September 26- The Return of Sir Francis Drake

It�s only my second day back on the job, and there�s not much of interest to report.
I give it a go anyway.

On September 26, 1580 one of England�s greatest patriotic heroes, Sir Francis Drake, completed his circumnavigation of the globe on his return to England.

Sir Francis Drake had started off in 1577, with his flagship the �Golden Hind� and five other vessels, crossed the Atlantic, made it through the Magellan straits and into the Pacific and for a while terrorized the Spanish naval traffic between it�s American colonies, tried in vain to find the North-West passage back to the Atlantic, crisscrossed the Pacific and Indian Oceans, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope,and having lost all of boats but his flagship finally found his way home to �Old Blighty� with the "Golden Hind" full of precious loot and strange vegetables, just in time for tea, and to defeat the Spanish Armada.



Sir Francis Drake

Nothing too spectacular and nothing that the Portuguese and Spanish hadn�t done before him. But he was the first Englishman to do so and here lies the significance. It was one of the first demonstrations of England�s rising global naval power during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the first intrusion into the spheres of the Iberian states that until now that dominated the seas around the newly discovered continents. After Drake and after the Armada disaster, the English would slowly but surely erode Spanish supremacy in the Americas, and rise to the most dominant colonial power and not only on that continent.
In time, Sir Francis Drake became an English folk hero, a latter day Robin Hood of the Seven Seas, whose exploits against the Spanish became the stuff of legends and of countless TV series. That many of his captures of Spanish ships were not so much heroic deeds of patriotism, but simply acts of common piracy, are hereby conveniently forgotten.

On September 26, 1687 everybody�s (on AE) least favourite Italian merchant republic Venice , amongst other things specialized in the plunder and destruction of Europe�s cultural heritage, seriously damaged the Parthenon in Athens during a siege of the Ottoman held town during the �Great Turkish War� of the 17th century. Mortars were fired on the Acropolis, set off Turkish stores of gunpowder and thus cut up the ancient building in convenient little pieces that the English could later easily transport home to the British Museum.

1955 The first "Fish Fingers" go on sale in the UK. Captain�s Birdseye�s bread crumbed sticks of re-constituted cod result in further popularization of fish as an every-day meal, which leads to a serious depletion of fish population in the North Atlantic, which caused a bitter struggle over fishing grounds, culminating in the Anglo-Icelandic cod war of 1972. There is your historical connection.

1961 The great American Folk and protest singer Bob Dylan, alias Robert Zimmermann, made his first public appearance in New York City. Originally from Minnesota, he went to the Big Apple in 1961 to perform in one of the many small Folk and Blues clubs in Greenwich Village, where he was quickly discovered in order to become an American icon.


The very young Bob Dylan

Full list:

Wikipedia

Edited by Komnenos