Laurence Bergreen’s book In Search of a Kingdom tells the true story of the heroics of Francis Drake and the wisdom of Elizabeth I that laid the foundations that would impact world history for centuries.
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By 08/04/2021
The story of Francis Drake is truly one of the most interesting, complex and heroic. The first English claim on what would become the United States on the Pacific coast is notable. Yet the events, actions and thinking of the man and his day are often lost to obscurity.
Every 10 or 20 years, a new author attempts to bring new energy and light to the subject. John Sugden, in his “Sir Francis Drake” (1990), and Harry Kelsey, in “Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate” (1998), were the most recent. Now, longtime author Laurence Bergreen has weighed in with “Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and the Perilous Birth of the British Empire: In Search of a Kingdom” (2021).
A Virginia Beach author with a string of credits acting on TV and Off Broadway, and who now home-schools her kids, has a new Afro-Filipina romance novel published by Avon. She’ll talk about it Tuesday in a Zoom event with Prince Books. She’s Preslaysa Williams; the book, “A Lowcountry Bride.” In it, an aspiring bridal designer returns to Charleston from New York to help her ailing father. She .
Matt Jaffe March 15, 2021Updated: March 16, 2021, 7:35 am
“In Search of a Kingdom” by Laurence Bergreen. Photo: HarperCollins
So there it is, in the very first sentence of historian Laurence Bergreen’s “In Search of a Kingdom: Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and the Perilous Birth of the British Empire.” Drake, the hero of England’s victory over the Spanish Armada and the first Englishman to set foot on the West Coast, was a slave trader and pirate.
If you prefer history by spreadsheet, that may be all you need to know about Drake. A clergyman’s son of modest means and with a ravenous craving for wealth, Drake spent six years in the slave trade, selling nearly 2,000 African captives into bondage. They were the ones who actually survived the brutal journey to the West Indies.