Hannah Cusworth

It's perhaps surprising we don't know 100% when Drake was born.

He was born during the reign of Henry VIII, between sort of 1539 and 1543, but records really vary.

He also had, it's said, 11 younger brothers, apparently, which as a mother of one child is absolutely terrifying.

to me the idea of having 12 sons, but his mother, Mary, apparently did it.

So it must have been a very chaotic, busy childhood.

Some reports were that it was as a result of religious tensions that were going on, particularly in Devon there was a religious uprising and it seems as though Francis Drake's father, Edmund, was potentially quite strongly Protestant, or at least we get that through in some of the sources.

Francis spent some of his childhood in Kent, developing his skills as a sailor navigator, spent some time working on a type of boat known as a barque with another mariner, very likely going from...

across the English Channel to trade with France and what is now Holland and Belgium.

But we also know that he spent time in the household of the Hawkins family, who were quite a big family, much wealthier and more established than the Drake family.

And they were resident in Plymouth, and we know that Drake spent some time as a child in that household, and that had a big impact on him too.

They were also very much like a sea-going family.

Trafficking enslaved people played a significant role in Drake's early voyages.

The Hawkins family were, I suppose, at the forefront of changing the kind of patterns of English trade.

And John Hawkins was the person who took Francis Drake on some of his early voyages.

In 1562, Hawkins, Drake, and about 100 men set out from Plymouth.

And Hawkins had previously been to the Canary Islands where he'd been trading and had found out from there that enslaved people and the trafficking of enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas could generate really sizable profits.

So in this voyage in 1562, Drake and Hawkins capture 300 enslaved people in Sierra Leone and they probably also attacked a number of Portuguese ships on the way over across the Atlantic and they land in the Americas and sell these trafficked people.

at this point in time the nature of the transatlantic slave trade is a little bit different to what it ends up becoming later where it's very race-based and also a lot of the people who are trafficked are going to english plantations at this point in time when drake and hawkins are operating england doesn't have big plantations in barbados or jamaica for example so it really is a

about taking enslaved people and then selling them over to Spanish colonists who are demanding these people to work on their plantations or in mines or as domestic workers, for example.

It's a real defining moment of Drake's career, and it's also where we start to see him turning away from these trading voyages and trafficking of enslaved people for profit, more to raiding the Spanish.