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.
Simon Fernandez Simon Fernandes (Portuguese: "Simão Fernandes" ; c. 1538 – c. 1590) was a 16th-century Portuguese-born navigator and sometime pirate who piloted the 1585 and 1587 English expeditions to found colonies on Roanoke island, part of modern-day North Carolina but then known as Virginia. Fernandes trained as a navigator in Spain at the famed Casa de Contratación in Seville, but later took up arms against the Spanish empire, preying upon Spanish shipping along with fellow pirate John Callis. Charged with piracy in 1577, he was saved from the hangman's noose by Sir Francis Walsingham, becoming a Protestant and a subject of the Queen of England. In 1578 Fernandes entered the service of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and later Sir Walter Raleigh, piloting the failed 1587 expedition to Roanoke, known to history as the "Lost Colony".