San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Daring and cruel: a history of Drake
So there it is, in the very first sentence of historian Laurence Bergreen’s “In Search of a Kingdom: Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and the Perilous Birth of the British Empire.” Drake, the hero of England’s victory over the Spanish Armada and the first Englishman to set foot on the West Coast, was a slave trader and pirate.
If you prefer history by spreadsheet, that may be all you need to know about Drake. A clergyman’s son of modest means and with a ravenous craving for wealth, Drake spent six years in the slave trade, selling nearly 2,000 African captives into bondage. They were the ones who actually survived the brutal journey to the West Indies.
Drake’s enslaving history plays only a minor role in Bergreen’s epic of adventure and empire, which looks in far, far greater detail at the mariner’s circumnavigation of the globe, his defeat of the Armada, and, as the subtitle suggests, how his relentless plundering on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I helped fuel Britain’s rise.
Despite Bergreen’s best efforts, Drake remains a rather remote, often contradictory figure. Drake’s ultimate renunciation of slavery receives little attention. He prayed twice daily, including immediately after a raid during which he and his men ransacked and robbed a Spanish settlement before desecrating and destroying the crucifixes and Catholic religious objects of those he had taken prisoner. As Bergreen points out, Drake was fighting a holy war.
Occasionally, Bergreen minimizes Drake’s excesses. Describing a confrontation with the Spanish, Bergreen writes that it was “one of the very few times that Drake actually wounded the Spanish despite their many encounters on land and sea.” Two pages later, however, Drake hangs two men in Guatemala until “almost dead,” and Bergreen explains away one of these near executions as “Drake’s idea of a fine joke — and a dire warning.”
He then describes the Englishman’s “measure of fleeting compassion toward his detainees” because Drake often gifted Spanish crew members he had taken prisoner with such trinkets as silver bowls inscribed with his name. Maybe it was all relative during an era when, as Bergreen recounts, Elizabeth considered it an act of mercy to execute a victim before having him quartered. Personally, I’d gladly forsake the inscribed bowl if it meant not getting strung up in the first place.
Bergreen has few illusions about what inspired Drake. After the Spanish burned a cousin at the stake, Drake developed a hatred for all things Spain. And that hatred paired with his insatiable desire for riches. Bergreen cites a survey in Forbes that estimated Drake went on to amass a fortune that would be worth $115 million today, earning Drake the runnerup slot as the “topearning” pirate of all time, piracy being a topic Forbes might know something about.
As Bergreen writes, “Drake lusted for gold, and when he had stolen enough for several lifetimes, he kept on stealing it, because it was deeply ingrained in his nature to plunder. He was something of a scavenger.” A prayer written by Drake attests to his relentless nature: “Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little, when we arrive safely because we sailed too close to the shore.” It’s one of the comparatively few times we hear directly from Drake in his own voice.
Bergreen aptly captures the times Drake lived in, as well as the perils and wonders of the circumnavigation. Having previously written books about the likes of Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan (typically credited for the first roundtheworld voyage, although Magellan, unlike Drake, died before the trip’s completion), Bergreen certainly knows how to weave a dramatic tale of discovery. Much of the world was quite literally still terra incognita where sea monsters were presumed to lurk, and indeed Drake and his crew came upon all sorts of strange creatures: seals that flung rocks at them with their flippers, gigantic bats, “fireseeming-worms” whose bioluminescence lit up the forest, and massive colonies of penguins. The crew promptly slaughtered 3,000 of the birds, and as Bergreen concludes, “Drake was oblivious to the wealth of natural phenomena he had experienced … except for their immediate strategic value.”
One disappointment from a local perspective is that the book never addresses the questions of where (or even whether) Drake landed in California. In the sometimes horrifying chapter “Life Among the Miwok,” Bergreen writes in detail about the Indigenous people’s “display of piety and selfmutilation” that left them bleeding and wailing before Drake. There are descriptions of white cliffs that sound like the coastal bluffs of Point Reyes, where in 2016 the National Park Service designated the Drakes Bay Historic and Archaeological District as the likely site of Drake’s 1579 landing.
Without any elaboration, however, Bergreen portrays Drake gliding out of San Francisco Bay after the fiveweek idyll. Nor is there any mention of the controversial thesis in Melissa Darby’s 2019 “Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake’s Fair and Good Bay” that the Englishman’s West Coast pause actually took place in Oregon, not California.
Bergreen’s book is unlikely to change the opinions of those who have already made up their minds about Drake, whether they regard him as a hero or an oppressor. But for anyone open to a comprehensive look at Drake, in all his contradictions, “In Search of Kingdom” is a lively and compelling history of a man whose blend of audacity, piety and cruelty changed the world.