author
active 1595 Thomas Maynarde
Best known for a rare firsthand account of Sir Francis Drake’s final voyage, this little-known Elizabethan writer brings a dramatic naval expedition to life from close range. His surviving work has endured because it captures history as it was being lived.
1 Audiobook
Sir Francis Drake: His Voyage, 1595 Together with the Spanish account of Drake's attack on Puerto Rico
by active 1595 Thomas Maynarde
About the author
Thomas Maynarde is an obscure English writer known chiefly from a single surviving work, Sir Francis Drake: His Voyage, 1595. Modern catalogues identify him simply as "active 1595," which suggests that very little secure biographical information about his life has survived.
What has lasted is his eyewitness narrative of Sir Francis Drake’s last Atlantic voyage in 1595–1596, including the failed attack on San Juan, Puerto Rico. The account was later edited from original manuscripts by William Desborough Cooley and published by the Hakluyt Society in 1849, alongside a Spanish account of the same campaign.
Because so little can be firmly confirmed about Maynarde himself, his reputation rests almost entirely on the value of that narrative. For readers interested in exploration, maritime history, and the late Elizabethan world, his work offers the immediacy of a participant’s view rather than a later retelling.