Thomas Doughty

Thomas Doughty was tried and beheaded by Francis Drake on a beach in Patagonia in 1578, in one of the most disputed episodes of English maritime history. He was a soldier, a lawyer and a courtier with connections to Christopher Hatton, and he sailed as a gentleman adventurer and Drake's supposed equal on the voyage that became the circumnavigation. The quarrel grew through the Atlantic crossing: accusations of theft from prizes, of witchcraft, of stirring the crew, and beneath them the unresolved question of whether a gentleman or a seaman commanded. At Port San Julian - the same bay where Magellan had executed mutineers fifty-eight years earlier, and Drake made the comparison out loud - Drake convened a jury of forty men, produced no commission authorising a capital trial, refused Doughty's request to be sent home for one, and had him convicted. The two took communion together and dined at the same table before the execution. Drake then gathered the crews and told them that the gentlemen must haul with the mariners and the mariners with the gentlemen, which is the sentence the episode is remembered for. Whether it was necessary discipline or judicial murder to remove a rival was argued at the time and has been ever since. Drake's own account was that Doughty had been placed aboard by Lord Burghley to wreck the voyage, which if true would make the execution a political act rather than a legal one and no more lawful. Doughty's brother John was later imprisoned in the Tower. The voyage went on to take the Cacafuego, cross the Pacific, and return in 1580 with a return of some 4,700 per cent for the investors, after which nobody in England was much inclined to reopen the question.

• Lived: 1545 CE – 1578 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: military_leader