Sir Francis Drake, a Pirate, a Gentleman, a Soldier, a Thief.

By JUAN CARLOS Hoyos

The biography of the best seaman of England. The Dragon, as named by his Spanish enemies, scourage the Caribbean sea, and besieged walled cities that kept treasures of gold, silver, emeralds, and pearls. Stole de mule train, crossed the Magallanes Strait to surprise Spanish in the Pacific, where pirates were not expected. And was the second man to circumnavigate the world. Beloved soldier of Elizabeth I, the virgin queen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JUAN CARLOS Hoyos
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215407950

Book preview

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

Juan Carlos Hoyos

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SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

© 2022

Esclavo Despierto Producciones

Al rights reserved

Tabla de contenido

Chapter 1  Betrayal in San Juan de Ulúa

Chapter 2.  The Mule Train

Chapter 3  Around the World

Chapter 4  From pirate to a politician?

Chapter 5  Roanoke: a colony is improvised while Drake returns to work and devastate half the world.

Chapter 6  Defeated the invincible, the lost colony.

Chapter 7  The last trip

Chapter 8  Epilogue

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Chapter 1 

Betrayal in San Juan de Ulúa

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Francis Drake had fallen into a nap while rereading his incipient chronicle of this adventure in a new world when a cannon shot woke him up. He jumped from his bunk and in two steps he reached the door of his cabin and left. He climbed, like a fleeing hare, the stairs and as soon as he was standing on deck, he felt the smell of Satan's incense. -Damn Catholics, shouted Francis, they have betrayed us.

They're attacking us, Judith's sailors shouted.

- To your places, Francis began to order, cut the moorings, weigh anchors, hoist sails, Pilot! How do we get out of this ambush?

In firing position, the Spanish caravels, the viceroy's guard, fired without hesitation and respite.

- Fire cannons, Francis was finally able to order.

The Spanish advantage was deadly. To his right, he saw how one of the six sailboats in his fleet was struck to death, its hull split, lost beyond saving. The men were already jumping out of it, and the rats had jumped out two minutes before. There is relentless cannon caliber shrapnel. The castaways swim towards the five remaining sailboats and those who can, in the midst of this hustle and bustle and with their ships fleeing, climb on them. Another sailboat falls, and another. At the height of the cannonade, the night becomes sepia day, and on the waves, you see those who swim as shipwreck rats float, the corpses, and the threatening fins of sharks that the blood has called and they have not taken long to arrive.

Four of the six sailboats are sunk by the cannon fire of the Spanish galleons. The English, who were able to get on, are now in the only two sailboats that seem to be free of the ambush, the waterline dramatically exceeded, the risk increased in the face of an onslaught that does not stop. As men climb aboard the only ships, more silver and other valuable ballast are thrown into the sea. When the ship is full, there is nothing left to throw except the corpses of those who have arrived badly injured or who have fallen under the rain of lead. Drake knows that his end has come and he commends himself to the Lord although he continues to give instructions to his pilot and sailors to right his ship out of there. The once calm sea now swallows the heads of his men.

John Hawkins, who has managed to maneuver thanks to his pilot, confronts the Spanish with his Minion. Drake sees this, out of the corner of his eye, as he retreats, watching his pilot's maneuvers, and incessantly giving the order 'fire', 'fire'. He calculates the direction of the projectiles that the cannons spit out of the embrasures of the tower of San Juan de Ulúa, and the rain of lead released by the firearms operated from the platform on the roof of that tower. He looks the other way and sees how the 13 Spanish ships surround them. The air has filled with shouts, orders, smoke, and that unmistakable smell of gunpowder.

Heavy ships make a slow escape from well-fed fire. Only a god who could cut through the fog of battle would know if it was the skill of hardened corsairs that saved Drake and his cousin Hawkins, or if the Spanish considered enough punishment to sink their silver, and force them to throw it overboard, kill their men, reduce their fleet to two damaged and overloaded sailing ships that on the Gulf Stream drift north pardoned, towards Texas. Either way, they crawl forward filled with rage and sadness.

Standing motionless at the stern, Francis sees Veracruz shrinking with its tower and wall on the southern horizon. A place that will remain marked in the geography of his heart with the columns of smoke from his lost sailboats.

He chews on his worst memories; those of encounters with Catholics; with Portuguese and Spanish. He chews and feeds his grudge. The same wind that pushes him north brings the jubilant and mocking voices of the Spanish, and Francis understands every word and resents every mockery. Behind his back, his badly wounded sailors complain. They say a prayer to the dead, and Our Father, they give their blessing and throw them overboard to the sharks that have not stopped following them like buzzards. An enraged Drake fires his musket at one of the sharks, that are, after one of his lost men, and a red stream gushes out of the animal's side. The Englishman smiles as he watches the menacing fin sink into the blackness of the gulf.

When Veracruz was already indistinguishable from a wave, Francis Drake had sworn revenge on the Catholics, especially the Spanish. Not all the galleons, not all the doubloons, not all the water in all the oceans will quench his thirst for revenge. Catching the wind with its sails, it would follow them wherever they went, to the Caribbean or the Strait of Magellan, to Chile or the Spice Islands, across the Atlantic or the Pacific, across the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean, or around the world, if required. That hatred of the Puritan Francis Drake for the Spanish makes him cunning and fearless. Although the Spanish navy looks like a powerful, armored, and huge crocodile, and he is only a languid rat, like the one in India, he will be able to get into the snout while the reptile takes a nap with its mouth open and from inside, eating the entrails, it will come to light, leaving its enormous enemy dying.

With that first cannon shot, Martín de Enríquez, the new viceroy of Mexico, broke their deal attacking by surprise. War is war, those who will never become gentlemen will say, but Drake, although a pirate, was a man of his word and principles in the manner of his time. Francis did not accept that the word was broken even if it had been obtained by force. A man of principles who, in partnership with his cousin Hawkins, obtained slaves from Guinea, raiding Portuguese sailboats, to sell them illegally in Spanish America. A slaver patronized by his own queen. An ambitious merchant who, after getting rid of his cargo of Africans, had filled his 6 sailing ships with silver and gold making an unauthorized trade for an Englishman in Spanish ports. A man of medieval principles opening new paths in a world to be divided. The embodiment of his time, a man shaped by the war of his world. The Spanish would say that his soul had been stolen by the devil. How many men did he send to heaven and hell, how many ignored children did his troops leave in the women they raped? He would be known as Dragon and the news that he was approaching would make even the bravest tremble. Perhaps he would have been a Puritan farmer with a devoted wife and children if history had not forced him to personify that bloody struggle between the English and the Spanish, between the Protestants and the Catholics.

Before Francis grew hair on his genitals, innocent in the bucolic setting of the land his family farmed, the angry intolerant horde of rebellious Catholics came storming in, seeking the blood of the Protestants. But nothing can do a child, lesser the son of a peasant against the heavy wheel of History that entangles men in its spokes, setting them to spin in what they believe to be their own personal biography but which is nothing more than the insignificant or disproportionate role that it has chosen for each. Francis would have been a Catholic, like all of Europe had been for more than a thousand years, if Luther had not dared to protest against the Roman, Catholic, and Papal Church, pasting his theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. He would have been a Catholic if the pope hadn't been taken prisoner in the castle of Saint Angelo during the sack of Rome. He would have been a Catholic if the Pope had not refused to consent to the divorce of Henry VIII from his wife, who was the aunt of Charles V. He would have been a Catholic if he had been born in Spain, Italy, or America. All matters of kings, popes, and fate, that poor little Francis couldn't even understand.

Circumstances had thrown him into the sea, a corsair, a token in the distribution of a new world that was delivered between fantasy and blood. The Catholic revolution in 1549 removed him