Courtesy of Wikipedia. Replica of the Elizabethan galleon, The Golden Hind, captained by Francis Drake in 16th Century, Southwark, London, UK. Author Jose L. Marin
Does the Golden Hinde qualify as secret London? Probably not. It’s certainly in all the tourist guides.
But every time I come to St Mary Overie’s Dock hidden-away near Borough Market and find a full-size pirate ship, like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean sitting pride of place, I get a jolt of surprise. So that’s good enough. It’s in.
First, I should say, its not the original. The ship that Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe between 1557 and 1580 (making him incidentally the first sailor to do so) was broken up in 1668 and this replica was built in the early 1970’s.
Having said that, the latest Golden Hinde was built by traditional methods and has sailed a whopping 140,000 miles across the globe copying Drakes epic journey. It’s now an educational and tourist attraction, a venue for weddings and meetings, and a great place for kids to dress up as pirates.
Drake himself was one of those characters who has gone into English folklore as one of our great adventurers and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I for basically, getting one over on the Spanish.
But the truth was he was a pirate (conveniently given the title of privateer, giving him tacit approval to plunder from Spanish ships) and made much of his money from the slave trade. The Spanish King Phillip II offered a reward of about £6 million in modern currency for his death or capture.