Operation Drake Operation Drake Operation Drake (1978–1980) was a round-the-world voyage with the participation of young people from many countries. The voyage was centred on the brigantine Eye of the Wind. She left Plymouth in October 1978 and returned to London two years later, in December 1980. Named after Sir Francis Drake, who had circumnavigated the world four hundred years before on the Golden Hind. Operation Drake was divided up onto 9 ocean and 1 land based phases, each lasting about 3 months. On each phase, a number of Young Explorers, youngsters aged between seventeen and twenty-four, who were selected from countries
Francis Pretty Francis Pretty Francis Pretty was a Suffolk gentleman, diarist, sailor, and man-at-arms, who wrote detailed accounts of two separate circumnavigation of the globe, first with Sir Francis Drake (1577-1580) and later with Thomas Cavendish (1588). Due to the dubious legality of these expeditions, accounts were officially suppressed; the earliest unofficial accounts were published in Dutch by Emanuel van Meteren who purchased both diaries and mixed elements of one with the other. Excerpts of both diaries were also included in Richard Hakluyt's 1582 and 1589 treatises on British explorations of North America, before he published the Cavendish diary in its entirety