Sir Richard Grenville
Sir Richard Grenville was born in 1541 into an old Cornish maritime family and died in 1591 in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He was a famous sailing ship captain during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. In 1585 Richard Grenville led an expedition sent to colonise Virginia in America. He was sent out by his cousin Sir Walter Raleigh.
In 1591, after taking part in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, when he was the captain of the Revenge, he engaged a fleet of Spanish war ships by himself of the Azores. After a desperate sea battle, in which four Spanish ships were sunk, he surrendered to the Spanish. The sea battle between the sailing ships is celebrated in The famous ballad by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Richard Grenville’s ship had become becalmed under the lee of a grand spanish galleon and the hand to hand fighting lasted fifteen hours. Richard Grenville had fought against fifteen spanish ships and five thousand spanish forces.