Hannah Cusworth

And it might be, yeah, he was just motivated by revenge.

What I find really fascinating about Drake is that he's kind of building this legend of himself in his lifetime and getting stories out there about what he's doing and why he's doing it.

And it does seem as though he does have this hatred of Spain or real kind of fixation on Spain.

Now, whether that is religiously motivated, whether that is politically motivated, whether he's just on this massive revenge arc through the rest of his time at sea, I don't necessarily know.

Drake is in his early 30s.

He's traveled over to what is often called the Spanish main.

So we're sort of in the Central America, Caribbean, and to a place called Nombre de Dios.

In this sort of expedition, he makes an alliance with a formerly enslaved man called Diego, who is described as a Cimarron.

So it's someone who has like got his own liberation.

He's kind of run away.

He's become free.

What ends up happening is that Diego, in an alliance with the Cimarrones and with Drake, they attack a series of mules, like a mule train with all of the Spanish silver on it.

And they capture a lot of this silver.

They take it back to England.

And Drake is an incredibly wealthy man at this point.

After Drake moves away from raiding and trafficking and enslaved people, historians think he actually made more profit from his raiding activities than he did trading with Hawkins.

And that certainly was a really big motivation behind what Drake was doing to make money for himself and to make money for the people who were backing his voyages.

In some cases, including Queen Elizabeth I.

When Elizabeth first comes to the throne, England and Spain had been very close because Mary had been married to the king of Spain, Philip, and therefore there was a really close connection between those two countries.

I think Elizabeth, we know her as a real pragmatist, and she was very keen, I think, not to be dragged into what would have been, I'm sure, a really costly war with Spain.