this episode covers England’s break with Catholicism, which helped produce the Elizabethan “sea dogs,” merchants-turned-smugglers like John Hawkins and Francis Drake who moved from contraband slave trading to piracy and then privateering as they violently challenged Spanish and Portuguese monopolies in the Atlantic world. Hawkins’s slave-trading voyages of the 1560s relied on coercion and armed force, climaxing in the disastrous clash with Spanish authorities at San Juan de Ulúa in 1568, which exposed the high costs and limited profits of England’s early involvement in the Caribbean slave trade and pushed the English toward piracy instead. A generation later, figures like Walter Raleigh extended this aggressive overseas vision into colonization, sponsoring failed settlements such as Roanoke in the 1580s, which—despite collapse—laid ideological and practical groundwork for England’s later imperial expansion in North America.