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?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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