ABSTRACT
Francis Drake, the English privateer, was born around 1542 in Devon to a prosperous family of farmers. Francisco Draque, the nemesis of Philip II’s far-flung realms, took shape in the testimony of former captives, naval scouts and diplomats. Ironically, these Spanish observers often aggrandized a privateer with a checkered reputation at home. As the naval historian Harry Kelsey demonstrates in his meticulously documented biography, Drake’s manifest cruelty to subordinates, mercurial battlefield behavior and unreliability for investors prompted influential Elizabethans to keep him at arms’ length. Even the Tudor queen, who accepted Drake’s purloined gifts, never entrusted him with the command of an entire fleet. The myth of Drake as a Protestant hero took root in England one generation after the raider’s death.1 When he died in 1596, the privateer owed his international stature in great measure to his adversaries’ exaggeration of his efficacy. Kelsey avers that Spaniards on both sides of the Atlantic aggrandized Drake to press for greater crown subsidies, cover for shoddy coastal defense systems and disguise unauthorized trading with the Englishman as “ransom” paid to a raider. Alongside these material explanations, we would do well to scrutinize the cultural affinities that enhanced the enemy’s attraction.
