The Drake Chair (from 1662)

Between 15 December 1577 and 26 September 1580, Francis Drake completed the first circumnavigation of the globe by an English sea captain. Although a special drydock was created at Deptford to preserve his ship, The Golden Hind, it rapidly decayed. The task of breaking up what remained fell to John Davis of Camberwell, Keeper of the Naval Stores at Deptford. A plate affixed to the back records that this chair was constructed from the sound timber of the ship and given by Davis to the Bodleian in 1662, further evidence that the library was serving as a national repository for artefacts as well as books in this period. Another officer at the Deptford dockyard was the brother of the leading English poet, Abraham Cowley, who was persuaded to compose commemorative verses inscribed on a second, reversable metal plate on the back of the chair: in Latin (Image 2) on one side, in 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.

Cowley later recalled writing an 'Ode, sitting and drinking in the chair, made out of the reliques of Sir Francis Drake's ship.'*

Von Uffenbach indicates that it was originally displayed in the 'gallery' in the Bodleian Library. Of the hundreds of curiosities which accumulated in the gallery, the Drake Chair is the only one to remain in the Library after successive dispersals to other University Museums: today it can be seen in the Divinity School.

Credits: Howard Hotson, March 2021. Photo by Xavier Laurent, August 2019. Used with permission of the Oxford and Empire project.

* David Rogers, The Bodleian Library and Its Treasures, 1320-1700 (Henley-on-Thames, 1991), pp. 132-3.