Hannah Cusworth

One thing I find really fascinating is that many of the crew were not aware that they were embarking on a circumnavigation.

They thought they were doing something much, much closer to home, and it probably came as quite a surprise to them.

And I think you could potentially even argue that there wasn't

Always the plan that there were certain things in terms of when they then crossed over the Atlantic and they're traveling down the Atlantic side of South America that kind of prevents them from going then back up and kind of following the Atlantic and going back.

And that's why perhaps they end up going into the Pacific.

The second event that is revealing about Drake's character is the abandonment of a pregnant black woman on an island that has no water source according to reports and tales of it in Indonesia.

And the pregnancy, sometimes it's described as though Maria had become pregnant by someone on the ship, whether that was Drake, whether that was Drake's men.

There is a clear sense from those sources that she suffered serious sexual assault.

And that gives us an idea of Drake, perhaps himself, or if he was not a perpetrator of that sexual assault, of what happened under his command.

If you've been to the replica of the Golden Hind, which is the boat that they sailed on in London, you definitely get a sense of how cramped it would have been and how much luck they had, but also how much skill was involved in making that journey.

Spain sent the Armada for a whole host of reasons.

One of them was partly because they were really annoyed at Drake and men like him for being in what they considered like Spanish territory, for raiding their settlements and their ships.

I suppose it all comes down to the Armada was really designed to stop Elizabeth I from harming Spanish interests.

And part of this was also that Elizabeth had been persuaded to send some support to some rebels in what was then the Spanish Netherlands.

And this, I think, to some extent, was like the last straw for Spain.

Some listeners might know Drake's raid on Cadiz as the singeing of the King of Spain's beard.

It was a series of attacks in 1587 that really delayed the Spanish naval forces attack on England.

Drake went in, a bit of spying, a bit of sort of a smash and grab raid, disrupted the preparations, the naval preparations, and gave intelligence to the British about what was going on.

The armada was to sail up the English Channel and then to meet up with an army from the Spanish Netherlands and kind of take that army over to land in England to invade, to get rid of Queen Elizabeth I and to put the King of Spain, Philip, back on the throne.

Because prior to Elizabeth being queen, he had effectively been King of England through his marriage with Mary I.