John Hawkins

Sir John Hawkins was a Plymouth navigator, merchant and naval commander who became one of the most influential English seamen of Elizabeth I’s reign. His early Atlantic expeditions combined trade, privateering and the trafficking of enslaved Africans, making him an important and deeply implicated figure in England’s early participation in the Atlantic slave trade. Francis Drake sailed on Hawkins’s disastrous 1567–1569 expedition, which ended with a Spanish attack at San Juan de Ulúa.

Hawkins later became Treasurer of the Navy and helped reform shipbuilding, supply and administration before the Spanish Armada campaign of 1588. He served as a vice-admiral during the Armada and continued naval operations against Spain. Hawkins died in 1595 during an unsuccessful expedition to the Caribbean with Drake.

John Hawkins appears directly in Tony Riches’s Drake – Tudor Corsair, where his voyages provide part of the Atlantic and naval world in which Francis Drake develops from a Devon sailor into Elizabeth I’s most famous privateering commander.