Francis Drake, born in Devonshire between 1540 and 1543 to a tenant farming family, had been raised by his relatives, the Hawkins pirate merchants of Plymouth, and at eighteen or so had enlisted in the family fleet, which prowled for shipping to plunder or seize off the French coast.

He spent his early career honing his sailing skills on the difficult waters of the North Sea, and after the death of the captain for whom he was sailing, he had become master of his own barque.

He had graduated by the early 1560s to the African trade, in which the Hawkins family has an increasing interest.

The twenty-six-year-old Drake makes his first voyage to the New World in 1566, in company with his cousin, John Hawkins, in a slave-trading expedition to the Cape Verde Islands and the West Indies.

Resenting the Spanish authorities' claims to regulate their colonies' trade and impound contraband, Drake will later refer to some “wrongs” that he and his companions had suffered—wrongs that plans to right in the future.