The Drake Chair

When Francis Drake's ship, The Golden Hind, was broken up, this chair and several similar ones were constructed from its sound timber. A plate on the front of the chair states that it was given to the Library in 1662 by John Davis of Camberwell, Keeper of the naval stores at Deptford Dockyard. Another plate affixed to the back of the chair contains commemorative verses by Abraham Cowley, in Latin (Image 3) on one side and English on the reverse. The English version reads as follows:

To this great Ship which round the Globe has run,
And matcht in Race the Chariot of the Sun,
This Pythagorean Ship (for it may claime
Without Presumption so deserv’d a Name,
By knowledge once, and transformation now)
In her new shape, this sacred Port allow.
Drake & his Ship, could not have wisht from Fate
A more blest Station, or more blest Estate.
For Lo! A Seate of endless Rest is giv’n
To her in Oxford, and to him in Heav’n.

References
* Quotations in this and the following paragraph from John Newman, 'The Architectural Setting', Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), 135-77, here 152.
** The most recent study is Margaret Bullard, ‘Talking Heads: The Bodleian Frieze, its Inspiration, Sources, Designers, and Significance’, Bodleian Library Record, vol. 14 [1994], pg. 461-500, who quotes Booth on 466. The Wikipedia article lists the portraits.
*** W. H. Quarrell and W. J. C. Quarrell, ed. and trans., Oxford in 1710: From the Travels of Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (Oxford, 1928), 13-14.

Credits: Howard Hotson, March 2021.