This adventure story recounts the first round-world voyage of Tudor explorer Sir Francis Drake through the eyes of Dickon, a lame stowaway, who goes on to become Drake's cabin boy and personal hero. Readers learn about the harsh life that sailors in Tudor times experienced as they coped with storms, mutinies and illness on board ship.

* Ruby/Band 14 books give increasing opportunities for children to develop their skills of inference and deduction.

* Text type - An adventure story.

* Provides lots of opportunities for drama and writing activities. This title is paired with: How to be a Tudor in 20 easy stages, an information book that can be used to locate factual information about Tudor explorers and the Armada.

* Curriculum links - History: What were the effects of Tudor exploration?

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book features in the following series: Collins Big Cat, Ruby Series .

. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading scheme has multiple levels. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 48 pages in this book. This book was published 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Julia Jarman is an ex-primary school teacher and is now a full-time childrens' author, specialising in fiction set during historical times. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.