SEADOGS

King Henry VIII of England recognized that his small island needed a large navy. This became even more important when, in 1531, he refused the authority of the Roman Catholic church and became a Protestant. Henry died before his new navy was strong. His oldest daughter Mary, tried to solve the problem of defending England by marrying the king of Spain and returning England to Catholicism. (They called her Bloody Mary because she hanged and burned many Protestants.) She died only a few years later.

Henry's second daughter was crowned Queen Elizabeth 1. Like her father, she was a Protestant, and she shared his certainty that England needed a powerful navy. But England needed time to build it. So Elizabeth commissioned privateers, "gentleman adventurers" who could afford to outfit a ship and pay a crew. She called them her "Seadogs".

She could not directly order them to harass Spain, no war had been declared. But she let them know what should be done. The Seadogs pirates and rogues, every one­ bought Elizabeth the time to build the Royal Navy and keep England independent.

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE was called Elizabeth's Dragon. (Drake actually means "dragon.") He went to sea at twelve and was the finest of the Seadog mariners. He was the first English sailor to circumnavigate (sail all around) the globe. He borrowed 1,000 crowns, a small fortune, from Elizabeth and set out with a small fleet in 1577. On the way he pirated, raiding Spanish towns everywhere, seizing Spanish ships, and capturing important charts of unknown waters. He sailed to the west for South America and returned from the east, up the coast of Africa, bringing his queen an additional 46,000 crowns. Furious, Spain planned to send a great fleet of ships, the Spanish Armada, to conquer England.

While the Spanish were preparing the invasion, Drake "singed the king of Spain's beard" by sailing into the Spanish port of Cadiz. He burned and sank two dozen ships and burned an especially important warehouse full of barrel staves. When Spain finally sailed in 1588, they had no good barrels; their food was bad and their water was tainted. Most of the invasion sailors were sick. In the week long battle with the Spanish Armada, Drake ever the pirate paused to capture the Spanish flagship Rosario with its money chest.

WALTER RALEIGH was a great favorite of Queen Elizabeth. He borrowed money from the queen to build his ship, the Ark Royal, and led the English fleet in its battle against the great Spanish Armada in 1588. Raleigh spent a lot of time in jail. Elizabeth threw him into the Tower of London for marrying one of her ladies in waiting, Bessie Throckmorton, without permission. She released him when one of his ships returned with a huge Spanish prize. After the queen's death, he was again thrown into prison on suspicion of plotting against the new king, James I.

In prison he wrote his five-volume History of the World. Raleigh was released to fight against Spain one more time, then beheaded. His wife kept his head until she died, twenty-nine years later.

SIR JOHN HAWKINS was born into an English shipping family and went to sea as a boy. He understood ships and became a shipbuilder. Hawkins built a new kind of warship, it was light, fast, easy to handle, and carried many guns. These were the tough little men 0' war that defeated the mammoth Spanish galleons. Hawkins was smart and inventive, but his reputation carries a dark stain. He started the slave trade. He bought captured tribesmen from chiefs on the African coast and sold them to the Spanish colonies in the New World.