In the 1590s Captain Parker sailed the West Indies islands in the Caribbean Sea of the Americas, taking several prizes.
Captain Parker was wounded in that attack but survived and succeeded in capturing a frigate carrying silver which was en route to San Juan de Ulua, the complex of fortresses overlooking and protecting the seaport town of Veracruz of New Spain on the western coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Portobello was a very important port being the departure point from which Peruvian treasure fleets left to cross the Atlantic for European Spain.
His successes secured for him a prominent mercantile and later political position in Plymouth, where he was looked upon as a hero of sorts and elected Lord Mayor of the major seaport English town in 1601.
He became a founding member of the Virginia Company, organized in London in 1606, which sent expeditions across the Atlantic Ocean beginning in 1607 to found the Colony of Virginia (modern U.S. state of the Commonwealth of Virginia) and the first settlement of Jamestown on the north bank of the James River, upstream inland from the Chesapeake Bay in the future Thirteen Colonies of English America / British America on the East Coast of the North America continent, building up the beginnings there of the four-hundred years old British Empire Captain Parker was made Vice-Admiral of the English Royal Navy and left on an expedition to the East Indies islands (between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, off the coast of Southeast Asia) on the other side of the world, but died on the voyage to Bantam (a seaport town on the island of Java in the former Banten Sultanate, later in the colony of the Dutch East Indies now the modern Indonesia) on 14 September 1618.