Francis Drake was born in Tavistock, Devon, the son of Mary or Elizabeth Mylwaye (Mildmay ?) and her husband Edmund Drake (1518–1585), a Protestant farmer (who later became a preacher) and grandson of John Drake and Margaret Cole. He is often confused with his nephew Francis Drake (1573–1634) who was the son of Richard Drake and Ursula Stafford, grandson of John Drake (1500–1558) – Edmund's older brother – and Amy Grenville (1510–1577), and great-grandson of the same above-stated John Drake and Margaret Cole (cf. John White, note. 2). His maternal grandfather was a Richard Mylwaye.
Drake was reportedly named after his godfather Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford, but throughout his cousins' lineages are direct connections to the Royalty and famous persons such as Sir Richard Grenville through Amy Grenville and Geoffrey Chaucer through Ursula Stafford. Ursula's line may be traced to royalty within four generations.
As with many of Drake's contemporaries, the exact date of his birth is unknown and could be as early as 1535, the 1540 date being extrapolated from two portraits: one, a miniature painted by Nicholas Hilliard in 1581 when he was allegedly 42, and the other painted in 1594 when he was alleged to be 53 according to the 1921/22 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, which quotes a certain Barrow, Life of Drake (1843) p. 5. Francis was the second eldest of twelve children; but as he was not granted legal right to his father's farm, he had to find his own career.
During the Roman Catholic uprising of 1549, the family was forced to flee to Kent. At about the age of 13 Francis took to the sea on a cargo barque, becoming master of the ship at the age of twenty. He spent his early career honing his sailing skills on the difficult waters of the North Sea, and after the death of the captain for whom he was sailing, becoming the master of his own barque. At age 23, Drake took his first voyage to the New World under the sails of the Hawkins family of Plymouth, in company with his cousin, Sir John Hawkins. Together, Hawkins and Drake made the first English slave-trading expeditions.
Conflict in the Caribbean
Around 1563 Drake first sailed west to the Spanish Main, drawn by the immense wealth accruing from Spain's monopoly on New World silver. Drake took an immediate dislike to the Spanish, at least in part due to their mistrust of non-Spaniards and their Catholicism. His hostility is said to have been increased by an incident at San Juan de Ulua in 1568, when Spanish forces executed a surprise attack — in violation of a truce agreed to a few days before — nearly costing Drake his life. From then on, he devoted his life to working against the Spanish Empire; the Spanish considered him an outlaw pirate, but to England he was simply a sailor and privateer. On his second such voyage, he fought a costly battle against Spanish forces, costing many English lives, but earning Drake the favour of Queen Elizabeth.
The most celebrated of Drake's Caribbean adventures is his capture of the Spanish Silver Train at Nombre de Dios in March of 1573. With a crew including many French privateers and Cimaroons — African slaves who had escaped the Spanish — Drake raided the waters around Darien (in modern Panama) and tracked the Silver Train to the nearby port of Nombre de Dios. He made off with a fortune in gold, but had to leave behind another fortune in silver, because it was too heavy to carry back to England. It was during this expedition that he climbed a high tree in the central mountains of the Isthmus of Panama and thus became the first Englishman to see the Pacific Ocean.
When Drake returned to Plymouth on August 9, 1573, a mere thirty Englishmen returned with him, every one of them rich for life. However, Queen Elizabeth, who had up to this point sponsored and encouraged Drake's raids, signed a temporary truce with King Philip II of Spain, and so was unable to officially acknowledge Drake's accomplishment.
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