Who was an English sea captain and privateer of the Elizabethan era, carrying out the second circumnavigation of the world in a single expedition and claiming California for the English? A: Francis Drake
Francis Drake Vice Admiral Sir Francis Drake (  1540  – 28 January 1596) was an English sea captain and privateer of the Elizabethan era. Drake carried out the second circumnavigation of the world in a single expedition, from 1577 to 1580, and was the first to complete the voyage as captain while leading the expedition throughout the entire circumnavigation. With his incursion into the Pacific Ocean, he claimed what is now California for the English and inaugurated an era of conflict with the Spanish on the western coast of the Americas, an area that had previously been largely unexplored by western shipping.
Blackbeard Edward Teach or Edward Thatch (c. 1680 22 November 1718), better known as Blackbeard, was a notorious English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of Britain's North American colonies. Although little is known about his early life, he was probably born in Bristol, England. Recent genealogical research indicates his family moved to Jamaica where Edward Thatch, Jr. is listed as being a mariner in the Royal Navy aboard HMS "Windsor" in 1706. He may have been a sailor on privateer ships during Queen Anne's War before settling on the Bahamian island of New Providence, a base for Captain Benjamin Hornigold, whose crew Teach joined sometime around 1716. Hornigold placed him in command of a sloop he had captured, and the two engaged in numerous acts of piracy. Their numbers were boosted by the addition to their fleet of two more ships, one of which was commanded by Stede Bonnet, but toward the end of 1717 Hornigold retired from piracy, taking two vessels with him.