History Buffs Disagree on Course of Sir Francis Drake’s Wake

To reach the spot where the dashing buccaneer Francis Drake is supposed to have visited California, Capt. Raymond Aker looks no farther than Drake’s Bay, a sweep of sand and rock curled at the edge of the cold Pacific.

Not Brian Kelleher. He thinks the Englishman landed in Bodega Bay, a foggy stretch of coast about 20 miles to the north.

Nor Bob Ward. He favors Whale Cove, Oregon.

Turns out the road to Drake’s landing spot is paved with dissension. History buffs agree his small ship, the Golden Hind, pulled in somewhere on the West Coast on a cold June day in 1579. Just where is the tricky bit.

“It’s like an old mystery story or an old jigsaw puzzle, and a lot of the pieces are missing. People are trying to fit in the missing pieces,” says Ward.

This much is clear: In 1579, about 16 years before the English made their first, unsuccessful attempt to colonize America at Roanoke, N.C., Drake stopped on the Pacific coast to fix his ship. He and his crew stayed for more than five weeks, met the local Indians, built a fortification, named the region Nova Albion (New England) and put up an engraved metal plate as a monument--more about the plate later.

Loaded with Spanish booty, Drake came home a hero--but a quiet one. His crew was ordered not to talk, and accounts of the voyage are sparse, secondhand and contradictory.

“It’s very clear that a lot of documents have gone missing, and they went missing when Queen Elizabeth was still alive,” says Anthony Bliss of the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. “I think the chances of our finding them are pretty slim.”

Upon the bare bones of history, Drake enthusiasts have woven a rich tapestry of possibilities. More than a dozen sites from Southern California to Canada have been mooted and refuted in a decades-old fight that has occasioned stinging retorts, a famous fraud and, on one occasion, fisticuffs.

“No one can tell you that this spot or that spot is out of the question,” says amateur historian Oliver Seeler, who understands the pull of Drake’s wake but doesn’t think anyone yet has come up with a watertight theory. “Wherever you happen to be, you can sit there and in your mind’s eye you can see the little Golden Hind come puttering in with Drake.”

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On a soft, gray day, Kelleher, a tall, bookish nature lover, strides across Campbell Cove, a dun-colored crescent on the lip of Bodega Bay.

“This is the spot,” he says, balancing himself on squarish chunks of gray stone. “This clearly is some sort of stone wall. My theory is that what I am standing on is indeed the remnants of the fort that Drake built 400 years ago.”

How did an environmental engineer turn into a Drake detective?

Kelleher blames it on Jules Verne. If he hadn’t contracted an interest in all things maritime from reading the visionary Frenchman’s books as a youngster, perhaps he wouldn’t have been so susceptible when he visited Drake’s Bay in 1989 and found out about the controversy.

One thing led to another, and soon he was plunging into the life of Drake, a farmer’s son who became the most celebrated seaman of his age. To the Spanish, whose gold he plundered with the tacit approval of his queen, Drake was nothing but a pirate. To the English, who rejoiced in his role trouncing the Spanish armada, he was a patriot who rightfully was knighted by his queen and became Sir Francis Drake.

What is indisputable is that he was only the second man to circumnavigate the world, and unlike the first, Magellan, he made it back alive.

Kelleher’s theory, laid out in a handsome, self-published book, “Drake’s Bay: Unraveling California’s Great Maritime Mystery,” is that the most widely accepted Nova Albion latitude of 38 degrees, 30 minutes (30 nautical miles) is correct within a range of 15 miles given the techniques used at the time. Campbell Cove lies at 38 degrees, 19 minutes. Voila!

No way, says Ward. He thinks the official account was faked to confound the Spanish; the truth, he says, lies in handwritten accounts putting the landing at 44 degrees latitude, the mid-Oregon coast.

Wrong and wrong, says Aker: “The other theories really don’t have any sound substance to them.”

Aker, a retired sea captain, is a leading light in the Drake Navigators Guild, a circle of Drake enthusiasts. He champions the Drake’s Bay site about 40 miles north of San Francisco.

He’s been following Drake’s trail since the 1950s, and says Drake’s Bay has it all: location (around 38 degrees latitude) and a backdrop of chiseled cliffs that fit voyage descriptions of white banks and cliffs reminiscent of the English coast.

“There should not be any question about it,” Aker says firmly.

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The Drake dialogue can be a bit peppery.

There are members of the Bancroft Library staff who still remember the fistfight on the library steps some years ago, when “one guy on one side of the landing question literally decked somebody who was on the other side,” says Bliss.

Thousands of pages have been written on what Drake’s crew ate, what they saw, what they might have seen and what the dickens they meant by saying they saw “a multitude of a strange kind of conies.” There are Drake societies, books and, latterly, Web sites.

Interestingly, just about everyone concludes that a 16th century drawing of Drake’s harbor matches his site perfectly, albeit sometimes better when turned upside down.

The most vehement proponents have “shuffled off this mortal coil. We have had no beatings in the library recently,” Bliss reports.

Sharp words, yes.

Seeler, on the Internet, denounces the Drake Navigators Guild as “Crackpots at Drake’s Bay.”

Aker on Seeler: “He doesn’t have a position on anything except to take no position on anything.”

Ward on Aker: “It’s a shifting-sandbank theory.”

Aker on Ward’s latitude attitude: “Why on earth did they bother to do that?”

The battle has mostly been waged among a band of dedicated amateurs, although in the 1930s professionals stepped in, with disastrous results. A brass plate purported to be the one Drake left behind surfaced and was hailed by a Bancroft Library official as the real deal.

It was subsequently unmasked as a fake, most definitively a decade ago when Bliss had it put through a UC atom smasher.

“The fact that it’s 20th century rolled brass makes it very difficult to place in Drake’s hands in 1579,” Bliss observes.

Seeler, who is working on a book, “Francis Drake in Nova Albion--The Mystery Restored,” is more interested in the “what” than the “where”--the fact that Drake, unlike most European visitors to California, apparently established good relations with the Indians.

Ward is aware that some Drake sleuths get a little obsessed, and says he’s glad he isn’t one of them.

“There’s good reason for believing that I’m right and they’re all wrong,” he says with a good-natured chuckle. “They’re all chasing after the falsified anchorage location. I’ve never claimed yet that I’ve proved my theory. I’ve produced enough evidence to say that the theory is worth thorough investigating.”

Will the Drake dispute ever be settled?

Bliss is, for the most part, happy to see the old sea dog still stirring up the dust 404 years after his death--”It shows that history is real”--but “I don’t think the evidence is around to prove anything.”

Kelleher’s OK with that.

“The fun is in the pursuit,” he says. If Campbell Cove is ever proved to be the elusive landing site, “in a way it would make me sad. What really captured me is the mystery of it all.”

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On the Net:

Brian Kelleher’s site:

https://www.drakesbay.com

Oliver Seeler’s site:

https://www.mcn.org/2/oseeler/drake.htm

Bob Ward’s site:

https://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/BobWard2/

Marin Co. Historical Commission:

https://www.marinhistory.org/articles/drake.htm