SAS Webinar
“Sir Francis Drake Landed in California?”
by
Melissa Darby
Monday, June 12, 2023
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM PT

English Navigator and sometime pirate Francis Drake and his crew of eighty men, and one Black woman named Maria, were in peril in the early summer of 1579. Their ship, the Golden Hind, was leaking, and they were searching an uncharted coast for a safe harbor. Though Drake had captured several tons of Spanish treasure, this voyage was not a piratical adventure: Drake was on a secret mission for Queen Elizabeth. He was to explore the west coast of America to find lands to claim for England in regions beyond the possessions of any ‘Christian Prince’; and to ‘seek the strait’ — the entrance to the fabled Northwest Passage. Failing to find the passage, and in danger of sinking, they had to find a bay or harbor that fit the necessary requirements for careening a wooden ship. Sailing south, they found a ‘fair & good bay’ where they spent most of the summer. Though Drake’s logs and charts are long lost, various narratives of the landing survive. Some of the confusion about where Drake landed is because the original sources don’t agree on the location of the fair bay. So the debate has come down to what original source was considered more authoritative; the official account by Queen Elizabeth’s appointed publisher, Richard Hakluyt, who put the bay at 38° north around San Francisco or two contemporary manuscripts that describe that Drake came in on the prevailing winds and currents at about 48° north and his fair bay stood at 44° north latitude.

Melissa Darby is an award-winning historian and anthropologist, and affiliated research faculty in the Anthropology Department at Portland State University. She is principal investigator and sole proprietor of Lower Columbia Research & Archaeology. Darby has worked for over forty years in the Northwest and is a noted authority on the ethnohistory of the Native people of the lower Columbia River region. Her research on Native American cultures of the area includes important works on settlement patterns, plankhouse architecture, and plant foods used by the indigenous people of the region. She has contributed substantially to our understanding of the Native peoples and the world they inhabited prior to European colonization. Her book Thunder Go North the Hunt for Sir Francis Drake’s Fair & Good Bay was published by the University of Utah Press in 2019 and is about the mysterious and vexed question of where Francis Drake landed the Golden Hind in the summer of 1579.