John Hawkins

John Hawkins made England a slave-trading nation on three voyages, then rebuilt the navy that beat the Armada. He was from a Plymouth merchant family and took his first cargo of captured and purchased West Africans to the Caribbean in 1562, selling them in Spanish colonies in defiance of Spain's monopoly; Elizabeth invested in the second voyage and lent him a royal ship, which made the crown a partner. The third voyage ended at San Juan de Ulua in 1568, where a Spanish fleet trapped his squadron in harbour and destroyed most of it; he and his young kinsman Francis Drake escaped separately, and the grievance shaped both men's careers and English policy for a generation. He was given a coat of arms showing a bound African captive. Appointed Treasurer of the Navy in 1578, he did the work he is genuinely important for: he attacked corruption in the dockyards, rebuilt ships to a lower, longer, faster design carrying heavier guns and able to sail closer to the wind, and argued for a fleet that fought with gunnery at a distance rather than by boarding. Those ships and that doctrine are why the English could handle the Armada in 1588, in which he commanded the Victory and was knighted at sea. He established a fund for disabled seamen, the Chatham Chest. He died of illness off Puerto Rico in 1595 on a last raiding voyage with Drake, who died a few weeks after him. His son Richard sailed on his own account and was captured by the Spanish in the Pacific. He sat in Parliament for Plymouth. He was buried at sea off Puerto Rico, and the slaving voyages he began were not resumed by the English on any scale for another sixty years.

• Lived: 1532 CE – 1595 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: military