First person to captain a complete circumnavigation

In December 1577, Francis Drake set out from England with a fleet of five small warships. His original intention was to raid Spanish merchant vessels off the coast of South America then return with a ship full of treasure, but his search for targets ended up taking him further than planned. In mid-1578, having lost many crewmen to illness, he scuttled two of his ships in his fleet and divided their crews among his remaining vessels. By the end of the year, Drake was down to just his flagship – the Golden Hind – which he sailed up the west coast of the Americas, raiding Spanish shipping as he went. In March 1579, by now laden with several tonnes of gold, silver and jewels, Drake headed home, crossing the Pacific and then the Indian Ocean before returning to Europe up the west coast of Africa. He arrived back in England on 23 September 1580 with just 58 surviving crew from an original complement of 164 (spread across all five ships). Although the 18 survivors of Ferdinand Magellan's 1519 expedition were the first people to circumnavigate the globe, Francis Drake was the first to do so as commander of a ship.

Drake was a privateer (a government-sponsored pirate) whose attacks on Spanish shipping earned him a personal fortune estimated to have been worth the equivalent of $126 million in 2015.