1579 - Drake explores California dn Oregon coasts

      While Sir Francis Drake was away on his voyages of exploration, no Elizabethan swashbuckler was more devoted to throwing off the Spanish imperial yoke in the New World than Sir Walter Raleigh. 

   Raleigh distinguished himself by participating in wars against the Irish, and became a celebrity for his exploits.  Queen Elizabeth I considered him too important to her causes at home to allow him to participate in any of the voyages to the New World that he sponsored and financed,  but this did not prevent him from growing into the most fierce imperialist of his day.   (Click here for more)

        As Robert Williams has noted: "The ingenious innovation of Elizabethan conquistadores and the proto-capitalist promoters of commerce in the Americas was the forging of a discourse of conquest that spoke with intense and legitimating passion to their own countrymen's emerging sense of material and spiritual manifest destiny." 

       The Elizabethan could passionately pursue either side of the colonizing equation: either religious reformation and/or imperial revenue.  The English discourse of the Discovery Era would prove that by doggedly pursuing one goal in the New World, the English crusaders could secure many other prizes at home.