When John Hawkins became Treasurer of the Navy in 1577, he had sailed all over the world, and his ideas contributed to the production of a new race-built series of galleons—of which Dreadnought was the second, following Foresight of 1570—without the high forecastle and aftcastle prevalent in earlier galleons.

Under Captain Thomas Fenner, she was part of Drake's fleet which "singed the King of Spain's Beard" with the raid on Cadiz in Spring 1587.

[3] On 2 June 1602, captained by Edward Manwaring, Dreadnought was part of Ricard Leveson's fleet which succeeded in capturing the Portuguese carrack Sao Valentinho at Cezimbra Roads[3][6] In 1603, as hostilities with Spain concluded, she was in the English Channel under captain Hamphrey Reynolds.

[3] In 1637, she was part of the Earl of Northumberland's fleet in the North Sea, commanded by Captain Henry Stradling and then by Thomas Kirke.

[1] This article includes data released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported UK: England & Wales Licence, by the National Maritime Museum, as part of the Warship Histories project.