 Thank you for joining Mechanics Institute for In Search of Nova Albion, a maritime detective story with Phil Williams, PhD. This event was originally held on site at Mechanics Institute in August 2023 and re-recorded here. We invite you to visit mylibrary.org to learn about all of the programs and events that we offer here on site at Mechanics Institute and online. Please enjoy this presentation by Phil Williams. I expect many of you have already heard the story of how 444 years ago Francis Drake landed somewhere near here nailing a sixpence into a brass plaque claimed California as a possession of his queen Elizabeth I. Drake named the land Nova Albion, which in Latin means New England. This was 37 years before the coast of Massachusetts was named the same. And Drake's claim ignited enthusiasm for English colonization of North America in Elizabeth's court. Within a few years of Drake's return, maps were being printed in England like this. Here you see Nova Albion on the western shore of North America, stretching eastwards from the Pacific Coast across the continent between Nova Francia and Nova Hispania to justify English possession of the Atlantic Coast. And here, Drake's friend Sir Walter Raleigh, just five years later, sent colonists to this new territory. He had named Virginia after the English Queen. So where is this important historic site, this Nova Albion? Over the last 150 years, more than 100 different amateur and professional historians have published documents claiming to have found where Drake landed. They have made arguments for places from Alaska to Baja California. The most credible ones though have centered on a location somewhere near what we now call Drake's Bay in Marin County. 11 years ago, the National Park Service designated 6,000 acres around Drake's Bay in Point Rays National Seashore as a National Historic Archaeologic District. It had determined that somewhere within this area, Drake's landing site was located, as well as many ancient Native American Archaeologic sites. Finally, in 2021, unnoticed amid the COVID epidemic, and after decades of hearings, the State of California Historic Resources Commission decided on the specific location within the National District where Drake's ship was beached. It is now an officially designated state historic landmark. My talk today describes a detective work that informed these state and federal designations. Much of it was research originally carried out or encouraged by the Drake navigators Guild. The Guild was founded in 1949 by a group of retired sea captains and researchers living in the Bay Area. Like so many others, they were intrigued by the dramatic story of Drake's voyage along the Pacific Coast, but they wanted to investigate it from a seafarers perspective. Over the years, they were supported in their work by eminent historians and prominent naval figures. Admiral Chester Nimitz was the first honorary chair of the Guild. And in his retirement, he lived on Yerba Buena Island. To locate Nova Albion, we first need to understand why Drake was here. We must immerse ourselves in late 16th century politics. In 1670, Pope Pius V had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth as a heretic and sought to depose her in favor of her cousin, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. This was an opening salvo in the religious wars that eventually consumed most of Europe. The Protestant nation, standing in the way of a resurgent Catholic counter-revolution, prosecuted most fervently by Elizabeth's ex-brother-in-law, Philip II of Spain. Elizabeth could not confront Spain directly. Philip's realm was far too powerful, global empire with population, army and resources far exceeding England's. Elizabeth covertly sponsored raiding expeditions led by daring sea captains like Drake, hoping to exploit Spain's main vulnerability, its reliance on ship-borne trade. In 1577, Francis Drake had set sail from Plymouth with five ships, ostensibly on a trading expedition to the Mediterranean. But once out of sight of land, he headed across the Atlantic to Ciaro del Fuego, then through the Straits of Magellan into the Pacific Ocean. This passage was a grueling winter voyage in uncharted waters against contrary winds. Here is Drake's ship, the Golden Hind, battling the seas off Ciaro del Fuego in what is now known as Drake's Passage. All the other ships were wrecked, abandoned or turned back, and only the Golden Hind was able to sail north into calmer weather. Now Drake could carry out his true purpose, looting Spanish colonies along the Pacific coast from Chile to Mexico. His most successful exploit was capturing this Spanish galleon, the Cacofuego, carrying much of a silver mind in Peru that year on its way to Panama and then on to Philip's treasury. After six months of plundering and now heavily laden with tons of treasure, it was time for the Golden Hind to return to England. Drake was reluctant to retrace his route back to the Straits of Magellan because he knew the Spanish were mobilizing forces to intercept him there. Instead, he hoped to take a shorter, less arduous route by heading north to find an ice-free route from the North Pacific back into the Atlantic through the Arctic Ocean. The undiscovered Northwest Passage that all his contemporaries of that time in England were convinced was somewhere there. But after seven weeks battling country northern winds and cold foggy weather in the enchanted North Pacific, Drake was forced to turn back. The Golden Hind was leaking and they were running out of provisions. There was only one other way to get back home to England sailing westward across the Pacific and around the world. Before embarking on this 25,000 mile oceanic journey, Drake knew he would first have to fix his weather on ship. So he turned south, blown along by the prevailing wind, seeking a sheltered harbour to rest, replenish and repair at the place he would call Nova Albion. 14 months later, the Golden Hind finally made it back to the English Channel after completing only the second circumnavigation of the world. There, Drake encountered the first Englishman he'd seen in three years, fisherman of the coast of Cornwall. When Drake hailed them, his first question was, does the Queen live? An affirmative meant that he was safe. He would not be held to account for his undeclared war on the Spanish Empire. He had brought back to England for Elizabeth, an immense treasure stolen from the Spanish American colonies. And his own share of it would establish him as one of the wealthiest commoners in England. He need not have worried. The Queen was alive. She knighted him and made him one of her most trusted courtiers. So Francis Drake became England's most celebrated naval hero, credited for his role in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, but frustrated Philip's invasion attempt and preserved England's independence and the survival of a protest religion in northern Europe. But for the Spanish, Drake was a villain, a heretic, and a pirate. He had stolen the gold and silver that they have looted from the wreckage of the Aztec and Incarnate's empires that their conquistadors, courtiers, and besiegers had created. The first place to look for a Nova Albion is in old maps like this, but they don't help much. The North Pacific coast remained terra incognito well into the 18th century. So for a long time, until 1846, cartographers used Nova Albion or New Albion to identify all of what we now call California. The first rigorous investigation of where Drake landed was carried out of the late 19th century by George Davidson, president of the California Academy of Sciences. Davidson, an English immigrant, had formerly been chief of the Pacific Coast Survey, responsible for the magnificent detailed charts we use today as historical references. Mount Davidson in San Francisco is named after him. He researched 17th century charts looking for the specific place Drake referred to as Portus Nova Albion. And this was the earliest one. It is a 17th century draft chart prepared in Italy by the English sea captain, Robert Dudley, whose father was the Earl of Leicester, the reputed lover of Queen Elizabeth, and a major investor in Drake's rating expedition. You can see an anchorage where depths have been recorded. The Bay of Nova Albion and an inscription by an inlet that says in Italian, the best of ports. But where is this? The rest of Dudley's coastal land is indecipherable. Drake was an experienced navigator who kept meticulous observations recorded in the Golden Hines logbook. When he returned to England, along with a golden silver stolen from the Spaniards, he gave this logbook to Queen Elizabeth. The 16th century was an era of competitive voyages of discovery. So charts and logbooks were highly praised state secret. Years later when historians were trying to write the definitive account of Drake's voyage, they had disappeared. Fortunately, Francis Fletcher, the Protestant chaplain on board the Golden Hines kept his own journal. He didn't know much about Fletcher, but he was evidently a keen observer of a flora, fauna and the people everywhere that the Golden Hines visited. His journal is the main source for most of the accounts of Drake's voyage, published in the decades after Drake's return. Drake's voyage around the world in this spectacular hall of Spanish treasure treasure had made him a celebrity throughout Western Europe. In London, we're eager to learn about his adventures. And for a few years, some of Drake's drawings of places he had visited were displayed in the hallways of a palace of Westminster. It so happened, one of Europe's most skilled cartographers, the Dutchman, Judithus Hondius, happened to be in London during that time. He came to Westminster and made sketches of what he saw posted on the walls. Some of them were printed on his best-selling chart of Drake's voyage that he published in Amsterdam in 1595. Hondius shows Drake's route around the world where he raided Spanish settlements, his attempt to sail north with the undiscovered Northwest Passage, and the approximate location where he went ashore in Nova Albion. In each of the four corners of the map are depictions of important events in a circumnavigation. The one on the lower right shows the golden hind aground on the reef in the East Indies. On the upper right and lower left show trading ports reverted in the spice islands. The fourth one on the upper left illustrates the port of Nova Albion. It was this sketch that created a puzzle, a mystery, which stimulated so many of the competing theories over the last 150 years. Everyone has tried to match it to their favourite landings for that place, usually not very persuasively. It provides no specific geographic location. Well, where did Drake think he was? The account based on Captain Fletcher's journal states, We came within 38 degrees and it pleased God to send us into a fair and good bay with a good wind to enter the same, and we fell in with a convenient and fit harbour. In the 16th century, before accurate clocks were made, it was practically impossible to determine longitude, east-west position, but comparatively easy to determine latitude. By measuring the sun angle at noon, experienced sailors like Drake could estimate how far north or south they were on the planet's surface, to within about half a degree or 35 miles. So where is 38 degrees? Well, here's a clue. San Francisco Bay's most popular yachting magazine. Does this mean Drake discovered San Francisco Bay? You might have thought so when a replica of the Golden Hines sailed into the bay in 1974. No. The entrance to the Golden Gate is perfectly concealed. Even on a fogless day, you must sail to within about five miles to see the break in the coastal hills, or notice the swift tidal currents that told you a huge estuary is here. For two centuries Spanish ships sailed by without seeing it. The Golden Gate waited to be discovered from the land in 1769 by Portola's expedition. If you were a captain of a leaking sailing ship blown by the prevailing winds along a rocky unknown coast seeking a safe harbour, you would stay several miles offshore hoping to find prominent headland behind which you would expect to find a sheltered bay, calm enough to anchor. Point Reyes is the first prominent projecting headland on the Pacific on the California coast. And this is what it looks like from out at sea. The sailing ship could easily round Point Reyes and suddenly find itself in a bay sheltered from a prevailing northwest winds and swell. We've no nearby rocks with plenty of sea room to maneuver in case of a dramatic change in the weather. Drake's Bay would be the logical place where Drake anchored. The depths here correspond well to the soundings on Captain Dudley's Italian chart. And 38 degrees is exactly the latitude of Point Reyes. Well, why did Drake call this place Nova Albion? Albion is what the ancient Greeks named the island of Britain. Albus means white. A Greek navigator's first sight of England's of England shore sailing up the English Channel would be this. And this is what Drake saw when he rounded Point Reyes. He reminded him of home, Albion. Drake's Bay is a fine summer anchorage, but not a good place to repair a wooden ship. To fix leaks in the hull and remove barnacles, seaweed and shipworm. The ship must be careened. This nautical term means unloading and beaching the ship on a high tide. Then healing are over to fully expose a bottom to be retard and repainted and repaired. This must be done in a sheltered harbor. And there was such a harbor near where Drake anchored. It is what we now call Drake's Ostero. The Ostero is unique on the Pacific coast. Since the 1960s, it has been protected against development as part of the Point Reyes National Seashore. No marinas, jetties or landfill have modified this harbor. What we see today is very similar to what it looked like four centuries ago. The first question that any seafarer would ask, could the Golden Hind have sailed into this estuary? It looks tricky, as you can see in this low tide photo. You must navigate shifting sandbanks and shallow tidal channels. Was the estuary mouth chapped deep enough for the Golden Hind to enter? Well, we know how deep the Golden Hind's hull floated in the water because later, as Honda said illustrators, she had run aground in the East Indies. And the crew measured it then as 13 feet. Then in 1595, the Ostero channel depth was measured to have been about 16 feet at high tide, not too different from what it is today. And deep enough for the Golden Hind to be brought into the estuary. Drake's visit in 1579 was also the first documented contact between the peoples of the North Pacific and the European world. This area supported a large population of indigenous people who shared a distinctive culture and language we now call Tostal Miwok. When the Golden Hind appeared, it would have been an unprecedented sight. Fletcher reports that the morning after the Golden Hind anchored, a Miwok man approached the ship in a reed canoe and performed rituals. The following days, as the crew landed the ship's stores and constructed an encampment, hundreds of Miwok came from their villages inland, assembling on the hill above. They were curious to see these strangely dressed, pale-faced visitors. This was potentially a tense situation. Drake was aware that first encounters like this could easily erupt into conflict. Earlier on the Chilean coast, when Drake's crew had landed to fill water casks, four had been killed by Arasunian Indians who mistook the English for their hated enemies, Spanish colonists. Drake succeeded in establishing friendly relations with the Miwok by exchanging gifts and by inviting all of them to come into the English camp unhindered. And he was able to clean the Golden Hind without hindrass. Over the next seven weeks, the two tribes mingled amicably, allowing plenty of opportunity for Fletcher to note the customs and artifacts of the Miwok. Many of his observations correspond with later accounts of the life of the coast Miwok before Spanish colonization. For example, he was impressed by their watertight woven reed balls, describing them as were hanging with pieces of shells of pearl and were wrought upon with matted down of feathers. Only the coast Miwok and their neighbors Vipomo made this kind of basket as shown preserved here at the Sacramento Indian Museum. Fletcher also made careful note of the flora and fauna, the geography and climate. He recorded animals the English had never seen before, like the very large and fat deer or tuli elk and a strange kind of cony or pocket gopher. However, it was the summer fog and cold northwest winds that made the dominant impression. He describes the thick mists and stinking fogs that prevented them in whole 14 days together to find the air so clear as to be able to take the height of sun or star. Point rays has the highest number of cold foggy days anywhere on the Pacific coast in July. Later, the Miwok took Drake and Fletcher to visit their villages inland in the Alema Valley. Fletcher contrasted the landscape there to the cold damp encampments on the coast. He wrote, it was far different from the shore, a goodly country and fruitful soil stored with many blessings fit for the use of man. On the last day before Drake set off on what would be a 68 day voyage across the Pacific. He needed to complete his provisioning. Fletcher recorded the Goldenhine visiting islands. Not far without the harbour where they found a plentiful store of seals and birds gathering such provisions as might competently serve a turn for a while. On a clear day, this is the view of the Feralon Islands from the hills above Drake's Bay, still abundantly populated by seals and seabirds. The latitude, the white cliffs, sheltered harbour, description of the Miwok, cold foggy weather and nearby the location of the Feralons all correlate well with Fletcher's description. But this is circumstantial evidence. What's needed for an official historic site determination is direct physical evidence, archaeological evidence. Fletcher had recorded a precise description of that brass plate Drake nailed to a post document English claim of Nova Albion. In the 1930s, a plate of brass was found by the roadside near San Quentin Prison. This was examined by famous historians, some of whom declared it genuine. It was purchased and displayed for many years at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. The guilt had mixed opinions concerning his find seemed too good to be true. In any event, the artifact had not been found in situ and could not be used as evidence of Drake's landing location. Eventually, metallurgic analysis demonstrated it was a fake. It was a real hoax perpetrated by members of E. Clampus Vitae, a secretive fraternal organization whose motto is, I believe it because it is absurd. Incredible archaeological evidence came later from an unlikely source from China. In 1565, the Spanish had established an Asian trading post in Colony in Manila. Every year, they sent a ship laden with cargers of silk, spiders and precious Chinese porcelains, eastwards back to Mexico, to be shipped onwards to Spain. Typically, these galleons followed with prevailing winds across the Pacific until they reached a California coast near Cape Mendocino and then ran south to Acapulco, keeping well away from a rocky leeward shore. The Spanish wanted to know where the mysterious Porta Nova Albion was as shown on Hondas' newly established map. It could be very useful to them as a harbor of refuge or by the English as a pirate base. In 1595, instructed Captain Semeno, commando of that year's Manila galleon, the San Augustine, to explore the North American coast on its way back to Mexico. Semeno followed a similar course to Drake's. He sailed around Point Reyes and anchored in almost the same spot in Drake's Bay 16 years later. The San Augustine carried on board a dissembled launch to enable exploration of shallow harbors like the one he saw nearby at Drake's Ostero. Semeno sent most of his crew ashore to assemble the launch there, leaving only a few on board. He didn't know that in November, the deceptively calm looking sea of lima to spit could be hit by sudden storm swells from the south. Short-handed, Semeno was unable to set sail when San Augustine's anchor cable parted and she was driven ashore and broken apart by the pounding swell. Semeno and his crew eventually completed their launch and then sailed on to Acapulco, leaving behind their cargo of precious Chinese porcelains smashed and scattered on lima to beach. In the 1950s and 60s, the guild sponsored archeological excavations of midden sites of several Miwok villages located around the shores of Drake's and his lima to Osteros. And sure enough, porcelain shards were discovered in many of them. Most of these shards had rounded edges consistent with being abraded by wave action on a beach. Many archeologists noticed that some of them were different with brighter blue color and clean sharp breaks. It seemed that these plates had been deliberately broken to create cutting edges by the Miwok who did not have metal technology. The chief curator of San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, Sarenos Shangro, was a world expert in the history and manufacture of Chinese porcelain. When he reexamined these shards in 1979, he could tell they were from two different cargos. The bright blue ones were fired in the 1570s, the dull ones in the 1590s. The cargo of the last Spanish ship captured by Drake included four heavy crates of fine Chinese porcelain. When Drake returned to England, we had a careful accounting of all his loot. The porcelains were not mentioned. It was logical that Drake would have left these heavy crates behind or given them to a Miwok because his ship was already overloaded with more valuable silver and the provisions he needed for a land voyage. So where exactly did Drake land with him? Drake's Ostero. Couldn't be far inland because the Ostero becomes too shallow. It had to be in a sheltered location where the shore was firm enough for careening. He also had to be consistent with Fletcher's description of encounters with a Miwok close to a hill and with an air shot of a nearby village. Various members of the gill spent many weekends hiking the beaches and hilltops around Drake's Ostero until one day in 1952, Matthew Dillingham took a series of panoramic photos. And later, when he developed them in his dark room, this one stood out. Dillingham's attention was the recurved sand spit with a sandbank island beyond it. It looks familiar. He took another look at Hondius' depiction of Portus Nova Albion. It dawned on him that he was looking at an oblique drawing of a landscape, not a crudely drawn chart, as all the other investigators had assumed. Dillingham realized he had been standing on the top of the bluff exactly where the original artists had sketched in 1579. Now the drawing Hondius had copied in Westminster made sense. The recurved sand spit, the shape of a shoreline, being cambered on the flat ground below the hill with a Miwok gathered, and the sheltered bay suitable for careening. The landscape difficult to recognize was a constantly changing position of the sandbanks and the channel at the mouth of Yostero. The spit and the sandbank islands erode and reform in different configurations each year. Dillingham had not only found the right spot, but was there at the right time. At a meeting of the California Historical Society in 1953, Admiral Chester Nimitz first proposed that this was the location that should be named Drake's Cove. And here is what Drake's Cove looked like today. State historic landmark number 1061. Well, I told you a story of how Nova Albion was found, but this is not the end of a story or the only story. How should the Miwok side of the story of this infant counter be told? And I believe the first thing the Miwok would say is only they can tell it. What the historic record shows is that after Drake and Semayna's visits, the Miwok's lives and culture remained largely undisturbed for another 200 years, until the Spanish missions were established in San Francisco and San Rafael. And forced conversions, disease, enslavement in the ranchers, followed by state sanctioned genocide in the 1850s, destroyed their way of life. Drake's Ostero has now been declared a wilderness area, but we shouldn't like us forget this, this area once sustained a large vibrant Miwok population and mistakenly causes to think Miwok themselves are now extinct. Descendants of surviving Miwoks have continued to live in the area, and in 2000, successfully gained federal recognition within the Federated Indians of Gran Rancharia. Other questions have no fixed answers. Why should we care where Drake landed? The answer to that changes over time. By the 17th century, the legend of Drake's voyage and his claim of Nova Albion had inspired a vision of colonization across the whole of the North America. You can see it here illustrated in America's first real estate promotional literature, a pamphlet encouraging settlers to come to Virginia in 1651. It falsely claims that Nova Albion's happy shores shown at the top can be reached in only 10 days journey from the James River. In the late 19th century, the account of the first use of the English language and the first Protestant church service in the California, provided a competing Protestant vision. The then romanticized legend of the colonizing mission of Spanish Catholic, Saint Junipero Sarah. Here, in the Episcopal Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, we see a mural depicting Chaplin Francis Fletcher preaching to Francis Drake's crew and unrealistically to represent a supplicant Miwok. In the 1920s, business promoters renamed the highway to one point raise Sir Francis Drake Boulevard to add glamour and identity for new housing development and tourism in County. And then after George Floyd's murder in 2020, across the US, activists directed protests at symbols of early European explorers and colonists. Here in the Bay Area, Saint Junipero Sarah's statue was toppled at Golden Gate Park. Christopher Columbus's statue on Telegraph Hill was dubbed with red paint and then removed. And then Francis Drake inspired sculpture on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and Green Bray was dismantled. Famous historic figures who have prominent geographic features named after him like Drake seldom have uncomplicated unblemished stories. His older cousin, John Hawkins, was the first Englishman to initiate slave trading voyages to the West Coast of Africa. He made so much money, he was knighted and given this as his coast of a coat of arms. At that time, England had no colonies of its own. And so calling these trading voyages as a misnomer, because Hawkins main purpose was piracy. Portugal then had a monopoly on English on the African slave trade Hawkins captives Portuguese ships and then sold their slave cargo to Spanish colonists and the Caribbean. And in 1566 and 1567 Hawkins appointed Drake an officer on two of these voyages. These were the first experiences of raiding expeditions beyond the shores of England. Yet among the 80 person crew who landed in Drake's Cove in 1579 were four Africans who Drake and freed from Spanish captivity, including his trusted lieutenant, who we know only as Diego from Senegal, and an African woman known as Maria. Diego, more than anyone else who had been responsible for establishing Drake's fame and fortune. Seven years earlier, Diego had escaped to the English during Drake's abortive raid on Nombre de Dios on the coast of Panama. Diego had been employed in the household of the governor of the town, and was familiar with Spanish strengths and weaknesses. With a persuaded Drake, he could help him by enabling an alliance of the English with the Simarons of Panama against their mutual enemy, Spain. The Simarons were escaped slaves who had established their own communities in the forested interior. They had successfully fought off all Spanish attempts to re-enslave them for 50 years. Drake stayed on in Panama and worked alongside the Simarons from a base that he named Fort Diego. With their assistance, he was eventually able to ambush the mule train carrying the annual shipment of Spanish silver across the smith. When Drake returned to England, he presented most of his loot to the Queen Elizabeth. Its value amounted to a substantial portion of the annual tax revenue of England. From this time on, it appears that Drake developed a respect for enslaved people. Though his main purpose was stealing Spanish property, when he encountered slaves on captured ships, he gave them the chance to return to the shore with a disarmed Spanish crew or freedom on board the Golden Hind. One of those released Spanish crew members was recorded later in an official Spanish inquiry as reporting, Negros were like brothers to the said Captain Francis. To honor Drake's success in Panama, Queen Elizabeth gave him this pendant known as Drake's Jewel. It commemorates the alliance of Drake and Diego made on behalf of the English Queen and the King of the Simarons. You can see Drake's Jewel on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. My last question. How should such an important historic event at Drake Co be explained and commemorated? In earlier times, we have different engenders and simpler ideas here. We see how Puritan's landing spot in 1620 at Plymouth Rock has literally been enshrined in a Greek temple. And at Jamestown National Historic Park, we see statues and reconstructions commemorating 1607. And this is what we see in Drake's Cove for 1579, an anchor and plaque placed here by the Royal Navy in 1954. I suggest that with a state historic landmark designation, there is now an opportunity and a need to tell a more complete story in a different way of how what happened here sparked events that led to the colonization and formation of the USA. And what this meant for the people living in North America. You don't have to go to England to experience 16th century history. It is here, just 33 miles away. And you can visit Drake's Cove by hiking eastward along the beach, about one and a half miles from the Drake's Bay visited Kenneth Patrick Visitor Center. I'd like to thank the Mechanics Institute for hosting this talk. I also want to thank Gordon Miller, a famous Canadian marine artist for permitting the use of his images, his paintings. I highly recommend this inspirational book that illustrates the maritime history of a Pacific coast. And for more information, here is the Drake Navigators Guild website and my email. Thank you.