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
West Country men The West Country men were a group of wealthy individuals in Elizabethan England who advocated the English colonisation of Ireland, attacks on the Spanish Empire and overseas colonial expansion. The group included Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, John Hawkins, Richard Grenville and Ralph Lane. Several of these prominent figures originated in the far southwest of Britain known as the Westcountry, particularly associated with the sea ports of Devon including Plymouth.
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.