Qualla: Golden Hind

Golden Hind: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Murgatroyd49, CC BY-SA 4.0. Queen Elizabeth I had a sentence she liked to repeat to Francis Drake before he sailed in December 1577. "We would gladly be revenged on the King of Spain for divers injuries that we have received." The official purpose of his expedition was, in the careful language of his commission, to find out places meet to have traffic. The unofficial purpose was piracy on a national scale. Drake set out with five ships and 164 men. He returned three years later with one ship, fifty-six survivors, six tons of cloves from the Spice Islands, twenty-six tons of silver, half a ton of gold, and a private fortune for his queen so large that she paid off the entire government debt and had 40,000 pounds left over. The ship that carried it all was a 120-ton galleon originally named Pelican. Mid-voyage, in honor of his patron Sir Christopher Hatton, whose family crest was a female red deer, Drake had her renamed. She became the Golden Hind.

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Image: Murgatroyd49 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Golden Hind: Around the Bottom of the World

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Moved here from en:Image:Brixham.hind.750pix.jpg by Akigka with original information., Public domain. The expedition was supposed to pass through the Strait of Magellan and explore the Pacific coast of South America, where the Spanish Empire had grown rich and almost completely unguarded. Drake reached the Brazilian coast in early 1578, hammered his way through the strait, and em...

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Image: Moved here from en:Image:Brixham.hind.750pix.jpg by Akigka with original information. | Public domain

Golden Hind: Cloves, Coins, and an Empire's Debts

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Moved here from en:Image:Brixham.hind.750pix.jpg by Akigka with original information., Public domain. Drake sailed back to England by way of the Spice Islands, where he loaded six tons of cloves so valuable they were worth their weight in gold. He came up the long arc of the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, and into Plymouth Harbour on 26 September 1580. Fifty-six of the o...

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Image: Moved here from en:Image:Brixham.hind.750pix.jpg by Akigka with original information. | Public domain

Golden Hind: The Long Afterlife of a Wooden Ship

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Moved here from en:Image:Brixham.hind.750pix.jpg by Akigka with original information., Public domain. The Golden Hind herself did not retire. Elizabeth ordered her kept on public display at the dockyard at Deptford on the Thames, where she sat as a kind of floating monument for the next seventy years. By around 1650, forty-five years after the queen who knighted Drake had died, t...

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Image: Moved here from en:Image:Brixham.hind.750pix.jpg by Akigka with original information. | Public domain

Golden Hind: Three Replicas and a Working Museum

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christine Matthews, CC BY-SA 2.0. The first reproduction of the Golden Hind was built in 1947 at Peter Pan's Playground in Southend-on-Sea, opened in 1949, and demolished in 1997. A second replica was constructed in 1963 for the television series Sir Francis Drake, filmed around Torbay and Dartmouth. That ship sa...

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Image: Christine Matthews | CC BY-SA 2.0