Pondering maritime mysteries

Historians are drawn to gaps in the historical record like bears to honey or, sometimes, like cats to mood-enhancing catnip. Why, in fall and winter 1805, did Meriwether Lewis keep no journal (as Thomas Jefferson directed him to) when he and William Clark traveled up the Missouri River and through the Rocky Mountains to search for a way to the Pacific? Was Lewis in one of his depressions? Was he afraid to tell Jefferson there was no easy water route to the great ocean?

There is no answer, only speculation. There is no answer, either, to the missing six months in Sir Francis Drake’s great voyage around the world for Queen Elizabeth I from 1577 to 1580. What was the great explorer-pirate-plunderer doing? Where was he between the time he left the Pacific coast of Mexico in 1579 and arrived in the Philippines half a year later?

No one knows, so unverifiable possibilities spring readily to mind. One of the more ingenious and agreeable of these is put forward in “The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake” by Samuel Bawlf. A British Columbian, geographer and sailor, Bawlf argues that in that uncharted time Drake went to the northwest coast of America; that is, to what is now British Columbia.

Bawlf’s argument, much simplified, is as follows: Protestant Elizabeth and her new secretary of state, Francis Walsingham, wanted to mount a more aggressive stance toward Catholic Spain than had Walsingham’s predecessor. They were especially intent on gaining a foothold in the New World, which Spain, to its great enrichment, dominated. Drake was commissioned to search for the supposed Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific and to plant a colony.

To avoid arousing the suspicions of King Philip II of Spain, no word of this project was to leak out. After Drake returned to England in triumph in 1580, no account of his voyage was published, and the very maps he used, Bawlf asserts, were altered upon publication to mislead all readers, especially the king of Spain. Thus, Bawlf says, Walsingham and the queen asserted this 16th century version of the doctrine of “national security.” At the time, world exploration and national security were vitally connected in the minds of Europe’s expansionist rulers.

The great goal of Drake’s expedition was to find the “Strait of Anian” -- the supposed Pacific entrance to the presumed Northwest Passage. By imputing to later writings (notably Richard Hakluyt’s “Principal Navigations”) discoveries and observations that were made by Drake and passed covertly along, Bawlf concludes that Drake found bays and passages off the mainland of British Columbia that led him to believe that he had indeed found the fabled gulf.

Indeed, Bawlf thinks that Drake sailed as far north as 57 degrees latitude -- to Alaska. Much of this rests on the evidence of early maps that, despite the censorship, show the northwest inclination of North America. One of these maps, Bawlf writes, “bore a closer resemblance to the actual trend of the coastline than any that would be produced for two centuries thereafter.”

Bawlf’s reading of the sketchy evidence is intense and complex. Only Drake scholars will be able to weigh justly Bawlf’s claims.

The general reader, however, can be bemused by the intricate detective work this British Columbian has undertaken.

Bawlf concludes: “Beyond any question, Sir Francis Drake’s secret voyage to the northwest coast of America must be regarded as one of the greatest in the history of global exploration.” It certainly will be, if other historians generally come to accept Bawlf’s conclusions. If not, his will have been at least a brave attempt at historical reconstruction.