The Queen's Pirate

In June 1593, a ghostly ship drifted into an Irish harbour. Only 16 crewmen remained alive, and the deck was littered with the dead.

This was the melancholy homecoming of the ship Desire, one of a fleet of five that had left England two years before, fuelled by dreams of Spanish gold and the glory of exploring the globe. The expedition's captain, thirty-one-year-old Thomas Cavendish, had been lost in the South Atlantic and was presumed dead: a