Drake, with a crew including many French…
March 1573 CE
Drake, with a crew including many French privateers and Maroons—enslaved Africans who have escaped the Spanish—raids the waters around Darien (in modern Panama) and tracks a Spanish silver-bearing mule train—the Silver Train—to the nearby port of Nombre de Dios.
Successfully attacking the train in March 1573, he makes off with a fortune in gold, but has to leave behind another fortune in silver, because it is too heavy to carry back to England.
It is during this expedition that he climbs a high tree in the central mountains of the Isthmus of Panama and thus becomes the first Englishman to see the Pacific, the ocean barred to all but Spanish ships.
It is now, as he will later put it, that he “besought Almighty God of His goodness to give him life and leave to sail once in an English ship in that sea.”