Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Medal commemorating the voyage of Sir Francis Drake

Medal commemorating the voyage of Sir Francis Drake

c1589
Silver
Bequest of Sir William Dixson, 1952
DN / M 1144 / Item a

In 1577 the English explorer and adventurer Francis Drake was secretly commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I and her ministers to raid Spanish ports and merchant ships along the Pacific coast of the Americas.

This fine silver medal is the earliest dated map of Drake's daring and profitable voyage, which generated enormous riches for the queen’s treasury and made Drake the second European to circumnavigate the world (the first was Magellan). It was engraved by the Dutch cartographer and instrument maker Michael Mercator, grandson of the great cartographer and mathematician Gerard Mercator. The eastern hemisphere is shown on one side of the medal, and the western hemisphere on the other. The base maps are derived from a map of the Americas which had been published in Hakluyt’s De Orbe Novo, (On the New World) in 1587. The medal is believed to be one of nine still in existence.

A pirate and a gentleman

By the time Francis Drake was introduced to Queen Elizabeth I’s principal secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, he had already built a successful career on raiding Spanish ports in the West Indies and the Americas. Together, Walsingham and Drake hatched a plan that would add enormous riches to the English treasury. Under the guise of a trading venture to Alexandria, the expedition would plunder the New World possessions of Britain’s maritime rival Spain.


The journey was financed as a joint venture, with investors that included the queen’s privy councillors and high government officials, among them Robert Dudley, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Christopher Hatton and Sir William Winter, and Drake's former commander John Hawkins. It is thought that Queen Elizabeth herself may also have been an investor.


Drake sailed from Plymouth on 13 December 1577 with a fleet of five ships. By late August 1578, the ships had reached the Straits of Magellan, but as they entered the Pacific Ocean they encountered a number of violent storms. The three smaller ships were lost. The Elizabeth became separated from Drake and returned to England, arriving there in June 1579. Drake in the Golden Hind continued alone to make a complete circumnavigation of the world, returning to England on 26 September 1580.


Delighted with Drake’s successes, the queen ordered Drake's ship to be put ashore at Deptford in London as a permanent memorial, and the spring of 1581 Drake was knighted, transforming the one-time pirate into a gentleman.