Francis Pretty

Francis Pretty was a gentleman-at-arms who sailed with Drake on the Golden Hind from 1577 to 1580, the first English circumnavigation, and his account of the voyage, through the Strait of Magellan, up the coast of Chile and Peru plundering Spanish shipping, to California, the Moluccas and home round the Cape, was printed in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations in 1589. It is the only eyewitness narrative of the voyage that survives, plain and unliterary, and the Harvard Classics print it with Nichols’s account of the earlier raids among the voyages that made the Elizabethan sea legend. Nothing else is known of its author.