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"Queen Elizabeth I sent Sir Francis Drake, along with twenty-five ships, on a mission to irritate the Spanish in America and to upset as much as possible the hostile preparations Spain was making to invade England. The map traces Drake's route from the Cape Verde Islands to Santo Domingo, Cartagena, and St. Augustine during 1585-86. After capturing St. Augustine, Drake sailed northward to Virginia to check on the English colonists who had put ashore at Roanoke Island some ten months earlier. Finding them in dire circumstances, he took the survivors--including the writer and scientist Thomas Hariot and the artist John White--back to England, at their request. White brought back the first drawings of Native Americans (now in the British Museum), which were later engraved and published by Theodor de Bry for his edition of Hariot's “Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia” (1590; see cat. 123). It is White's illustration of the trigger-fish, called here "Sea Connye, that appears on the map. Baptista Boazio was an Italian cartographer who worked in London from about 1585 to 1603, primarily as a compiler of regional maps. Besides this large map, he produced four separate plans of the cities visited by Drake (also in Mellon's collection and now at the Center), meant for inclusion in Walter Bigges's account of Drake's raids on Spanish America, published in 1588. The general map was most likely neither meant for inclusion in that work nor in any other printed account. It is extremely rare, and probably fewer than a dozen copies survive."-- Elisabeth Fairman. Paul Mellon's Legacy: a Passion for British Art: Masterpieces from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, p. 299, no. 121, N5220.M552 P38 2007+ OVERSIZE (YCBA)