On the California coast above San Francisco, great white cliffs box in a snug harbor. At their foot once lay a small encampment, secure behind a stone-faced rampart. Its 60-odd inhabitants, intent upon the repair of a small ship careened on the beach, could have been but dimly aware of their place in history and of the heritage and mystery which they were to bequeath to us.
These men and their tiny ship were participants in one of the great events that were to shatter and remake the Old World. Theirs was the first ship to fly the English flag beyond the Americas, engaged upon the first English circumnavigation of the World. On the beach rested Spanish treasure whose seizure was to help precipitate the launching of the Spanish Armada and whose use by Elizabeth I was to help destroy that armada. Here with Francis Drake and his Golden Hind lay the genesis of the British Empire. And here, 15,000 sailing miles from England, was actually the first “New England” in the United States.
For 36 days in 1579, Golden Hind found a secure haven in California. The ship’s crew built a fort and found themselves worshipped by the Indians. They explored the shore and the interior, repaired their ship and abandoned another, and left a brass plate “fast nailed to a great and firme post” claiming the land “in the name of Herr Majesty Queen Elizabeth of England and Herr Successors forever.” Then they sailed away, leaving grieving Indians and what was to become a fascinating, centuries-old research problem.
The Indians soon took away portable remnants of the English visit and removed the Plate of Brass. Winter storms swept over the fort, leveling its ramparts and burying its stones under the beach sand.
Sixteen years later, the Spanish galleon San Agustin entered the outer roadstead on an exploring expedition. While her crew was assembling a small pinnace on the beach, a gale drove the galleon onto the outer beach to total destruction, adding much new wreckage to the Indian villages. The survivors made their way south to Mexico in the pinnace. Their journal has survived the years, but it says nothing about evidence of Drake’s visit beyond an uncertain allusion to Indian ownership of iron arrowheads. In this silence there is no surprise, for storm and time had been at work. Had any trace remained, no mention would have been made of it, for 16th century explorers made no official records that would have helped to justify rival claims.
For well over two hundred years, the little harbor remained almost unchanged. The Indians disappeared and cattle took their place on the low-mounded village sites; only a name preserved through vague tradition tied the Drake saga to the bay.
Suddenly interest revived, as Americans, seeking their traditions in the new western land, began to search for old sources to aid in locating this first encampment of Englishmen on these shores. George Davidson of the Coast and Geodetic Service made the most thorough early study and in the 1890s, he decided on Drake’s Bay as the anchorage he sought. It satisfied all the facts he knew and he even thought he had located the careening site just inside Point Reyes. For several decades his findings won widespread acceptance, then newcomers challenged them and in turn tried to locate the harbor, some going as far as the Oregon border and some into San Francisco Bay itself, but no one could find a location that satisfied all the known facts.
The Plate of Brass was found about 1933, only to be discarded without investigation until found again in 1936. Its authentication was an event which brought even more searchers into the field, but these added little to the knowledge and much to the confusion.
In 1949, the Drake Navigators Guild was formed for the express purpose of studying this problem. Under the leadership of Adolph S. Oko, a former merchant ship captain, this group of men, each expert in at least one vital research area, decided to adopt the navigational approach to the problem. What Drake had observed, they expected to see; what he had reported, they expected to find from the sea. For the sea has not changed, though the landsman be half blinded when he looks upon it.
What charts were there, asked the Guild, and what sailing directions survived almost four hundred years? A surprising number, the Guild found. One was the Hondius Broadside map of Drake’s circumnavigation with its three sketch-maps from the voyage including that of the California harbor. Another was the California coastline by Robert Dudley showing an outer bay and inner port at Latitude 38° North. Versions of several accounts survived, including those of Drake’s chaplain, his nephew, and his Spanish prisoners. The interest and generosity of Guild member Robert Marshall enabled the researchers to use many of the rare materials in his fine Drake collection.
How accurate were these sources? Point- for-point detail, said Guild member F. Richard Brace, an engineer and former lieutenant in the U. S. Navy, who carefully compared the two known Hondius detail sketches with modern charts of those areas. Very accurate, said the University of California anthropologists who definitely identified Coast Miwok Indian culture from the descriptions. Slowly, documentary information was collected from scores of sources throughout the Western world by Robert W. Parkinson, enabling the Guild members to compile their own working “Coast Pilot” of the 16th century.
Complementing these searches was a study of Elizabethan ships, navigation, and seamanship by Lieutenant Raymond Aker, USNR. This study culminated in the most accurate reconstruction of Golden Hind and its attendant vessel ever completed.
The Guild could then retrace Drake’s route, first north from his raids on the Spanish treasure ships toward the hoped-for Northwest Passage, then south in search of a harbor to 38° North.
Once there, the search returned immediately to Drake’s Bay, Davidson’s location. Latitude 38° North crosses the roadstead. Great white cliffs backed by moorlands, which reminded the English so much of home that they named the land Nova Albion, rise for miles along the bay. The “stynking fogs” in summer still make it one of the foggiest places in the United States, while inland the lush forested ridges and sunny grasslands are still “farre different from the shoare.” The Plate of Brass was first found nearby and the “great and firme post” upon which it was mounted was a necessity, for there are no trees on the headlands along the shore here. When Drake left, the steady winds took him directly to the Farallones—or Isles of St. James—as the journal records them, where he obtained birds’ eggs and seals. Today a sailing ship leaving after dawn with the morning tide will reach those wildlife sanctuaries in the afternoon—which is the next day if one changes the date at noon, seatime, as Elizabethan seamen did.
The search had led to Drake’s Bay as it had led Davidson some 60 years before. Could it then lead to the exact location of the careening site which no one had as yet found? This was the crucial test of Guild research, for on this there was only fragmentary and seemingly contradictory information, while the Guild had shown that all these tantalizing bits of material were probably relevant. Where then was the island shown on the Hondius sketch? What of the fort? Portus is an exact term; could it be applied to Drake’s Bay? For the solution of this last and most difficult problem, the Guild insisted on positive identification of every known detail in its “Coast Pilot.”
With the kind co-operation of Mr. William Hall and other ranchers, field crews led by Matthew P. Dillingham, former Naval Reserve lieutenant, redoubled their efforts, tramping mile after mile and taking countless photographs. The effort added greatly to the members’ interest in this primitive region as they climbed cliffs, wandered along the windswept beaches, hiked the rocky shelves along the Estero shore, and studied winds, currents, tides, and storms while sea lions’ heads bobbed in the surf and deer scattered before them as in the days of Drake. Months of work, however, brought them no closer to the answer. Davidson’s rocky island and exposed beach at Point Reyes matched no requirements, while the Estero sands and currents seemed equally unsatisfactory. The determined search went on.
Suddenly, one series of photographs, taken from a bluff on the north side of a small harbor just within the entrance to Drake’s Estero on 23 November 1952, blew away the fog of 373 years. There, once again, the members looked down on the cliffs and the small valleys where the Indians had walked. As delineated on the sketch map of centuries ago, there was the cove, sheltered by its shifting sand spit, in which Golden Hind had swung to her anchors with her bow to the current. Guild members drew her outline in the sand, in fine proportion, as she appeared in the Hondius sketch. A layer of stones, now buried under sand and scrub, is probably the last trace of the little fortress encampment so clearly drawn. The small mystery island which had eluded searchers for a century appeared and disappeared. And appeared again, as it has and will for many centuries; for it is of sand, its existence determined by storm and tide. But to the patient observer, it shows itself ever and again.
The moment of discovery and the first follow-up field trips were not enough for the Guild, for there is no end to the curiosity from which knowledge comes. How was the cove found? In a search for a sheltered anchorage with fresh water, says the “Pilot,” and research into watering problems and solutions showed that small boat exploration had led Drake to the Estero entrance and that he had found the answers to the water, firewood, and careening problems there.
Is this a portus within a bay as the “Pilot” demands? Clearly it is a beautifully protected harborough within an estuary, connected to a commodious road by a clear channel whose size and depth have changed little since Cermeno described them in 1595. The tides, compiled by the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey at Guild request, were right for arrival and departure. The protected beach, with its steep drop-off into deep water and hard sands, is ideal for careening, as meticulous study of numerous maps and photographs of careening sites showed.
The Indian village mentioned was found three-quarters of an English mile to windward up the Estero as the accounts required, and men on the beach can hear those at the village mound, just as Drake could hear the Indians in that sheltered waterway away from the pounding surf outside. In this mound and several others nearby, but nowhere else, Robert Allen and his crews, in following up the work of the University of California Archeological Survey, found more of the iron spikes, Ming porcelain fragments, and other artifacts that are the only physical remains on these shores of San Agustin, Golden Hind, and the little vessel that Drake stripped and abandoned here.
Today, when one walks toward the bay from the cove, the white cliffs stand stark and clear toward the west, and “toward the sea,” thus fulfilling even in its language the requirements of the “Coast Pilot.”
As a final check on the problem as a whole, the Guild compared every other possible harbor with its “Pilot.” All satisfied some of its co-ordinates, but none fulfilled more than a few.
The Guild then submitted its findings to the Drake experts in England for impartial analysis. Their enthusiastic agreement with the Guild conclusions led to a visit by A. A. Cumming, the curator of the Drake home and museum, Buckland Abbey. Here, to his immense satisfaction, he had the opportunity to review all the findings on the ground.
On 14 June 1956, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, long the advisor and friend of the Guild, and its Honorary Chairman, addressed the monthly meeting of the California Historical Society to present the Guild’s findings. It is particularly fitting that this man who led the triumphant drive of sea power across the entire Pacific should tell the world about Francis Drake, the first man to project English sea power into that ocean.
Since that presentation, the Guild has continued to add knowledge to its chosen subject. Now the members are working to see this site preserved as the National Historic Monument to the first New England in the western world. Such a memorial would remind our generation and those to come of our maritime heritage and of that great Elizabethan seaman to whom that heritage owes so much.
“It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It would take three hundred years to rebuild a tradition.”
Admiral Sir Andrew B. Cunningham
A teacher of history at the secondary school level in Santa Rosa, California, Mr. von der Porten’s special interest is in maritime history. He has been associated with the Drake Navigators Guild for the past four years and is at present a member of the Board of Directors.