Francis Drake

8 Pages 2105 Words

triumph and glory didn’t exactly begin that way. During their times in Kent, the Drakes were met with great poverty and many hardships. Even though Francis had no formal education, he learned to read and write fairly well and also was quite eloquent, as was his father. Nonetheless because of his family’s poverty, Francis was forced to hire himself out at a young age. As a young teenager, Francis was surrounded by the maritime industry. Edmund, his father, worked not only as a laborer, but also continued his Protestant ministry (“Sir Francis Drake” 211). The Drakes would frequently have meetings in their home with sailors often in attendance.
Around the age of 13, Francis was apprenticed to the master of a ship. This particular ship frequented ports on the North Sea. The path that lie between the North Sea and the Thames Estuary being one of the most grueling stretches of sea in the world, allowed Francis to become a skilled seamen (“Sir Francis Drake” 331). Over time, Drake mastered the ship in his own right and when the old captain died, he left his ship to young Francis (Kelsey 9).
Discontented with his prospects for progression in North Sea trade, Francis decided to sell his small ship and join the crew of a small vessel headed for the West Indies for slave trade. This first of Drake’s many voyages to the New World was uneventful, at least to our knowledge, other than the fact that this was Francis Drake’s first encounter with the Spanish. Drake witnessed the Spanish’s dealings with foreigners and how they confiscated foreign goods based on tr...