What do you think about this?
In the summer of 1579, the English privateer Francis Drake, halfway through sailing around the world, needed to stop and repair his ship, the Golden Hind. He put in somewhere along the coast of northern California, careened his vessel on a beach, spent five weeks among the native Coast Miwok people, and claimed the whole land for England, naming it Nova Albion. Then he sailed on, and the exact spot was lost to history.
For more than four centuries, Californians have argued about where that landing was. The leading candidate is a quiet cove at Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco, now called Drakes Bay, where the pale cliffs match Drake’s own description of a coast that reminded him of England. It would make this stretch of the Bay Area the site of the first English claim on the west coast of the future United States.
The story took a strange turn in 1936, when a brass plate turned up near San Francisco Bay, supposedly the very marker Drake left behind. For decades it was celebrated as real. Then, in 1977, scientific testing proved it a modern hoax, and the mystery of the true landing site opened right back up.
Makes you wonder how a moment this important, the first English footfall on the California coast, could leave so little behind that we still cannot say for certain which beach it happened on.
A forgotten cove at Point Reyes, or somewhere along the coast we have never guessed? What do you think became of the true site of Drake’s landing?
