Francis Drake

8 Pages 2105 Words

From Plowboy to Privateer: The Intriguing Life of Sir Francis Drake.

Chasing down a Spanish galleon full of untold treasures headed for the King, fighting your arch adversary for the glory of God and country, returning home with the spoils of victory and the reputation of a fearsome sea dog; this was my dream as a young boy sitting on my grandfather’s lap as I listened to him tell the rich tales of those brave souls who rode the mighty seas before him. This was my dream as a child, but it was the life of Sir Francis Drake; one of the most famous and to some, infamous seamen of Elizabethan England. But there was more to this famed character than just the tremendous wealth he attained or his many naval victories; there were also times of poverty and utter failure. This was the life of Sir Francis Drake.
The exact date of Drake’s birth eludes historians, but he was believed to have been born between 1540 and 1543 to a yeomen farmer family. Francis’s grandparents leased the Crowndale farm from the estate of Lord Francis Russell. Francis’s father Edmund was also born at Crowndale (Kelsey 4). There the family farmed nearly 180 acres of land and lived by fairly comfortable means. Francis’s father Edmund also served the local community and the county of Devonshire as a Protestant lay preacher (“Sir Francis Drake” 211). His father’s ideals and teachings had great effect on Francis and his upbringing and experiences as a Protestant would lead to a loathing of Catholics later in his life. During the Catholic uprising of 1549, the Drake family was forced to flee their comfortable Crowndale home in Devonshire County and head east. The family settled in the county of Kent. Giving up their contented homestead at Crowndale, the Drakes found lodging on the south bank of the Thames Estuary, in the hull of an old naval ship near Chatham (Kelsey 8) (“Sir Francis Drake” 211).
The life we think of as being full of ...