The story poised on the galleon of Francis Drake, “hound” of Queen Elizabeth

“‘Heard of it!’ exclaimed the earl. ‘Heard of it, you say! He was the bloodiest buccaneer in all the seas. Blackbeard was a child in comparison. The Spaniards had such an overwhelming fear of him that, I confess, I sometimes felt proud that he was English. ‘” So spoke Earl Trelawney of the pirate Flint in theTreasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. A good summary of English imperial pride, fueled by dominion over the seas for more than two centuries. If the mother of this thalassocracy is Elizabeth I, her fathers are the sea ​​dogs of the queen, and the story of the most feared “hound” is told in Francis Drake. The corsair who challenged an empire (Laterza, 256 pp., 20 euros), by the historian David Salomoni. The book takes hold from a discovery like few happen in the life of a historian: the discovery of a new document, the first on Drake sixty years later. This is the testimony of Nuno da Silva, the Portuguese pilot kidnapped by the corsair to be guided in the Pacific, released in Madrid in 1583 before the Council of the Indies, the most important administrative body of the Spanish colonial empire. After his liberation, da Silva began a judicial odyssey that also brought him before the Inquisition, providing posterity, with his depositions, with the material to reconstruct the bloody enterprises and explorations of El Drac – first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe between 1577 and 1580.