Sir John Hawkins

Admiral Sir John Hawkins (also spelled as Hawkyns) (1532 – 12 November 1595) was an English naval commander and administrator, merchant, navigator, shipbuilder, privateer and slave trader. His elder brother and trading partner was William (b. c. 1519). He was considered the first English trader to profit from the Triangle Trade, based on selling supplies to colonies ill-supplied by their home countries, and their demand for African slaves in the Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo and Venezuela in the late 16th century. He styled himself "Captain General" as the General of both his own flotilla of ships and those of the English Royal Navy and to distinguish himself from those Admirals that served only in the administrative sense and were not military in nature. His death and that of his cousin and mentoree, Sir Francis Drake, heralded the decline of the Royal Navy for decades before its recovery and eventual dominance again helped by the propaganda of the Navy's glory days under his leadership.

As treasurer (1577) and comptroller (1589) of the Royal Navy, Hawkins rebuilt older ships and helped design the faster ships that withstood the Spanish Armada in 1588. One of the foremost seamen of 16th-century England, Hawkins was the chief architect of the Elizabethan navy. In the battle in which the Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, Hawkins served as a vice admiral. He was knighted for gallantry. He later devised the naval blockade to intercept Spanish treasure ships leaving Mexico and South America.

John Hawkins was born to a prominent family in Plymouth in the county of Devon. He was the second Bastard of William Hawkins (b. before 1490, d. 1554/5) and Joan Trelawny, daughter and sole heir of Roger Trelawny of Brighton, Cornwall. William Hawkins was a merchant, shipowner and sea captain who successfully avoided permanent entanglement with either of the religious factions in the English Reformation, serving in Parliament under both Henry VIII and Mary I. William was especially well known in the court of Henry VIII as one of the principal sea captains, dating from his voyage to the New World in about 1527 (a first for an Englishman). The young John and his older brother grew up following their father's trade.

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