Citation Needed - Sir Francis Drake
Episode Date: August 7, 2024Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540 – 28 January 1596) was an English explorer and privateer best known for his circumnavigation of the world in a single expedition between 1577 and 1580. This was th...e first English circumnavigation, and second circumnavigation overall. He is also known for participating in the early English slaving voyages of his cousin, Sir John Hawkins, and John Lovell. Having started as a simple seaman, in 1588 he was part of the fight against the Spanish Armada as a vice-admiral.
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LINDS, WHERE DELICIOUS BEGINS. Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, a podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article
about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts.
Because this is the internet and that's how it works now.
I'm Heath and I'll be the captain for this one.
And I'm joined by three able-ish semen with strong motility for their 40s I would say.
Cecil, Noah, and Tom.
Strongly arcing downward.
Absolutely correct.
Yes.
He had jokes on you.
All those extra tails make them faster, actually.
The key is not skipping balls day.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Dooks.
Ha ha ha ha.
Never do.
All right, Cecil, what person, place, thing, concept,
phenomenon, or event are we gonna be talking about today?
Sir Francis Drake.
I sure like the patrons.
Me too. I do too.
They're the best.
So what happened
exactly on this day
Cecil with Francis Drake
unless the schedule gets moved around
and you get rid of them.
I know right, it wasn't fucking gets moved but if it doesn't get moved
436 years ago today
a captain
in the English fleet
ordered several boats covered with pitch
and he lit them ablaze.
They sent these ships directly
into a formation of Spanish vessels.
This group of Spanish ships was the Spanish Armada
and they had come to England to support an invasion.
This scattered the Spanish ships
and was the first in a series of events
that took the famed armada from unbeatable status to just a bunch of boats. This audacious act
was just one of many in the life of Francis Drake, a legendary English sea captain,
slave trader, and privateer. I love that for most of human history, what passed for brilliant military tactics was
often just knowing that things were flammable.
Right?
Yeah, no, it's insane how often the answer to, have we thought of setting that on fire
was no.
Guys, top of the whiteboard.
Let's just go straight to fire.
Right.
We're making this harder than it has to be. These things are made of fuel.
Come on.
Francis was born sometime in 1540.
Or 1541.
Or in 1544.
There's conflicting records and markers and we aren't quite sure.
He was the eldest of 12 sons.
When he was young,
he was sent to live off with a relative of some sort,
Captain William Hawkins,
who owned boats and was a merchant. was sent to live off with a relative of some sort, Captain William Hawkins,
who owned boats and was a merchant. He was to become a purser, someone who was responsible for
supplying a ship and administering those supplies. And when his guardian died, he left that ship to
Drake, probably because he liked him, but also because Hawkins was child free and had no beneficiaries. Ah, yes. Another inspiring historical tale of a self-made man who had but his gumption
and generational wealth to rely upon to get ahead. Yeah. Yeah.
Drake got his start as a slave trader. Lots of people try to write in circles to make sure
that people know that while he was part of it, his heart wasn't in it.
Oh, yo, really, Jim, this enslaves me more than it enslaves you.
On the issue of slaving, scholar John Sujin writes that, quote,
Drake was in his twenties and did not question "'what his elders accepted,' end quote."
Oh, well, if he was just following orders,
in that case, it's not immoral.
During the decade of his twenties,
so, you know, that's when you're able to do that, right?
Locker room talk, really.
So many historians, too.
So many historians.
All right, in 1562 to 1569,
Drake participated in four slaving voyages.
The ships he crewed attacked the African coast and then took anyone they could kidnap to
the Americas to sell them into slavery.
Queen Elizabeth actually outlawed the captain from participating in the slave trade, but
they got around it by literally just letting someone else lead the expedition.
Sorry. All right. someone else lead the expedition
Are you can lead the expedition, but I'm not letting you pick the radio station man. I've seen what happens
the fleet of ships again sailed to the New World with some slaves to sell and
Bad weather forced them into a port owned by the Spanish while negotiating repairs a
fleet of Spanish vessels arrived and attacked the English the The Spanish sunk all but two of the English craft.
The English flagship was abandoned when the Spanish sent a fire ship toward it.
Drake fled on one of the ships, leaving the captain of the other ship behind.
When both arrived back in England, the other captain accused Drake of leaving him.
Nothing really came of it except a searing hatred of the Spanish and a new direction
for Drake.
He would stop participating in the slave trade and start trying to take what he could from
the Spanish.
Okay, I guess.
It sounds like spite overtook racist profiteering.
I guess that's an improvement.
But you know it started with Drake being like, guys, the Spanish people, they're like brownish,
right?
Like, that'll still work when we get there.
He just hauls out his list of shithole countries and quietly writes in Spain.
Yeah, right.
In 1572, Drake led an attack on the fort town of Nombre de Dios.
This city was where all the silver and gold from Peru was brought
and then loaded onto ships and sent off back to Spain.
Drake came, he saw, and he conquered.
The big problem was that there wasn't any gold, silver, or pearls in the fort and all
he got for his trouble was wounded.
So he set out along the coast and started targeting galleons.
He recruited cimarons who were escaped African slaves and with their help he looted a bunch
of mule trains and wound up with tons of silver
and gold.
He also wound up with a good friend named Diego, who would become a companion of sorts
for Drake.
The wiki says that Diego would eventually be a free man under Drake, which seems to
imply that he escaped slavery only to be a slave under Drake, which sounds super sucky.
Do you think any of the Simmerons that he recruited were people that he had captured and enslaved?
It would be so fucking awkward.
He'd be like, oh my God, that's so weird to run into you again.
I did not say no tics.
He's back.
There's a really bad episode of Dora the Explorer with Diego
right there.
Oh, traumatizing Oh, fuck. Traumatizing episode for sure.
Drake allied with a group of French raiders
and kept on pillaging.
During their raids on land,
they captured about 20 tons of silver and gold
and had so much that they had to bury it.
We captured it.
We didn't steal this gold.
We liberated it.
The leader of the French group he partnered with got captured and beheaded. captured it. We didn't steal this gold. We liberated it.
The leader of the French group he partnered with got captured and beheaded. So Drake and the rest of the raiding party quickly retreated to where they stashed the boats on the shore.
When they arrived, they found that the boats were gone. Drake buried the rest of the treasure,
and then he had his men make a few rafts so they could travel up the coast
to where the fleet was stationed.
They arrived at the fleet and Drake did the classic pretend you didn't find anything.
Psych!
Bar gold bitches!
And then they like traveled back to the shore, dug up the booty and headed home, Rich.
Okay.
I feel like that dramatic reveal went badly.
Like Drake's walking up the beach.
Everyone's like, hey, Frankie, what do you got there?
You got a gold bar in that bag that you're struggling with
that's shaped like a gold bar?
And he's, shut the fuck up, I'm doing a thing.
I'm doing a thing.
I didn't find anything.
Sorry.
What's this behind you?
Fuck you.
Yeah.
What's this behind my back?
Oh, it's a torn rotator cuff.
God, that's heavy.
Oh shit.
Ah.
It's also at this same trip that one of the most famous,
probably not real, tales of Francis Drake is said to have happened.
Drake supposedly climbed up a tree in Panama.
Now, this wasn't like scaling a normal tree.
This was a purpose made lookout tree with steps cut into the side of the tree.
What? The legend is very clear about this.
And then it is multiple places.
Very clear.
And then from the perch, he saw the Pacific ocean and then he vowed he
would one day sail its waters and then the music swell and then all the holler
monkeys started like slow clapping and it was a whole thing.
Such an obvious lie. Feels like Jaws is about to pop out of the water and he's gonna take a selfie like that's definitely made up.
Jaws by he will set sail on the Pacific, but we're gonna need a bigger boat.
Well, but to do it too, what I think is he just he got all the way to the top and he thought well
They made this whole fucking thing. I gotta say something or I'm gonna look stupid. They did this whole thing with this fucking tree
I shall have sales there over on that thing there. You fucked up my bag of gold thing earlier
After Drake returned to England
He was recruited to help the Earl of Essex and the commander
of his troops, John Norris, to transfer troops to Rathlin Island in Ireland.
And I guarantee I mispronounced that island.
Don't send me your corrections.
The soldiers besieged the castle until the constable there surrendered.
The constable was able to negotiate the terms and he and his family were spared,
but the force of troops there killed everyone else.
Again, Drake historians try to make it seem like
he has a case of the sads after this massacre,
so we should definitely not hold it against him.
And there's no documentation
that he actually participated in it,
but definitely feels like he helped facilitate it.
Okay, so apparently everyone in the story is a bad guy, including every white
historian who wrote about the story.
But I'm sure those historians all had a mean case of the sads after defending a
different colonizer in one of their other books.
So yeah, pretty sure European history is several swooshes deep into a doodly-doo into its own
ass.
And that means we're going to take a quick break for some Apropos of Nothing. Okay, Captain, it's just this way.
Where are you two knuckleheads taking me?
Right up here.
You are gonna love it.
Okay?
Alright, here it is.
Oh, wow.
You guys made this tree into like, like a ladder, air-gaze thing?
Yeah, yeah. We worked pretty hard on it. Wow, like a ladder, areas thing. Yeah, yeah.
We worked pretty hard on it.
Oh, you know, it's great.
Oh man.
Did you reinforce the steps?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I used my cutlass to cut out some of the smaller trees and then I put them up
there and I was actually a cutlass is a 17th century seafaring weapon and the story's taken
place in the 16th century, so it's a...
Get out of the sketch!
Nobody cares about your stupid swords!
Okay, that one hurts. Come on, man.
Sorry. Sorry, Cecil. I took it too far.
But you're not in this one.
Okay, all right.
Okay, where were we?
Guys, this tree ladder that you made with your cutlass or whatever is amazing.
Oh, thank you so much.
But go up it.
Wait, there's more?
Yeah.
The surprise.
All right, you goofballs.
Let me up there. Let me check it out.
Hey, do you see it?
Do I see it?
You guys made a platform up here.
We did.
No, Captain, not that.
Look to the west. Oh my God, is that a railing?
And we're back. When we left off, Slave Trading Pirate was having a really tough day, you guys.
Really tough day.
What's next?
Okay.
So Drake then decided to make good on his promise to see the Pacific and he set out
to follow in Magellan's footsteps.
He travels.
Which were carved into a tree, I heard.
They just...
He travels...
Meticulous.
...to the Americas and he makes his way to the Pacific Ocean through the Strait of Magellan.
Dude, the fucking Drake Passage was right there.
What were you thinking?
He set out on November 15th, but then he ran into bad weather and he had to turn around
and he head back home to wait
the storm out and then head back out a month later.
On the coast of Africa, he captured a Spanish ship called the Santa Maria and he renamed
it the Mary.
Now the wiki here has a really interesting tidbit on how he recruited new sailors and
know it was not through LinkedIn.
Quote, he kidnapped its captain, Nuno de Silva, a man with considerable experience navigating
in South American waters, end quote.
Good afternoon, Nuno.
I hope this finds you well.
I see from your profile that you have considerable experience navigating in South American waters
and hate being murdered and thrown into the ocean.
When would be a good time to set up a zoom call?
Big opportunities available.
So there was also some other weirdness with Drake's crew.
You see, he was a commoner,
and one of his boats under his command
had a nobleman, Thomas Doughty, as captain.
Now, according to Drake,
Doughty was trying to rile the crew against him,
so he held a
trial.
And he did so in a dramatic fashion too.
We learned in that episode that featured Enrique of Malacca that Magellan had killed several
mutineers in a bay in Argentina.
Well, this is where Drake tried and executed Doughty.
I like to believe all those sailors listened to that episode too, so they knew it was a big deal when it happened.
Daddy gets called to the deck like it's the principal over the PA.
Everybody's like, ooh, you're in trouble.
John killed a bunch of guys right here.
This is right here. Remember in the podcast.
It's also here that he scuttled several ships because their crew died
on the passage over
and they didn't have enough manpower for all the boats.
Drake, with three ships, set sail into the Strait of Magellan, which is windy and full
of currents and difficult to navigate.
So on their trip, one of the ships just crashed.
The other separated from Drake's and decided to call it quits and head home to England.
Drake persevered with his ship, the Pelican.
At some point, he decides to rename his ship the Golden Hind, which is an attribute to
one of the people who were funding the trip.
Oh hey guys!
Guys gather around.
Listen, I know that right now we are lost in treacherous seas, separated from all of
our seafaring fellows and every minute is a fight for our bitter survival.
I am though thinking now might be a good time to rethink our mission statement.
But he changes it to gilded asshole though, doesn't he?
It's like am I the only one who's seeing this?
It is referring to an animal.
The name was a reference to the financier's coat of arms.
Don't worry, Harold G. Nerds, I got you.
I had you last episode too, by the way.
Nice.
You guys want to do a brokered convention right now
about the name of the ship?
I think it's, it's not too late.
No, I'm actually excited, Kamala's awesome.
There's also this amazingly terrible one-off sentence
in this section.
Here we go, quote,
"'In the Magellan St straight, Francis and his men engaged
in skirmishes with local indigenous people, becoming the first Europeans
to kill indigenous peoples in southern Patagonia.
End quote. Yeah.
Don't worry. Ethnic cleansing nerds.
Wikipedia's got you.
Yeah. They make it sound like he's got a fucking plaque
that he had hanging up over his fucking fireplace of this shit
drake now past the tip of south america was in the pacific
but
Also along an unprotected coast you think this is kind of guess when they hit it and they're like wait, this is pacific, right?
Yeah
It feels I hear you can taste the difference. Get down there and taste it.
The Spanish there had several vessels that would travel between-
We've replaced his regular Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific.
Let's see if he notices.
The Spanish had several vessels that would travel between ports on the Pacific side of
the Americas.
These ships really didn't have to worry about encountering any other ships because the Spanish were the only ones on this side of the world. Well, now the Fox
was in the head house and Drake started plundering up and down the coast of Chile and Peru. He
sacked ports, captured ships, and basically was a menace to the people plundering the
Americas. He was a plunderer of plunderers.
Well, yeah, sounds like a great guy all around. Did he give all the gold back to the indigenous people at this point?
Or maybe he was still kind of melancholy, had the sads from that thing in Ireland.
So he had a sad in Ireland.
A lot weighing on him. A lot of gold weighing on him.
He's like the first half of Robin Hood, right?
Robin?
Robin, yes, exactly. And then Exactly. The book. Yeah, exactly. So he captured one ship and he found quote 36 kilograms or
80 pounds of gold, a golden crucifix jewels, 13 chest of silver reels and 26,000 kilograms
or 26 long tons of silver and quote naturally Drake was super happy about this, so happy in fact he, quote,
dined with the captured ship's officers and gentlemen passengers, and he offloaded his
captives a short time later and gave each one gifts appropriate to their rank as well as a
letter of safe conduct. And for you, I have a lovely gift of some tiny fraction of your previously
owned belongings.
Yeah. Right. Okay. This is a weird thing to key in on here, but why the fuck would they
include a parenthetical conversion of 26,000 kilograms to a unit that's 1000 kilograms?
Right? 26,000 kilograms or 26 long does well, obviously, dude.
So now with his coffers full, he decided to head home. Traveling down past the southern
tip of South America sound like it sucked. So he decided to find another way home. Some
guests that he tried to sail north back around the globe to get to England, but he gave up somewhere around
Vancouver where Vancouver is today.
He just fucking passed it in.
Not even halfway.
He's like, yeah, no, this is as far as I'm going.
So he comes back down and he into the south
and he landed in California and he made friends
with the native Miwok there.
He stayed on the coast for over a month,
trading with the native people thereok there. He stayed on the coast for over a month, trading with the native people there,
resupplying him and repairing his ship.
And then he set sail on July 23rd and headed west
to go across the Pacific to head home.
Captain's log.
Not totally sure where we are,
but pretty sure it's south of England.
My navigation officer insists we're also quite a bit
east as well, or west. They're gonna quite a bit east as well.
Or west.
We gotta fix the north problem first though.
I'm a sailor.
Technically they're all in all you can get either they all work.
You can go anywhere on the globe by a straight line.
It's all a flat circle with an ice shelf around the side.
I'm a person from this century.
It took Drake a year for him to cross the Pacific, head to several small islands in the South Pacific, and then head back around the Cape of Good
Hope and head home from there.
Slack forever.
Now, during this time, his ship would spend months at sea, and often when they landed,
they were not met by people happy to see them.
At one point, his ship got caught in a shallow reef and his crew was forced to throw tons
of gunpowder supplies, cannons, and other items overboard to raise the hull.
I will point out they did not jettison the gold they had plundered from South America
because they had priorities. It took three days and a high tide to get them off the reef
they were stranded on, but they were able to head home.
Big sigh of relief by all my fellow large gentlemen when that high tide finally rolled
in. Stop looking at me and then looking at a bar of gold and then looking at me
I feel like this part of the trip. You don't have any large gentleman like yourself
I'm on keto. It won't even matter It just give me Drake was also the first captain to attempt a circumnavigation and survive
So there was much fanfare when he returned we came home
They were able to split the bounty from their mission and the Queen got a half share of the goods now this surpassed her income
For the rest of the year Queen Elizabeth and Drake exchanged
gigantic jewels as gifts for each other and then in April of 1581
She boarded the Golden Hine and knighted Francis Drake making him a noble. Golden Hine. He became a mayor of Plymouth
For a time and then became a member of Parliament for a bit too.
OK, so boarded the Golden Hynd obviously sounds like a fuck thing.
And then but then and knighted him makes it sound like pegging.
Right. Like that's very clearly she like she grabs his hair and like whispers,
I'm going to knight you so fucking hard right now.
Obviously, with a scepter. Yeah.
Huey one aggressive, but also loving. Yes! Right now. Obviously with a scepter. Yeah.
Huey 1.
Aggressive, but also loving.
Yeah.
So then a documentary.
In 1585, war between the Spanish and English broke out and Drake headed back to the Americas
with a fleet and a torch to burn some shit down.
He had command of 21 ships and set sail to Vigo, Spain, where he attacked and stole some supplies.
Then he traveled to a set of islands off the coast of Africa called Cape Verde Islands and plundered some more.
Then he headed to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and sacked that city, traveled to Cartagena, captured that city.
On his way back up to the settlement in North Carolina called Roanoke, he burned St. Augustine, Florida
to the ground. In Roanoke, he took colonists that hated the New World back with him to
England. When he returned, he then led a preemptive strike against the Spanish on the Spanish
coast. He headed with his fleet to the port city of Cadiz. Now, they did not have a master
plan here.
They literally just rode up to the port that had a large fleet of Spanish boat stock there
and just started fucking shit up.
According to Drake, they sunk 39 ships, but according to the Spanish, they only sunk 24.
Either way, big loss for the Spanish.
The action is known as the singeing of the King of Spain's Beard.
Okay. It's a weird argument from Spain about the ship sinking scoreboard there though, right?
Yeah.
Being like, yeah, no, we started a false flag operation on 15 ships. That was us. And then
the rest was a freebie and we were like, oh no, this is great. We wanted you to do that.
So technically.
It feels like there's like a lot of like, no, I can, I can still see the mast though. Right. Like I, you guys could see, right.
That's still, that doesn't count. That's not sunk.
Drake then left the port and started heading up and down the coast,
capturing and sinking ships as well as forts and towns.
And now climate change does most of the sinking of the town. So,
I guess I should have wrote that differently.
changed as most of the sinking of the town. So I guess I should have wrote that differently.
I just want to have fun with it.
Yeah, he was going up past Florida.
The last paragraph.
Uh, one interesting point that I read was that Drake wound up
capturing 1600 to 1700 tons of barrel staves.
This is going to make tens of thousands of barrels.
Supposedly this particular provision was way more
costly to the Spanish than the sinking of the vessels at Cadiz as this was like a
Material needed to supply the ships and had further reaching effects than just a few dozen ships
Yeah, now you're fucking with whiskey and wine big trouble
trouble
This attack on the Spanish was only delaying the inevitable.
Spain decided to attack England.
Well, yeah, but without barrels, though, that's important.
They did do barrels.
It's very important.
Their plan was something of a reverse D-Day invasion.
Get troops to the coast. They were Nazis.
Get troops to the coast of Netherlands and then grab them with their armada and then head over to England and drop them off.
The army was being gathered by the Duke of Parma and he was set to meet the Spanish armada
on the coast.
The armada left Spain from Portugal heading over the English Channel and they ran in bad
weather and it took longer than they had planned.
Well, yeah, because how could they possibly have planned for bad weather for their invasion
of England?
Their supplies were rotting and they lost some ships.
Not enough to turn back, but it was not ideal.
There's an apocryphal story about Drake that he was playing a game of bowls,
which is like lawn bowling.
Then he found out that the Armada was spotted off the coast and he famously
quipped, quote, there is plenty of time to finish the game and beat the Spaniards.
End quote.
Okay.
You know, the guy who was losing to Drake tried to wrap it up early and call some
bullshit time out.
You're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no is like, no, no, no, no, no, no,
none of that, we're playing.
We're not carrying the bowling alley onto the ship
like a Monopoly board, none of that.
I'm about to win, it is your role, we're still playing.
See, so what the hell do you mean
their food started rotting?
I looked this up, this is a 36 hour journey on a ferry.
What do they bring for food? Hollandaise sauce?
Okay, so funny enough, it's actually longer than 36.
It was like 12 days because of the storms,
but they just call it sauce.
The reason why, Tom, they had to use green barrel staves
and it rotted all the food.
Oh shit, for real?
The staves! So it was green barrels, the staves, they heated their staves and it rotted all the food Was green barrels the state
They're supposed to stave off the rotting I get it now
There you go
Now the boats and the planet act tactics of each here are quite different
The English had bigger guns that shot farther and they had more of them
They also had smaller ships that were more maneuverable.
The Spanish had bigger ships with less guns, but wanted to get in close so they could throw
grapples and board the opposing boats fighting hand to hand on the sea.
The ships met for the first time in the English Channel with Drake as vice admiral of his
fleet.
Okay, again, I am definitely not an expert in naval warfare, but I feel like in a naval
battle, if your side is relying on getting into a fist fight, you're doing it.
Look, when the other side has more maneuverable ships than you and they have more and better
guns, the winning strategy is to make better boats and then go to war against them, right?
What if we get inside their guard though?
I feel like we could get inside their guard.
Have we tried doing some barrel rolls?
We can't.
They've got all our staves.
Green staves.
That's the problem.
The first conflict was in the dark and Drake disabled a few
galleons.
He was somewhat lucky in the ships that he captured
and one of them had a bunch of money
that was gonna be used to pay the army
and the rest of the armada.
He basically captured the payroll ship.
There was a fight in the ocean between these.
It's like they're strapped in on multiple ships, right?
Or just maybe in the center of all your ships.
I don't know why it would be hanging in the back.
So maybe it's weighed down by sick passengers and lots of gold.
There is a fight in the ocean between these fleets, but the English just ran
circles around them, shooting the Spanish with more guns and they really couldn't
hurt the Spanish and the Spanish were like, we can't catch them and do any damage.
Eventually the Armada is just lying on its back.
All right, let's do some grappling.
Come on, come on in.
You go, I'm here.
I'm ready.
Bring it in. Nobody to stand me up. That's do some grappling. Come on. Come on in you go. I'm here. I'm ready bring it in nobody to stand me up
Neural as they neared the pickup spot the rest of the armada just went to the coast so they could wait for the army that was Supposed to meet him there
This was when the English lit the ships on fire and sent them into the armada and there was out like a massive
Panic the fire ships were enough to scare many of the Spanish fleet to cut anchor and sail away.
In the disarray, some of the Spanish ships
were captured or sunk,
but it wasn't an overwhelming victory.
The Spanish were basically forced northward
towards Scotland and the fight was mostly over.
The flaming boats are coming in range, boys.
Grappling hooks at the ready.
We are gonna board the fire and stab it with our swords
We lost but it but it was not over for the spanish who had no idea
That above the british isles there was a north atlantic current that brought not just warm weather
But also warm water from the other side of the ocean. The
current there is like a fast river. So it threw off navigations quite a bit. They would set
sail for the proper amount of time that they thought they needed to get past Ireland and
then head back home to Spain. But they misjudged how far they actually traveled and instead
plotted a collision course for the Irish coast. But then storms came up and pushed the boats to shore and
They were already closer than they thought they would be so they just wrecked there the Armada left Spain with a hundred and forty
One ships and returned home with half the number of soldiers in sixty three ships
How does this happen see so ha did Ireland did all of Ireland sneak up on them?
What you got to get really close for your grappling hooks to work? Okay
This is storm after the failure of the Spanish Armada Drake was tasked with a cleanup effort
He was told to take out the Spanish fleet
landing along Portugal to help with the revolt against Spain.
And then he was supposed to sail to the Azores and take them over.
He destroyed some ships, but mostly their fleet was able to get away from him and he
never really engaged them.
The rebellion never materialized and Drake in a huff and not one to go away empty handed
raise the city of Vigo to the ground.
It cost him hundreds of men and it won him nothing
and he sailed back to England and he fell out of favor.
After having racked up a career of wins,
Drake was on a losing streak.
And in 1595, he set out to try to do some more plundering
and basically failed everywhere he went.
He did not conquer Las Palmas.
He did not successfully attack San Juan.
And during that fight, his boat caught a cannonball that went right through his cabin
He went back to where he had victory hatchet
Then get the out
He went back to where he had his victories early in his career
And he attacked Nombre de Dios and then he died a dysentery in the bay there
It said that he donned his full armor so he could shit himself to death in it
Well, Drake's lead line common cause put in the waters of the Gulf and his rival Sir Kendrick Lamar finally finished his diss track
Fantastic I'm so glad you wrapped it
All right, if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?
The best defense is a good North Atlantic current.
That's definitely what I would choose.
Effective.
And are you ready for the quiz?
Let's do this.
All right.
So what remained of the Spanish Armada after this Irish fiasco?
They had no choice but to return home to Spain and start a slapstick comedy troupe.
What was that troupe called?
A, the grapple dunkling gang.
B, Cadiz nuts or C, what's our motto with you?
What's our motto with you? Okay.
The height of this entire medium with Cadiz nuts is the greatest joke that's ever been
made on our podcast.
It is B. Cadiz nuts.
Amazing.
That is correct.
Thank you.
Amazing.
Cadiz nuts.
Oh, Captain My Captain.
That's amazing.
Running a groundlings.
Stupid.
Okay. It's amazing. Running a groundlings stupid. Okay, which is the following is the best movie about dying of dysentery.
You said that.
All right.
Sure.
Hey, wet hot American summer complaint.
We live and let diarrhea obvious one.
See, Cannonball runs that's pirate thing andis and terry nailed it or D feel good the book of Eli
Bravo D the book of Eli is amazing. What a great way to correct. Well done. Oh so good
All right, see so I try to write a pun joke using Drake song titles, but A, I didn't
actually know any.
I tried to do the same thing.
Yeah.
B, I looked them up and that still didn't help.
C, I listened to a few and that made it worse.
D, current Drake sucks, but not nearly as bad as this one.
My A and B were exactly the same.
Oh, gosh.
I think it's secret answer E all the above.
Oh, yeah.
Maybe.
No, I probably got it wrong, Tom.
You're bad at this.
Okay, Tom, you have stumped Cecil.
Congratulations, you are the winner.
I win.
I don't know how.
Anyway, as a huge Bill Bryson fan, I'm going to nominate Noah to go next.
All right.
Well, for Tom, Noah, and Cecil, I'm Heath.
Thank you for hanging out with us today.
Also, Eli Bosnik, who likes to announce his last name every time is sometimes here, not today.
Whatever.
We'll be back next week,
and Noah will be an expert on something else.
Fuck Eli!
Can we just really quick, because he's not here?
Fuck that guy.
I don't think we used this time to roast Eli enough.
He looks funny.
So between now and then,
you can listen to Cognitive Dissonance,
Lawful Assembly, Talking
Ship, Your Old Dad's Godawful Movies, The Skating Atheist, The Skeptocrat, and D&D-.
If you're feeling generous and want to join the ranks of our beloved patrons we love so
much, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citationpod.
And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect on social
media, or take a look at show notes, check out citationpod.com.
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