Christopher Newport - Early Career

Early Career

For almost twenty years, Newport worked as a privateer who raided Spanish freighters off and on in the Caribbean. The spoils from these missions were shared with London merchants who funded them. Over the years he commanded a series of privateer ships, including the Little John, the Margaret, and the Golden Dragon. In August 1592, he captured a Portuguese ship, the Madre de Deus, off the Azores, taking the greatest English plunder of the century. His ship returned to port in England carrying five hundred tons of spices, silks, gemstones, and other treasures.

In 1605, after another mission to the Caribbean, he returned to England with two baby crocodiles and a wild boar to give as gifts to King James I who had a fascination with exotic animals.

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