Francis Drake was the second to circumnavigate the globe (following Ferdinand Magellan) during his expedition on the Golden Hind from 1577 to 1580. In 1579, Drake explored the west coast of North America, where he careened his ship in a “Fair and Good Bay” for repairs and made a territorial claim for England. The question of where on the North American Pacific coast Drake landed has never been definitively resolved. California's Drakes Bay near San Francisco has been a consensus site for many, a position the US National Park Service has reinforced by its listing as a National Historic Landmark (language in the nomination equivocates slightly, calling it the “most likely” landing site). In Thunder Go North, Melissa Darby, a historian and archaeologist, provides critical analysis.
The book's initial chapters focus on the historical context and documents relating to Drake's voyage, including evidence for sailing much farther north along the Pacific coast than was originally publicly acknowledged and possibly landing on what is now the coast of Oregon in the vicinity of 44°N latitude. Original documents were shrouded in secrecy, and published information was intentionally deceptive so as not to inform competing governments, especially Spain. A 1589 publication by Richard Hakluyt reports Drake's landing at about 38°N latitude, the latitude of Drakes Bay. Hakluyt's is the primary document on which the California landing rests, but a draft version of the manuscript in the British Library specifies a landing at 44°N latitude. This, and other sixteenth-century sources, supports Drake's exploration of more northern latitudes, a conclusion numerous other scholars had also reached. Darby suggests that the change reflects “information the Crown wanted publicly known—and what it did not” (p. 22). A reason for this change, “The Queen's Ruse,” was to establish an English claim north of Spanish territory in the Americas to inhibit northward Spanish expansion. This was a conclusion reached by Zelia Nuttall based on her review of original documents for a manuscript completed in 1917 but never published—due to active obstruction by California scholars, which Darby meticulously chronicles. Nuttall's manuscript was subsequently lost, but her interpretation of a more northerly landing was supported by later scholars (J. W. Robertson, E. F. Benson, F. P. Sprent, E. G. R. Taylor) who published their research in the 1920s and 1930s.
The growing consensus for a more northerly landing was derailed, in 1936, by recovery of an inscribed brass plate supposedly left by Drake as a declaration of discovery and possession. It was only revealed as fake in 1977—by which time meaningful discussion of competing landing sites to Drakes Bay had been largely quieted.
Chapters 7–14 outline the history of the promotion of Drakes Bay, largely by California civic and business interests, and some allied members of the academic community. Darby focuses on Herbert Bolton (chair of the UC Berkeley history department and chair of the Bancroft Library) as having been involved in the brass plate hoax. Bolton had relationships with prominent California-promoting civic groups who backed the Drake-in-California narrative, and who also subsidized Bolton with research grants and support for student assistants. Darby documents several other historical fabrications promulgated by Bolton, which—in spite of his consequential academic record—reveals a level of comfort with deception. The brass plate fed Bolton's appetite for fame, was embraced by Bolton's supporters, and was, in his own words, hopefully “worth one or more millions to the university” (p. 138).
The book's final chapters explore ethnographic records regarding material culture, language, and cosmology for Native groups north of California as they may relate to evidence provided by the Drake narratives. Darby argues that among the problems with a landing in the Drakes Bay neighborhood are descriptions of the Natives’ wood-walled houses (more like Northwest Coast plank houses than the grass thatch houses of the Miwok and their neighbors), use of canoes (as opposed to reed boats more typical south of Cape Mendocino), and a reference to the “coast of the canoe trees” south of their landing site (more consistent with the cedar and redwood forests north of California's Drakes Bay). She discusses a detailed description from the voyage of a type of “conie” with a rat-like tail and other features that may refer to muskrats, which were common and used for meat and clothing by the Natives; abundant in Oregon, they are not typical of the Drakes Bay area.
Darby discusses the very limited descriptions of Native basketry from the voyage and analyzes the few documented Native words with respect to the Coosan languages of the central Oregon coast or the widespread Chinookan trade language. Although inconclusive, these exercises suggest that the scant evidence could well apply to portions of the Pacific coast beyond California, at least as adequately as similar comparisons to Indigenous groups of California. She also considers the reported behaviors of the Natives in light of cosmological beliefs that prevailed on the Pacific coast north of California; again, although her points are speculative, they are no more so than similar analyses used to support a California landing.
Darby offers Oregon's Whale Cove as an alternative landing site, which is a remarkably close physical match to the Portus Nova Albion map (copied from Drake's original, which was destroyed by fire) where he careened his ship for repairs. Located at 44.78°N latitude, it is in the vicinity of the 44°N latitude that appears in the Hakluyt manuscript draft.
Even with Darby's exhaustive research, her book does not provide definitive evidence for a Drake landing north of California (either at Whale Cove or elsewhere), but it casts meaningful shade on the Drakes Bay scenario and emphatically makes the point that—in spite of NPS National Historic Landmark status—the question remains unresolved. Barring the finding of additional lost historic documents, the settling of this question may rest with archaeology.
Darby's historiography of the Drake debate exposes the creation of a consensus history through academic patronage, personal agendas, and the manipulation of public perception. Darby presents a convincing case that prominent academics were influenced by commercial boosters of the California Drake landing. This book is immensely interesting, thoroughly researched from primary sources, and well written. It is full of intrigue and deception that would do credit to any engaging mystery novel, but it is grounded in good, careful, and serious research.
