{"product_id":"the-secret-voyage-of-sir-francis-drake-15771580","title":"The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580","description":"\u003cp\u003eOn September 26  1580  Francis Drake sailed his ship  the Golden Hinde  into Plymouth Harbor on the southwest coast of England. He had long been given up for lost  and rumors quickly circulated about where he had been on his three-year round-the-world voyage  and about the plunder he had brought home to fill Queen Elizabeths treasury. However  a veil of secrecy was immediately imposed on the expedition: Drakes journals and charts were impounded  and his men were forbidden  on pain of death  to divulge where they had beenespecially during the summer of 1579  when they had dropped from sight in the North Pacific. In hindsight  Drakes journey was arguably the greatest sea voyage of all time. In a ship barely one hundred feet long  he sailed more than 40 000 miles  much of the voyage at extraordinary speed; disrupted the Spanish Empire in the New World; encountered often hostile native peoples on four continents; narrowly escaped disaster on numerous occasions; and became the first captain to circumnavigate the globe. Samuel Bawlf masterfully recounts the drama of this extraordinary expedition within the context of Englands struggle to withstand the aggression of Catholic Europe and Drakes ambition for English enterprise in the Pacific. He offers fascinating insight into life at sea in the sixteenth centuryfrom the dangers of mutiny and the lack of knowledge about wind and current to the arduous physical challenges faced every day by Drakes men. But it is Bawlfs assertion of Drakes whereabouts in the summer of 1579 that gives his book even greater originality. From a seminal study of maps of the period  Bawlf shows with certainty that Drake sailed all the way to Alaskamuch farther than anyone has heretofore imaginedthereby rewriting the history of exploration. Drake was  Bawlf claims  in search of the western entrance to the fabled Northwest Passage  at which he planned to found Englands first colony  which could wrest control of the Pacific  and the wealth of the East Indies  from Spain. Drakes voyage was  in fact  far ahead of its time: another 200 years would pass before the eighteenth-century explorers of record reached the northwest coast of North America. A cast of luminous characters runs through The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: Philip II of Spain  Europes most powerful monarch; Elizabeths spymaster and powerful advisor  Francis Walsingham; the encyclopedic cosmographer John Dee; and Abraham Ortelius  the great Dutch mapmaker to whom Drake leaked his Pacific discoveries. In the end  though  it is Francis Drake himself who comes most fully to life through the lens of his epic voyage. Remembered most as a privateer and for his victory over the Spanish Armada  the Drake that emerges from these pages is so much more: a dynamic leader of men  a brilliant navigator and sailor  and surely one of historys most daring explorers.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44946980962357,"sku":"ByrdShop_0802714056","price":27.51,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780802714053.jpg?v=1769975866","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-secret-voyage-of-sir-francis-drake-15771580","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}