Sir Francis Drake's own status as one of the most celebrated figures in English naval history gives this legend a real and nationally significant hero at its centre, the drum itself a genuine surviving 16th-century artefact still displayed today, giving this tradition an unusually tangible physical object compared with most of this register's more purely narrative-based curses and omens.
The drum's claimed self-sounding at a sequence of major national historical moments, spanning more than three centuries from the Mayflower's departure to the Second World War, gives this legend an exceptionally long and cumulatively reinforced tradition, each retelling apparently adding a further historically significant occasion on which the drum was said to have been heard, the story's own scope expanding alongside the nation's subsequent history.
The 1938 fire and the drum's temporary removal to Buckfast Abbey, recorded separately in this register's own Buckfast entries, before its return ahead of the Plymouth Blitz, gives this legend a genuinely dramatic and well documented mid-20th-century episode of its own, the coincidence of the drum's return and the city's survival lending exactly the kind of retrospective confirmation found throughout this wider register's curse and omen traditions.
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