Tudor England produced two of the most famous explorers in British history. Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe between 1577 and 1580 in his ship the Golden Hind, the first Englishman to do so. Queen Elizabeth I knighted him on the deck of his ship at Deptford. He later played a leading role in defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588.
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Sir Walter Raleigh, courtier and adventurer, organised the first English attempts to settle in North America in the 1580s. The colony at Roanoke Island in modern North Carolina failed, but Raleigh named the wider region "Virginia" in honour of the Virgin Queen. He is also credited — possibly inaccurately — with introducing tobacco and the potato to England.
You may be asked who first sailed around the world for England (Francis Drake), or who founded the colony of Virginia (Walter Raleigh).
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