Before the Armada. Before the knighthood. Before the legend. Francis Drake was forged in fire, failure, and vengeance.
Plymouth, 1567.
Tom Rouse keeps his Spanish buried. Born in Andalusia to an English father and a Spanish mother, he has learned that a man with two countries may be trusted by neither. On the docks of Plymouth, silence is safer than memory, and four pence a day is enough to keep him fed.
Then John Hawkins needs a translator. So does Francis Drake.
Tom is drawn into a voyage that will carry English ships across the Atlantic and into the guarded world of Spain’s empire. The men call it trade. The sea will teach them other names for it.
Aboard Drake’s small ship, Tom becomes interpreter, witness, and sometimes accomplice. His Spanish opens doors, calms prisoners, bargains for food, and gives shape to orders he does not always want to understand. To the English, he is useful. To the Spanish, he is suspect. To Drake, he may become something more dangerous: a man worth keeping close.
From Plymouth to the Caribbean and the Isthmus of Panama, The Dragon’s Forge tells the beginning of Drake’s rise through the eyes of the man at his elbow. It is a story of ships, guns, hunger, loyalty, vengeance, and the price of surviving between two worlds.
Genre: Historical
Plymouth, 1567.
Tom Rouse keeps his Spanish buried. Born in Andalusia to an English father and a Spanish mother, he has learned that a man with two countries may be trusted by neither. On the docks of Plymouth, silence is safer than memory, and four pence a day is enough to keep him fed.
Then John Hawkins needs a translator. So does Francis Drake.
Tom is drawn into a voyage that will carry English ships across the Atlantic and into the guarded world of Spain’s empire. The men call it trade. The sea will teach them other names for it.
Aboard Drake’s small ship, Tom becomes interpreter, witness, and sometimes accomplice. His Spanish opens doors, calms prisoners, bargains for food, and gives shape to orders he does not always want to understand. To the English, he is useful. To the Spanish, he is suspect. To Drake, he may become something more dangerous: a man worth keeping close.
From Plymouth to the Caribbean and the Isthmus of Panama, The Dragon’s Forge tells the beginning of Drake’s rise through the eyes of the man at his elbow. It is a story of ships, guns, hunger, loyalty, vengeance, and the price of surviving between two worlds.
Genre: Historical