A 1583 portrait of Sir Francis Drake Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Francis Drake’s successful voyage included British sailors’ arrival in California and the plundering of a glut of Spanish riches that sustained Elizabeth I’s empire

Francis Drake and 164 men aboard five ships left Plymouth, England, quietly on December 13, 1577. Few knew that the Pelican, the Elizabeth, the Marigold, the Swan and the Benedict were commencing a voyage only one other expedition had ever completed—a full circumnavigation of the earth.

“By order of Queen Elizabeth, the expedition had been cloaked in secrecy from the outset,” wrote Samuel Bawlf in The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, 1577-1580, including a rumor that the British ships were simply en route to the Mediterranean. After all, Drake’s journey would be a significant blow to Spanish and Portuguese maritime hegemony under Philip II.

Only Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer supported by the Spanish crown, had led a circumnavigation of the globe before, although he was killed in the Philippines in 1521, and only his crew completed the journey.

In a span of just three years, Drake and his men would undertake a harrowing journey from the shores of England, south across the Atlantic, through the Strait of Magellan, around South America, up North America’s west coast, through the Pacific and the East Indies, around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, and back to England by September 26, 1580.