In The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, Samuel Bawlf offers fascinating insight into life at sea in the sixteenth century, from the dangers of mutiny and the difficulty of understanding patterns of wind and current to the arduous physical challenges faced every day by Drake’s men. But it is Bawlf's assertion of Drake’s whereabouts in the summer of 1579 that gives his book its exciting originality. Based especially on his seminal study of maps produced after the voyage, Bawlf shows with certainty that Drake sailed all the way to Alaska, much farther north than anyone has heretofore imagined, thereby rewriting the history of exploration. He was, Bawlf claims, in search of the western entrance to the fabled Northwest Passage, at which he planned to found England’s first colony, and wrest control of the Pacific from Spain. Drake’s voyage was in fact so far ahead of its time that another 200 years would pass before the eighteenth-century explorers of record reached the northwest coast of North America.

On September 26, 1580, Francis Drake sailed his ship, the Golden Hinde, into Plymouth Harbor on the southwest coast of England. Samuel Bawlf masterfully recounts the drama of this extraordinary expedition within the context of England's struggle to withstand the aggression of Catholic Europe and Drake's ambition for English enterprise in the Pacific. He offers fascinating insight into life at sea in the sixteenth century-from the dangers of mutiny and the lack of knowledge about wind and current to the arduous physical challenges faced every day by Drake's men. A cast of luminous characters runs through The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: Philip II of Spain, Europe's most powerful monarch; Elizabeth's spymaster and powerful advisor, Francis Walsingham; the encyclopedic cosmographer John Dee; and Abraham Ortelius, the great Dutch mapmaker to whom Drake leaked his Pacific discoveries. In the end, though, it is Francis Drake himself who comes most fully to life through the lens of his epic voyage. Remembered most as a privateer and for his victory over the Spanish Armada, the Drake that emerges from these pages is so much more: a dynamic leader of men, a brilliant navigator and sailor, and surely one of history's most daring explorers.

How well do you know the life of one of Britain’s great maritime heroes? Discover the truth behind a man who remains a legendary figure of history more than four hundred years after his death. Sir Francis Drake’s career is one of the most colourful on record. The most daring of the corsairs who raided the West Indies and Spanish Main, he led the English into the Pacific, and cirumnavigated the world to bring home the Golden Hind laden with Spanish treasure. His attacks on Spanish cities and ships transformed his private war into a struggle for surivival between Protestant England and Catholic Spain, in which he became Elizabeth I's most prominent admiral and marked the emergence of England as major maritime nation. ‘Excellent...It deserves to become the standard Drake life. His scholarship is impeccable’ Frank McLynn, Sunday Telegraph