Sir Francis Drake (c.1540 – c.1596) my distant relative

 

One day, during one of those wonderful summer vacations, probably around January or February 1977, I’m playing around the terrace and I overhear my grand-father saying that he had come across some documents that showed we were somehow connected to Sir Francis Drake – “The Queen’s Pirate”.

I was only 5 and a bit of a tomboy, so just the mention of the words “pirate” and “queen” were enough to get me excited. We were related to pirates?! Not just any pirate, but the queen’s pirate? Queens had pirates? All these questions were populating my mind but I knew better than to interrupt him when he was talking to other adults and I was not even supposed to be listening.

My grand-father was British, born in Brazil but a British citizen by descent. And he cared a lot about Genealogy.
If you look it up in Wikipedia, Genealogy (from Greek: γενεά, genea, "generation"; and λόγος, logos, "knowledge") is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. It also says that “the pursuit of family history tends to be shaped by several motivations, including the desire to carve out a place for descend family in the larger historical picture, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling”.

I think my grand-father had all these motivations and he passed them on to me. And this was when it all started for me.

Later I managed to find out who that pirate our relative was. During the 16^th century, at a time when Portugal and Spain were “discovering” all the New World, the daring and ruthless, Francis Drake sailed the oceans in search of land and treasures for Queen Elizabeth I. His exploits were legendary, making him a hero to the English but a pirate to the Spaniards to whom he was known as El Draque. King Philip II was said to have offered a reward of 20,000 ducats, about £4 million (US$6.5M) by modern standards, for his life.

When I told my friends at school that Francis Drake was my distant relative they either didn’t know who he was or just didn’t believe me. So many years later, I finally asked for a copy of those documents and was very happy to find out that even though we were not direct descendants there really was a connection with him in our genealogy.

These are just a few pages of the whole document. I love my grand-father's letter to his "cousins". Also the use of the word "pedigree" strike me as funny, specially when it's "to show connection to Drake".

When I got hold of these papers I was about 14 and I tried to make the information look like a family tree. This was around 1986. It was before the Internet and few people had Personal Computers (and they were very different from today's). So my tree ended up looking like this:

My father who never cared for genealogy but very much respected my interests, always said that if you're going to go that far away in time you'll find out that everyone is related. I guess he is right. So I'm going to finish with a funny video I found on YouTube:

http://youtu.be/drvddhuiOcI

My childhood super-hero

 

I’ve always wanted to talk about my grand-father.

Growing up he was the most interesting person I had ever met.

The way he told his stories made me truly believe that he was a real super-hero.

Not just the fictional stories about gnomes and other creatures that lived in his house in Belém do Pará in Brazil, where I spent the best summers of my childhood, but also the real ones where he survived two plane crashes, two cancers and even received the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II herself.

The stories he told us about our family's history made me love history, any history, because it made me understand how our own history is so closely related to the World's History.

He also made me want to live my life as if I was writing a book. He life's book was so interesting, so rich with wonderful different experiences that I wanted mine to be just as exciting.

Now that I am a grown-up I know that he was far from perfect. But super-heroes are not perfect, just super. Here are some of his amazing stories and some of my best memories.

  

This picture was taken in 1973, when my grand-father William Bolivar Kup came to visit us while we were living in England. I was not even 2 yet but I vividly remember his visit.