In June 1593, a ghostly ship drifted into an Irish harbour. Only 16 crewmen remained alive, and the deck was littered with the dead.

This was the melancholy homecoming of the ship Desire, one of a fleet of five that had left England two years before, fuelled by dreams of Spanish gold and the glory of exploring the globe. The expedition's captain, thirty-one-year-old Thomas Cavendish, had been lost in the South Atlantic and was presumed dead: a victim of disease, mutiny, and an excess of ambition.

Yet just five years earlier, in 1588, things had been very different. Cavendish had returned aboard the Desire triumphant from circumnavigating the world in record time, having taken a Manila galleon and secured the largest haul of treasure ever to fall into English hands. Cavendish sailed the Desire to Greenwich and paid homage to Queen Elizabeth I, staging a lavish banquet for her on board.

In The Queen's Pirate, Iain Gately traces the career of this remarkable - and unjustly neglected - Elizabethan mariner from spectacular triumphs to great betrayals and an ill-fated final voyage.