Colonialism

The Battle That Made Francis Drake Spain’s Worst Nightmare

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Loutherbourg-Spanish_Armada

Depending on one’s historical sympathies, Sir Francis Drake is one of history’s many characters who was either great or infamous. To the English, he was a daring, successful patriot. To the Spanish, however, he represented everything to hate about lawless, Protestant aggression and the rising sea power to the north.

Queen Elizabeth, I knighted him after he circumnavigated the globe—the first Englishman to do so. The Spanish, meanwhile, dubbed him El Draque, or “The Dragon,” for the brazen piracy he carried out on that trip and countless others.

Drake contributed more than anyone to the war in which England famously defeated the Armada in 1588. But mere patriotism and fear of Catholicism didn’t drive him to harass the Spanish. For Drake, it was personal. One battle drove him mad with vengeance and convinced him he could no longer trust or trade with the Spanish.

In 1568, Drake was a 28-year-old captain in a seven-vessel fleet led by his cousin John Hawkins. This was his second slave-trading voyage to the Spanish colonies. The crew had recently unloaded its cargo in Cartagena, and the ships were weighed down with gold, silver, and all types of jewels.

During Hawkins’s most recent voyage, he and his crew had been feted as heroes by court and countrymen alike. He had also made a 60 percent profit and become highly wealthy overnight. The haul he carried now promised to dwarf his previous journeys.

On the way back to England, however, a violent storm hit the fleet off the coast of Cuba and drove them into the coast of Florida, badly damaging Hawkins’s ship, the Jesus of Lubeck. Running low on supplies and unsure if the Jesus of Lubeck would make it back to England, Hawkins decided to risk landing at the nearest port, San Juan de Ulua, off Veracruz.

This created considerable concern because the English were trading with Spanish colonists on the black market. Spain’s King Phillip II interpreted the Treaty of Tordesillas—which divided the world between the Spanish and Portuguese—to mean that no other nation should colonize or trade in the Americas.

Three years earlier, the Spanish had massacred a French Huguenot colony near present-day Jacksonville, Florida for being there and being Protestant.

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Why Was England Late To Colonize?

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Canonniere

No nation ever dominated global trade and geopolitics more than Great Britain from the mid 18th century until World War I. But the English, who united with the Scots to form Britain in 1707, arrived late to the scene of colonization. The Age of Discovery—when Western Europeans explored Africa, Asia, and the Americas—began in the early 15th century. The English, however, didn’t establish any permanent colonies until the early 17th century.

The English lawyer John Rastell lamented this development, in the 1510s, in a play he wrote about a failed expedition he took part in toward America. “Oh, what a thing,” he wrote, if “they that be Englishmen” had been the first to “take possession” and “make the first building and habitation” in the New World.

So, what delayed the people who soon created the greatest empire the world has ever known?

Why did they sit back on their island and watch Spain conquer the most advanced peoples in the Americas and take South America’s riches for itself?

Why did they allow the Portuguese to gain the initial footholds in Africa and Asia and only much later wrest some of these regions from them?

To answer these questions, let’s first look at where the English were in their civilizational development when this exploration and colonization began.

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