Francis Drake: The Queen's Pirate

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
In January 1596, Francis Drake — the most feared sea captain alive, the man who had sailed around the entire world and plundered the treasure of an empire — was lowered into the Caribbean in a lead coffin off the coast of Panama. The coffin has never been found. To England he was Sir Francis, knight and hero. To Spain he was El Draque, the Dragon, a devil with a king's ransom on his head. This is the complete story of the Devon cabin boy who became the Queen's pirate.

Born around 1540 to a farmer turned Protestant preacher and raised in the rotting hulk of a ship, Drake was commanding vessels while other men were still apprentices. Betrayed under a flag of truce at San Juan de Ulúa in 1568, he came home with a hatred of Spain that never cooled — and waged a one-man war in answer: the midnight raid on Nombre de Dios, the climb up a Panama tree to become the first Englishman to see the Pacific, and then the Golden Hind's impossible voyage, through the Strait of Magellan and up the undefended Pacific coast, seizing the Cacafuego and the greatest treasure haul of the age, claiming Nova Albion in California, and returning around the world to a knighthood at Deptford.

This biography follows the whole arc — the Hawkins apprenticeship, the Doughty execution, Cádiz and the Armada year, and the final failing voyage of 1595 — weighing the hero and the terror honestly, and separating the documented Drake from the legends that grew around him, drum and all.