Sir Francis Drake: The Queen`s Pirate (Yale Nota Bene)

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 586 pages
• Published by: Yale University Press August 11, 2000
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0300084633
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0300084634
• Book Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 1.6 inches
• Weighs: 1.3 pounds

Product 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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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 terrible 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 requirements more wind in his sails than the "pirate's progress" summations at the end of each chapter. thirty b&w illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
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".