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The Queen's Pirate
The Triumphant Life and Tragic End of Thomas Cavendish, Elizabethan Privateer
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The Queen's Pirate
Narrated by:
Barnaby Edwards
Buy Now for ₹667.71
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Narrated by:
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Barnaby Edwards
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Written by:
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Iain Gately
About this listen
In June 1593, a ghostly ship drifted into an Irish harbour. Only 16 crewmen remained alive, and the deck was littered with the dead.
This was the melancholy homecoming of the ship Desire, one of a fleet of five that had left England two years before, fuelled by dreams of Spanish gold and the glory of exploring the globe. The expedition's captain, thirty-one-year-old Thomas Cavendish, had been lost in the South Atlantic and was presumed dead: a victim of disease, mutiny, and an excess of ambition.
Yet just five years earlier, in 1588, things had been very different. Cavendish had returned aboard the Desire triumphant from circumnavigating the world in record time, having taken a Manila galleon and secured the largest haul of treasure ever to fall into English hands. Cavendish sailed the Desire to Greenwich and paid homage to Queen Elizabeth I, staging a lavish banquet for her on board.
In The Queen's Pirate, Iain Gately traces the career of this remarkable Elizabethan mariner from spectacular triumphs to great betrayals and an ill-fated final voyage. Gately expertly steers readers through Cavendish’s tempestuous life, as he crafts the first biography of an unjustly neglected Elizabethan hero.©2026 Iain Gately (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic Reviews
An incident-filled, fascinating and brilliantly written slice of history centred on a relatively unknown 16th-century figure whose almost Zelig-like adventures allow a new light to be brought on the extraordinary era of privateering, trading, and a colonising dynamic that set the key note for our own troubled world.
Savvy, brisk, and sophisticated, this account by Iain Gately brings to life the exploits of Thomas Cavendish, who cast his fate upon the waters only to find them returned in unexpected ways. I read it with rapt fascination.
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