One of history's greatest maritime adventure stories and its hero come to life in this enthralling new biography S ir Francis Pirate, explorer and zealot, a genius at once awe-inspiring and riddled with faults. He is the archetypal Elizabethan sea-dog, and Stephen Coote's brilliant new book rescues him from the dusty pages of history. With novelistic verve, Coote re-creates all the episodes that made Drake's The excitement and terror of the raids on Spanish Caribbean ports during his privateering days; the extraordinary feat of circumnavigation aboard the 'Golden Hind'; and Drake's role in the famous defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.