Simon Fernandes

rdf:langString Simon Fernandes

rdf:langString Simon Fernandes

rdf:langString unknown, possibly the Azores

rdf:langString Terceira, the Azores

rdf:langString c. 1538

rdf:langString c. 1590

rdf:langString The Swine

rdf:langString Simon Fernandes (Portuguese: Simão Fernandes; c. 1538 – c. 1590) was a 16th-century Portuguese-born navigator and sometime pirate who piloted the 1585 and 1587 English expeditions to found colonies on Roanoke island, part of modern-day North Carolina but then known as Virginia. Fernandes trained as a navigator in Spain at the famed Casa de Contratación in Seville, but later took up arms against the Spanish empire, preying upon Spanish shipping along with fellow pirate John Callis. Charged with piracy in 1577, he was saved from the hangman's noose by Sir Francis Walsingham, becoming a Protestant and a subject of the Queen of England. In 1578 Fernandes entered the service of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and later Sir Walter Raleigh, piloting the failed 1587 expedition to Roanoke, known to history as the "Lost Colony". Fernandes disappears from the records after 1590, when he sailed with an English fleet to the Azores, a journey from which he most likely did not return alive. However, a copy of one of his charts of the East coast of North America still survives in the Cotton Collection, and was probably one of the chief sources used by John Dee for his 1580 map justifying English claims to North America.

rdf:langString South Wales, England

rdf:langString Piloted Sir Walter Raleigh's failed 1587 expedition to Roanoke island, "The Lost Colony"