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Francis
Drake in 48° North
Latitude;
as related by Francis Drake's young
cousin, and companion on Drake's s voyage
of circumnavigation, John
Drake, in two
depositions made in Argentina and Peru.
The two depositions, made under oath, are
genuine first-hand accounts of Drake's
voyage, and the only accounts to have
located the landing on the west coast of
North America at 48 degrees, suggesting
that Francis Drake landed and remained for
six weeks on the coast of Vancouver Island
in 1579. See
bibliographical
note
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Fra ncis
Drake's cousin John took part in the
circumnavigation at age 15 as a page. Two years
later, as captain of the forty ton Francis,
owned by Francis Drake, he deserted the ill-fated
Fenton expedition and was shipwrecked on the coast
of Brazil. John was captured by Indians, who, after
thirteen months, turned him over to the Spanish.
Anxious to tap this source of first-hand
information, they put John through the terrors of
at least two interrogations before Tribunals of
Inquisition.
Drake had entered the North Pacific, crossing the
equator for the second of four times, on March 5,
1579 as he sailed past Cape Francisco in Ecuador.
He reached Guatulco ten days later. From his
captured Spanish charts, he knew that to go further
north from there, that with the clockwise rotation
of the winds and currents of the North Pacific, he
needed to sail a Spanish course--see
map.
Here the three synoptic accounts, as translated by
Zelia Nuttall
(see biblio.),
are presented for the days covering that voyage
from Mexico to Canada, in parallel, and
verbatim. Bold text is emphasis added by
this editor.
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John Drake 1st
deposition1
March 24, 1584
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John Drake 1st deposition
(Antonio
de Herrera's 1606
recount)
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John Drake 2nd
deposition2
January 8-10, 1587
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They sail ed
out at sea always to the north-west and north-
north-west the whole of April and May until the
middle of June, from Guatulco, which lies in 15
degrees north, until they reached 48 degrees
north.
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He sailed towards the northwest and northeast
two months encountering great storms and a sky
obscured with many fogs, until he reached a
latitude of something more than 45
degrees--
see map at right, and
Bishop in bibliography
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Then they left and sailed, always on a wind, in
a north-west and north-north-westerly direction,
for a thousand leagues until they reached
forty-four degrees when the wind changed and
he went to the Californias where he
discovered land in forty-eight deg.
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--for the purpose of seeking the strait
[de los Bacallaos3]
which has been referred to [earlier in the
account].
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On their voyage they met with great storms. All
the sky was dark and full of mist. On the voyage
they saw five or six islands in 46 and 48
degrees. Captain Francis gave the land that
is situated in 48 degrees the name of New
England.
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Francis Drake on this journey, saw five or
six islands of good soil. He called one San
Bartolome, one San Jaime [James], and
another [island] which seemed to
be the largest , and the best, Nueva Albion
[New England].
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They were there a month and a half,
taking in water and wood and repairing their
ship.
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Here he remained a month and a half
repairing the two ships which he had with
him.
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There he landed and built huts and remained for
a month and a half, caulking his
vessel.
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- The commemorative statue of Drake
is one of 14 historical figures on the
Parliament Library building in
Victoria, just 2.4 crow miles west of
the landing site.
- The proposed landing site is at 48
and 41/100 degrees degrees north
latitude. See more
description below.
- On the glacially scoured Harling
Point, overlooking the Salish Sea, is
the Sahsima, a Songhees
Transformer Stone (slideshow
below).
The translated caption of the 1590
Portus Novae Albionis by Hondius reads
With appalling lacerations of their
bodies and numerous sacrifices in the
hills, the inhabitants of this port of New
Albion lamented the departure of Drake,
whom they had already twice
crowned.
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The victuals they found were mussels and sea
lions.
 During
that time many Indians came there and when they saw
the Englishmen they wept and scratched their faces
with their nails until they drew blood, as though
this were an act of homage or adoration. By signs
Captain Francis told them not to do that, for the
Englishmen were not God.
These people were peaceful and did no harm to
the English, but gave them no food. They are of the
colour of the Indians here [Peru] and are
comely. They carry bows and arrows and go
naked.people
The climate is temperate4,
more cold than hot. To all appearance it is a very
good country. Here he caulked his large ship and
left the ship he had taken in Nicaragua.5
He departed, leaving the Indians, to all
appearance, sad.
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From there they went to the islands "de los
Ladrones." On account of the great cold they
did not go further north than 48 degrees and from
the said New England they navigated to the
south-west to the islands "de los Ladrones,"
[thieves] which are in nine
degrees.
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From here he went to the Ladrones Islands
in 9 degrees...
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From here he went alone with the said ship,
taking the route to the Moluccas. On account of the
currents which hindered him he directed his course
towards China before he reached the latitude of one
and a half deg. north. From there they went to the
Island of " los Ladrones" [thieves]
in nine deg.
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 Foul
Bay, charted and named
by Capt. George Vancouver in the 1790s, is proposed
as a candidate careenage at N48 on the
"largest and best island."
Please do not disturb residents; there is
limited parking and public access to Gonzales
Beach at Foul Bay Road in the Fairfield
district of Victoria. There is also a nice general
view of the bay at the intersection of Crescent
Road and Penzance Street on Harling Point at the
Chinese Cemetery. See a Google
map of the bay and area showing Salish sites.
See news re a candidate site in
California.6
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The
people and places that the English
probably saw in those six weeks in June
and July of 1579.
In 1929 an English silver sixpence dated
1571 was found by a man digging in a
garden in Oak Bay, just 2 miles northeast
of Foul Bay. Stephen Hume,
Vancouver Sun, Thursday, February
19, 2009
strait of
juan de fuca
Post Script: Having survived
the inquisition, John Drake spent the rest
of his life in captivity in Peru.
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Notes
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1
Examined by Alonzo Vera y
Aragon, through the interpreter Juan Perez, in the
city of Santa Fe, Province of the Rio de la Plata,
March 24, 1584. Read the full account online from
bibliography below
2
The examination of John Drake by Chief
Inquisitor Don Antonio Gutierrez de Ulloa of the
Tribunal of the Inquisition at Lima, Peru during
the audiences held on the 8th, 9th and 10th days of
January 1587. Read the full account online from
bibliography below
3
The John Drake depositions confirm
that Drake returned to England via Cape Horn, thus
completing history's second  circumnavigation
of the globe. This is the view taken by popular
histories, but at the time of the voyage, because
of the secrecy maintained by Elizabeth, some had
conjectured that Drake had returned to England via
either the Northeast Passage above
th e
Promontory of Tabin (see
letter Mercator to Ortelius), or the
Northwest Passage, the conjectured Strait
of Anian, or Sebastian Cabot's Strait of
Bacalloas [codfish].
In today's much warmer climatic, the Northwest
Passage has become ice free for summer shipping for
a 40% savings in distance between Europe and Asia
than through the Suez Canal. 2010, 4 ships; 2011,
34 ships; 2012, 46 ships.
 4
John Drake: "The climate is
temporate."
June
daytime highs at Victoria, BC average
65°f, with cool nights dropping to 51°f,
which under the international Köppen climate
classification system is a salubrious
Cfb.
Contrast that with the 16C description of the
fogbound northern coast of California (see note 6
next) by Juan Rodrigues Cabrillo, who in the spring
of 1542 "met with such extreme cold" that he "had
to return south." He described the mountains along
the coast as Sierra Nevadas--snow covered
mountains. After Cabrillo died on San Miguel
Island, his 2nd in command Bartolemé Ferrelo
turned north again to perhaps as high as 43
degrees, but probably did not see Cape Mendocino.
Cape Mendocino (perhaps for Don Antonio de
Mendoza, first viceroy of New Spain) was probably
not named until 1584 by Francisco de Gali returning
from Manilla. It is so called at 45 1/2°
degrees on a map by Ortelius in 1587 and at
42° on a Molineux globe of 1592.
Sebastian Vizcaino shivered through the same
frigid weather in 1602.
In 1864 Mark Twain wrote that "the coldest winter I
ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."
In today's warmer climate, the average June/July
temperature
at Point Reyes (N38) remains a foggy 3-5
degrees colder than Vancouver Island (N48), and has
the highest annual average hours of fog on the west
coast at 1,337 hours.
5
A bark belonging to Rodrigo Tello captured at
Caño. Drake found on board two pilots headed
for Panama to take the new governor to the
Philippines, Alonzo Sanchez Colchero and Martin de
Aguirre, who were carrying navigation charts and
rutters for the Pacific [Mar del Zur].
6
On October 17. 2012, in an apparent settlement
of the long-running debate as to the location on
the northwest coast of  North
America where Drake landed in 1579, the United
States Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar signed
a document creating The Drakes Bay Historic and
Archaeological District National Historic
Landmark, which gives formal recognition to
Drakes Bay, CA as the site of first contact between
Europeans and the Coast Miwok people with the wreck
of Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeño's galleon the
San Agustin in 1595, and also as "the
most likely site" of Francis Drake's landing in
1579. This National Historic Landmark lies
within the 77,000 acre Point Reyes National
Seashore in the area of Drakes Estero and Limantour
Spit at 38 degrees north latitude. The photo here
is looking east across the bay from Pt. Reyes.
 But
in an email to the Sonoma
Press Democrat, Secretary Salazar made it
quite clear that the approved landmark
nomination by the Drake Navigators Guild "does
not address the controversy regarding
[Drake's] landing site," and the
designation "should not be interpreted as providing
a definitive resolution of the discussion." The
 designated
US National Historic Landmark at Drakes Bay is a
full 10 degrees south of the "48 degrees" sworn to
by John Drake in 1584, and repeated three years
later in 1587--a discrepancy of over 700 statute
miles!
John Drake said 48 degrees. He said it
twice. How
accurate were 16C latitude determinations?
See
here my article on Drake and
longitude.
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Bibliography (read
linked online; in full)
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Bishop, R. P., Drake's Course in the North
Pacific, British Columbia Historical Quarterly,
Vol. III, No. 3, Vancouver, BC, 1930, for an
analysis of Drake's route from Guatulco to
Vancouver Island.
Donno, Elizabeth Story, An Elizabethan in 1582;
The Diary of Richard Madox, Fellow of All
Souls, The Hakluyt Society, London, 1976
[sic, for 1974]
Fuller-Eliott-Drake, Elizabeth Douglas, Lady,
The
Family and Heirs of Sir Francis Drake,
(Vol. 1), Smith, Elder, London, 1911.
Hondius, Jodocus "Broadside"
map (c.1595), with the Portus
plan inset, is part of the collection of the
Bancroft Library of the University of California at
Berkeley, CA.
Nuttall, Zelia, New
Light on Drake, Hakluyt Society, London,
1914.
See p.24 for translations of the 1584 John Drake
deposition, and p.34 for the 1587 deposition, both
of which reside in the Archive General de Indias in
Seville, Spain).
Taylor, E. G. R., Tudor Geography;
1485-1583, Methuen & Co. LTD, London, 1930,
for background on the planning of Drake's
voyage.
Wagner, Henry R, Sir
Francis Drake's Voyage Around the World,
John Howell, San Francisco, 1926.
See p..330 for Antonio de Herrera's 1606 almost
word for word recount of John Drake's first
deposition published in his Historia General del
Mundo, and utilized three years later by
Bartolome Leonardo Argensola in his Conquista de
las islas Malucas.
 Bibliographical
note: Other than the two John Drake
depositions, there are no published accounts of
this part of the voyage that are first-hand
accounts. The others are either hearsay, or
compilations from mostly unknown contributors;
viz. the "divers others" credited on the title
page of The World Encompassed, which was
not published until 44 years after John Drake's
first deposition. The latitude of 48 as the
landing site on the northwest coast of America
is also found in the even earlier (1582) diary
of Richard Madox, chaplain of the Fenton
Expedition, but Madox credits the information
not to John Drake, but to "M[aster] Haul
[sic]." Christopher Hall had been with
all three of Frobisher's voyages, but not
Drake's, so this was a third hand account;
perhaps Hall had it from either Thomas Hood
[Whood] or William Hawkins, who had been
with Drake.
 There
are two longer accounts of Drake's voyage of
circumnavigation, Hakluyt's The Famous
Voyage (1589) and The World
Encompassed (1628), but they were compiled
much after the voyage and from many unnamed
sources--divers others. In those two
accounts, as in most of the other short
accounts, the latitude of the landing is given
at near N38 degrees, and the descriptions of the
people encountered on the Northwest coast of
North America have long ago been clearly
demonstrated to relate to those people who once
lived at that latitude on that coast, not to N48
degrees. But although their reported latitudes
of the landing sites cannot
be reconciled with the John Drake
depositions, they are fascinating accounts, and
are, like the above, presented
here in parallel.
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Copyright © mmxiij Bob
Graham
Bacallaos Exploration Society
aliquid verè redolentque
piscis
Page indexed at CGHL
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