The whole idea of circumnavigating the globe is certainly a daunting one. After all, Magellan didn’t fare so well in his journey, having suffered all kinds of unfortunate happenings along the way before dying during the voyage, as described by National Geographic, and for Francis Drake the journey was also precarious. He did, after all, lose four of his five ships before even making it to the Pacific Ocean. That, however, was all in the Atlantic theater, far from the Pacific that encompassed the biggest part of the journey. With just one ship to tend to, the journey seemed to get easier for him, and once he hit the Pacific, the journey was almost as easy as the raiding of the Spanish Empire had been.
There was really only one snag, literally, that held up his voyage. Drake got the Golden Hind caught on a reef near Java, according to “Sir Francis Drake: A Pictorial Biography,” but he only got stuck there for a day before the ship glided off, docked for repairs in Java, and then continued on its merry way home. The Golden Hind sailed across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up the African Coast all the way back to Plymouth, where he completed his circumnavigation in September of 1580. All told, Drake’s odyssey took him just under three years, and he became the first Englishman to make the voyage.