Thomas Cavendish

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Thomas Cavendish with double hemispheres world map with reference to the circumnavigation of the world in 1586/88
The Vera Totius Expeditionis Nauticae map by Jodocus Hondius contains, although it was published as early as 1595, an astonishingly exact representation of Thomas Cavendish's circumnavigation
Cavendish and Francis Drake sail around the world

Sir Thomas Cavendish (* 1555 in Trimley St. Martin near Ipswich , Suffolk , England ; † February 1592 on the Atlantic ) was an English privateer and the third (or fifth) circumnavigator .

Cavendish studied briefly at Corpus Christi College , Cambridge from 1575 to 1577 without graduating. In 1585 he accompanied Sir Richard Grenville to Roanoke Island off North Carolina.

Soon after his return to England, he embarked on an elaborate imitation of Sir Francis Drake's great journey . Using his own resources, he equipped three ships with a crew of 123 ( Desiré, Hugh Gallant and Content ) to sail around the earth on July 26, 1586 from Plymouth . At the estuary of the Río Deseado , Cavendish went ashore in 1586 and named the place Port Desire (now Puerto Deseado ). In 1587 he reached the place Puerto del Hambre (translated: Port of Hunger) in the Magellan Strait , where he found the remains of the settlement and around 300 starved and frozen settlers. He called the place, in the English translation of the Spanish name, Port Famine . He went through the Strait of Magellan to Chile , Peru and Mexico , where he sank 19 Spanish ships.

Later he hijacked the Santa Ana on the coast of California , a 600-ton galleon belonging to the King of Spain, which carried great values ​​with it, including 122,000 Spanish Dolaros . ( Philip II of Spain had such silver dollar coins minted from 1575 in Potosí in what is now Bolivia. They were of equal weight with the Dutch Phillipusdaalders and were often captured by English privateers (privateers).) Across the Pacific , the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena , whom he entered as the first Englishman, reached a ship, the Desiré (140 tons), on September 10, 1588, again Plymouth.

In 1591 Cavendish undertook a new voyage with five ships, but had to turn back in the Strait of Magellan, as his crew mutinied. He died on the way back on the Atlantic .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ After Juan Sebastián Elcano and Francis Drake, Cavendish was the third sailor to circumnavigate the world on board the same ship, but if you add the expeditions of Andrés de Urdaneta and Martín Ignacio de Loyola , which took place in several stages on board different ships, Cavendish was the fifth protagonist who managed to circumnavigate the world
  2. ↑ St Helena: Ascension, Tristan da Cunha Susan Britt-Gallagher, Tricia Haine, 6. Retrieved October 23, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Cavendish, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English privateer
DATE OF BIRTH 1555
PLACE OF BIRTH Trimley St. Martin at Ipswich , Suffolk , England
DATE OF DEATH February 1592
Place of death Atlantic