Sir Francis Drake: The Queen`s Pirate [Hardcover]

Mr. Harry Kelsey (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300071825 | ISBN-13: 978-0300071825 | Publication Date: August 11, 1998

In this biography, Harry Kelsey seeks to shatter the familiar image of Sir Francis Drake. The Drake of legend was a pious, brave and just seaman who initiated the move to make England a great naval power and whose acts of piracy against his countries enemies earned him a knighthood for patriotism. Kelsey paints a different picture of Drake as an amoral privateer at least as interested in lining his pockets with Spanish booty as in forwarding the political goals of his country, a man who became a captain general of the English navy but never waged traditional warfare with any success. Drawing on much new evidence, Kelsey describes Drake's early life as the son of a poor family in 16th-century England. He explains how Drake dabbled in piracy, gained modest success as a merchant, and then took advantage of the hostility between Spain and England to embark on a series of pirate raids on undefended Spanish ships and ports, preempting Spanish demands for punishment by sharing much of his booty with the Queen and her councillors. Elizabeth I liked Drake because he was a charming rogue, and she made him an integral part of her war plans against Spain and its armada, but she quickly learned not to trust him with an important command: he was unable to handle a large fleet; was suspicious almost to the point of paranoia and had no understanding of personal loyalty. For Drake, the mark of success was to amass great wealth - preferably by taking if from someone else - and the primary purpose of warfare was to afford him the opportunity to accomplish this.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Remembered in standard history texts as an adventurer who helped extend England's maritime empire to the coasts of Africa and the Americas, Francis Drake roamed the world under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I. He enriched her coffers by attacking Spanish merchant ships in the Caribbean, raiding ports, looting churches, and taking a cut of the slave trade--the acts not of a military man, Harry Kelsey argues, but of a pirate, and of a cowardly one at that as he was given to fleeing at the first sign of danger, leaving his men behind. Even so, for his services Elizabeth awarded Drake a knighthood and a degree of immunity until he failed to appear at his post during a naval engagement against ships of the Spanish armada. He then lost the queen's favor and disappeared from history's stage. Drake has few champions today, certainly fewer than he did in Elizabethan times. Even then he was none too popular. This well-written revisionist biography explains why. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

As a pirate he was a fearless improviser. In naval engagements, he tended to hang back and look out for number one. Widely despised by his shipmates, he fascinated his queen and countrymen as the first Englishman to sail around the world. Drake emerges from Kelsey's biography as a paranoid bully who by luck and bluff succeeded in an age that was hungry for heroes. It's too bad that this demythologized Drake is denied a gripping narrative. We too often see him through the squint of a historiographer, as when he's stalled for pages in the Straits of Magellan while Kelsey compares theories on how he got around Cape Horn. When Drake does get moving, his itinerary of raids reads more like a police blotter than a saga. Fittingly, this determinedly unromantic, Dragnet approach works best when Drake is at his worst, as during the summary execution of his partner, Thomas Doughty. And it's useful to doubt such ill-supported myths as Drake's supposed landfall in California. But there should be more attention to the big picture, such as painting Spain and Portugal's relationship before following Drake on his ill-fated expedition to Lisbon?whose outcome Kelsey gives away too soon, for the sake of another statistic. Kelsey's Drake may be truer than others', but he needs more wind in his sails than the "pirate's progress" summations at the end of each chapter. 30 b&w illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (August 11, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300071825
• ISBN-13: 978-0300071825
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #231,073 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars UNBRIDLED BIAS -- buy a different biography, June 19, 2005

By 

R. Swinney - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sir Francis Drake: The Queen`s Pirate (Paperback)

Most professional historians at least try to feign objectivity in their treatment of historical figures. Harry Kelsey does not. The author despises Drake and makes no attempt to hide that fact. Kelsey set out to do a hatchet job and he certainly wasn't going to let history get in the way.

Although the author does a reasonable job of addressing many of the established historical events, he deliberately fails to report dozens of well documented incidents of Drake's mercy and largesse. While Drake's Spanish contemporaries were torturing or executing the Englishmen they captured, Drake repeatedly spared his captives' lives, fed and treated them well, then eventually released them unharmed. These accounts are well documented BY DRAKE'S CONTEMPORARY SPANISH ENEMIES, yet Kelsey cannot bring himself to report these incidents.

Why? Harry Kelsey loathes Drake and cannot force himself to simply objectively report the positive things that Drake's own enemies said about him.


More objective treatments of Drake include

1. "Francis Drake" by John Cummings

2. "The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake" by Samuel Bawlf

3. Passing treatment of Drake in "The Queen's Slave Trader" (biography of John Hawkins) by Nick Hazlewood

Even Kelsey's own more recent (2003) work "Sir John Hawkins -- Queen Elizabeth's Slave Trader" treats Drake (albeit incidentally) more evenhandedly than his "Sir Francis Drake: The Queen's Pirate".

35 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Judging by the editorial ..., September 19, 2000

By 

"the_arpad" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sir Francis Drake: The Queen`s Pirate (Hardcover)

Judging by the editorial the book gives a completely wrong picture judging actions from another time and place by modern rules.

Sir Francis Drake had very little in common with the pirate from the movies. He was more of talented gentleman of 16 century on dangerous, but profitable enterprize.

I do not remember Drake looting churches, but even if he did - one must not forget about him being protestant during major religious unrest in Europe. His attituide to his enemies was good and he wasn't bloodthirsty. His moral values were quite normal for his time. And his military prowess definitely was higher than normal.

His performance during engagement with Spanish Armada was good as well (worth to mention, that, unlike of admiral Hogwart - commander of the English fleet, Drake owned some ships of English fleet). The book "Defeat of Spanish Armada" by Garrett Mattingly gives very accurate account on that issue.

He never lost Queen's favor. He rather lost Queen's admiration, because results of his last expeditions were less spectacular, but he died vice-admiral commanding his fleet.

I have unplesant feeling that the book is just one of those "detroning" biographies, which use the standard approach "all great people are just good liars" and aimed to entertain readers with no background in the area. Pity, because writing biography of Drake give unique possibility to make reader understand 16 century through picture of this great military leader.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Making Revisionist Stew from Historical Garbage, May 14, 2008

By 

LUISE PERENNE "Luise of the Phoenix" (FOUNTAIN VALLEY, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sir Francis Drake: The Queen`s Pirate (Paperback)

The discontented sources used for this book were a sure guarantee that Sir Francis Drake's historical accomplishments would not be shown as world-shaking events but merely "maritime myth". Many in the Royal Admiralty and Queen Elizabeth I's court blatantly reviled Drake as an upstart commoner and threat to the courtly status quo. They frankly hated Drake's guts, and wrote down all their antimosity, while all of Drake's firsthand accounts (especially the journals and logs of his Circumnavigation) have been lost to posterity.

Why did the author treat Drake's actions as cruel and/or unusual in an era when Spanish and Portuguese colonists/explorers/conquistadores' brutality towards the peoples of the Americas, Africa and Southeast Asia knew no bounds whatsoever? Drake showed much more consideration for the native peoples he met than most of the Spanish or Portuguese had ever done.

The author uses a contemporary politically judgemental tendency to color his attitudes. Having read some of the sources cited in this book and seen none of the spiteful inferences made in TQP, I think the author's attitude perhaps colored his interpretive judgement.

Drake's piracy is condemned, although he only appropriated the riches that the Spanish had extracted through forced labor from the Incas and Aztecs. But nowhere does the author either state or condemn the brutal methods the Spanish used to rob the indigenous people of their culture and their freedom in the name of Empire and the Roman Catholic Church.

Drake had many flaws: a legendary temper, brusque manner and lack of courtly breeding, but he proved himself as a leader of men, a superb sailor and an erascible member of English maritime history.