the enemy would dare follow, in spite of his superiority
which must anyway restrict his movements.”
Quiberon Bay was a landmark clash, ending the
French threat of invading Britain. A song was written
in honor of Hawke’s victory, printed in pamphlets at the
time:
Ere Hawke did bang,
Mounseer Conflang,
You sent us beef and beer;
Now Mounseer’s beat,
We’ve nought to eat,
Since you have naught to fear.Following the Quiberon Bay victory, Hawke served
as First Lord of the Admiralty from 1766 to 1771, and
in 1776 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Hawke
of Towton. He died on 17 October 1781 at Sunbury in
Middlesex. In 1904, the biographer Montagu Burrows
wrote of Hawke’s place in history: “It may be hoped that
it is no longer necessary to vindicate the place which has
of late years been assigned to Lord Hawke in naval his-
tory, that is to say, in the history of Great Britain. It will
be seen... that he was the parent of the modern Royal
Navy in the sense which can be attributed to no one else
... that he had left behind him a name unrivalled in the
maritime records of his country.”
References: Burrows, Montagu, The Life of Edward Lord
Hawke, Admiral of the Fleet, Vice-Admiral of Great Britain,
and First Lord of the Admiralty from 1766 to 1771 (Lon-
don: J. J. Keliher & Co., Limited, 1904), 1, 9; The Secret
Expedition impartially disclos’d: Or, an Authentick Faithful
Narrative of all Occurrences that Happened to the Fleet and
Army Commanded by Sir E. H. [Edward Hawke] and Sir
J. M. [John Mordaunt], From its First Sailing to its Return
to England... (London: Printed by J. Staples, 1757);
Mackay, Ruddock, “Edward, Lord Hawke, 1705–1781,”
in Precursors of Nelson: British Admirals of the Eighteenth
Century, edited by Peter Le Fevre and Richard Harding
(London: Chatham Publishing, 2000), 201–224; Laugh-
ton, John Knox, “Hawke, Edward, Baron Hawke,” in The
Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols., 8 supps., edited
by Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee, et al. (London:
Oxford University Press, 1921–22), IX:192–199; The
Wat’ry God. A Celebrated Song Written on Lord Hawke’s
Victory over Conflans in 1759 (Dublin: John Lee, 1770).
Hawkins, Sir John (Sir John Hawkyns) (1532–
1595) English sea captain
John Hawkins (spelled in some sources as Hawkyns)
was born in Plymouth, England, in 1532, the scion
of a family of Devon shipowners and sailors. Much
of his early life is unknown; it appears that he got his
first naval training when he served on ships that stole
slaves from Portuguese ships and sold them in the Span-
ish colonies in the New World. This began about 1562
when Hawkins would have been around 30 years of age.
However, when he subsequently set up his own trading
venture, two of his vessels were captured by the Span-
ish. Queen Elizabeth I eventually loaned Hawkins one
of her royal ships as a replacement, and he once again
went to sea and had two more profitable voyages. De-
spite the Spanish edict against him, he continued to seize
slaves and sell them. For his success, he was granted a
coat of arms with the emblem of a slave in chains. In
1567, while he was again searching the Caribbean coasts
for slave ships, Hawkins was attacked by a huge Spanish
fleet at Veracruz. Although he was defeated, his ship, the
Minion, and a smaller craft, the Judith, piloted by Sir
Francis drake, Hawkins’s cousin, were able to escape
and limp home to England.
For several years after his defeat at Veracruz,
Hawkins did not return to the seas, instead using his
family’s wealth and some of his own to finance priva-
teering missions for slaves. In 1573, he was named as
treasurer of the Royal Navy, succeeding his father-in-law,
Benjamin Gonson. He later served as controller of the
navy, and it was during this time that Hawkins reformed
the construction methods and updated the navy’s ship
purchases, getting rid of old ships that were outmoded
and obsolete and replacing them with newer, faster ves-
sels carrying many more guns that could fight far bet-
ter than the older ships. Although some accused him
of corruption and taking bribes, no charges were ever
proven, and Hawkins continued with his sterling work
in improving England’s navy. Indeed, England’s great
naval victory in this period came because of Hawkins’s
reforms. In 1588, the Spanish, desiring to invade Prot-
estant England and restore Catholicism there, assembled
an enormous fleet—the Spanish Armada—and sailed
toward England. The English navy met them in the En-
glish Channel (July 1588) and harried them all the way
to Gravelines, near Calais. Working closely with the
commander of the English navy, Charles hoWard, sec- hAwkinS, SiR John