Sir Thomas Shirley was an English soldier, adventurer and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1584 and 1622. His financial difficulties drove him into privateering which culminated in his capture by the Turks and later imprisonment in the Tower of London.
Adriaen Courtsen Block was a Dutch private trader, privateer, and ship's captain who is best known for exploring the coastal and river valley areas between present-day New Jersey and Massachusetts during four voyages from 1611 to 1614, following the 1609 expedition by Henry Hudson. He is noted for possibly having named Block Island, Rhode Island, and establishing early trade with the Native Americans, and for the 1614 map of his last voyage on which many features of the mid-Atlantic region appear for the first time, and on which the term New Netherland is first applied to the region. He is credited with being the first European to enter Long Island Sound and the Connecticut River, and to determine that Manhattan and Long Island are islands.
Portobelo is a historic port and corregimiento in Portobelo District, Colón Province, Panama. Located on the northern part of the Isthmus of Panama, it is 32 km (20 mi) northeast of the modern port of Colón now at the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal. It has a population of 4,559 as of 2010, and functions as the seat of Portobelo District.
The Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) was an intermittent conflict between the Habsburg Kingdom of Spain and the Kingdom of England that was never formally declared. It began with England's military expedition in 1585 to what was then the Spanish Netherlands under the command of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in support of the Dutch rebellion against Spanish Habsburg rule.
Admiral Sir Richard Hawkins was a 17th-century English seaman, explorer and privateer. He was the son of Admiral Sir John Hawkins.
Martin Pring (1580–1626) was an English explorer from Bristol, England who in 1603 at the age of 23 was captain of an expedition to North America to assess commercial potential; he explored areas of present-day Maine, New Hampshire, and Cape Cod in Massachusetts. During this expedition, he noted a potential site for settlement as "Whitsun Bay" and a nearby hill "Mount Aldworth" after two of his merchant financiers in Bristol. The location of Pring's Whitsun Bay has, at various points, been identified as modern-day Provincetown, Plymouth, Edgartown, and Vineyard Haven ; of these, the likeliest location, based on primary source descriptions including latitudinal position and landmarks, is either Edgartown or Vineyard Haven.
Oliver Lambart, 1st Lord Lambart, Baron of Cavan was a military commander and an MP in the Irish House of Commons. He was Governor of Connaught in 1601. He was invested as a Privy Counsellor (Ireland) in 1603. He was also an English MP, for Southampton 1597. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Sir Michael Geare was a 16th-century English sailor, privateer and merchant. One of the many Sea Dogs who plagued the Spanish Empire during the Elizabethan age, Geare was well known to the Spaniards of the West Indies and the Spanish Main as commander of the Little John. He remained one of the most active in the region throughout the 1590s and up until his retirement in 1603.
Singeing the King of Spain's Beard is the derisive name given to a series of attacks by the English privateer Francis Drake against the Spanish in the summer of 1587, beginning in April with a raid on Cádiz. This was an attack on the Spanish naval forces assembling in the Bay of Cádiz in preparation for the planned expedition against England. Much of the Spanish fleet was destroyed, and substantial supplies were destroyed or captured. There followed a series of raiding parties against several forts along the Portuguese coast. A Spanish treasure ship, returning from the Indies, was also captured. The damage caused by the English delayed Spanish preparations for the Armada by at least a year.
The capture of Cádiz in 1596 was an event during the Anglo-Spanish War, when English and Dutch troops under Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and a large Anglo-Dutch fleet under Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham, with support from the Dutch United Provinces, raided the Spanish city of Cádiz.
The Sea Dogs were a group of English privateers and explorers authorised by Queen Elizabeth I to raid England's enemies, whether they were formally at war with them or not. Active from 1560 until Elizabeth's death in 1603, the Sea Dogs primarily attacked Spanish targets both on land and at sea, particularly during the Anglo-Spanish War. Members of the Sea Dogs, including Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake, also engaged in illicit slave trading with Spanish colonies in the Americas.
Sir John Watts was an English merchant, Alderman and shipowner, active in the East India Company and Virginia Company and Lord Mayor of London in 1606.
The Capture of Portobello was a military event during the long ongoing Anglo–Spanish War of 1585-1604, in which an English naval expedition under the command of privateer William Parker, of Plymouth, assaulted and took the seaport town of Portobelo at Colon on the eastern / northern coast of Panama / Isthmus of Panama in Central America, from the Spanish, captured some looted booty, and then sacked the place, an important site on the Spanish Main in the then world-wide Spanish Empire.
The Raid on Puerto Caballos was a military event that took place during the Anglo–Spanish War where a small expedition of ships funded and raised by the Earl of Cumberland was sent to the Caribbean under command of Captain James Langton. At Puerto Caballos on the coast of the Royal Audiencia of Guatemala in the New World empire of Spain on 16 March 1594, Langton raided the place and after a three-day battle won possession of seven ships under command of Diego Ramirez along with much booty.
The Capture of Recife also known as James Lancaster's 1595 Expedition or Lancaster's Pernambucan expedition was an English military expedition during the Anglo–Spanish War in which the primary objective was the capture of the town and port of Recife in the Captaincy of Pernambuco in the Portuguese colony of Brazil in April 1595. An English expedition of ships led by James Lancaster sailed via the Atlantic capturing numerous prizes before he captured Recife. He held the place for nearly a month and then proceeded to defeat a number of Portuguese counterattacks before leaving. The booty captured was substantial, Lancaster chartered Dutch and French ships that were also present there thus making the expedition a military and financial success.
The Preston–Somers expedition, or the Capture of Caracas, was a series of military actions that took place from late May until the end of July 1595 during the Anglo-Spanish War. The English expedition headed by George Somers and Amyas Preston sailed to the Spanish Main initially intending to support Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition which set out at the same time.
Watts' West Indies and Virginia expedition also known as the Action of Cape Tiburon was an English expedition to the Spanish Main during the Anglo–Spanish War. The expedition began on 10 May and ended by 18 July 1590 and was commanded by Abraham Cocke and Christopher Newport. This was financed by the highly renowned London merchant John Watts. The English ships intercepted and dispersed Spanish convoys capturing, sinking, and grounding many ships off the Spanish colonies of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica. Despite losing an arm, Newport was victorious and captured a good haul of booty. A breakaway expedition from this discovered that the Roanoke Colony was completely deserted and which gave the name The Lost Colony.
Amyas Preston was an English privateer of the Elizabethan period. His career was largely spent in the Caribbean, as were other more famous corsairs of the age such as Francis Drake, John Hawkins and Walter Raleigh. He is principally remembered for his participation in the Battle of Gravelines against the Spanish Armada in 1588, as well as the Preston–Somers expedition in 1595.
This timeline of the history of piracy in the 1600s is a chronological list of key events involving pirates between 1600 and 1609.
Captain Thomas Fenner was a sea captain of the Elizabethan era. He served under Francis Drake in the Anglo-Spanish War, notably commanding a warship during the Spanish Armada. Details of Fenner's life are scant, but after leaving military service in about 1589 he may have involved himself in the financing of merchant ships. The historian David Loades suggests that he died in November 1593 when records mentioning him cease.
