Post Scripts.
Our Voyage’s End
There are a number of issues associated with Drake’s movements and the veil of secrecy erected around them that are not part of the evidence, per se, but rather stem from the voyage, or from the misinformation associated with it. We address these offline (find a link to contact us for this info, below).
For example, one of the most important byproducts of identifying the anchorage site is that we have a detailed description of the Native people that Drake met there. Along the Oregon coast, the local population was decimated by wars and diseases following white settlement. The remaining population were gathered on two Reservations, and cultural identities began to be lost, or at least lessened. By the time anthropologists began to document the Native populations in the late 1800s, there were no survivors of the people who had lived around Whale Cove. So the Drake accounts provide the only written, detailed descriptions of their pre-contact lifestyle and culture, including aspects such as language, dances and rituals that cannot be discovered by archaeological means.
Another important bi-product of the plot is the impact it had in the early and mid 1800s, when negotiations took place between Britain and the United States about ownership of the Oregon Territory. This was the land lying to the west of the Rockies and between Russian Alaska and Spanish California. At the outset, the US delegates thought little of this area, describing it as “an arid wilderness, containing nothing worth contending for.” Surprising importance was placed on discovery and official acts of possession. The US case depended almost entirely on Robert Gray’s claiming of the land around the Columbia River in 1792. Had the truth been known that Drake’s act of possession at New Albion took place on the mid-Oregon coast, then Drake’s claim would probably have taken precedence over that of Gray, and the whole area might well have become part of British North America, or Canada as it is now called. The United States would have stopped at the Rockies, with no “sea to shining sea.” Little did the Queen know how effective and costly her Royal plot to hide Drake’s movements turn out to be.
We also examine, just for fun, the role Whale Cove played during Prohibition in the 1920-30s, when it was used by bootleggers to smuggle Canadian alcohol into Oregon. Drake would have approved of that!
Another impact was on the depiction of the American coast for over a century: California was shown on most maps in the 1700s and 1800s as an island. This was almost certainly a direct result of the misinformation surrounding Drake’s voyage. When the pilot Moreno, as described earlier, was supposedly set ashore by Drake in the Northern Strait, he walked all the way back to Mexico and told the authorities that it appeared to him that the Gulf of California seemed to run north to join the Strait where Drake had set him down. There were obviously doubts about Moreno’s claim, and when Hakluyt’s account gave 42 degrees as Drake’s most northerly movement, maps were drawn that connected the Gulf to a strait in that latitude, resulting in the Island of California, as depicted later.
In an offline overview of Drake’s movements, we examine the claims of some of the many inlets proposed as Drake's true anchorage. None of these have any real credibility, but we examine the fragile claims of Drakes Bay (California), Nehalem (Oregon) and Comox (British Columbia), and perhaps some of the others, just to show how poor all the claims are, compared to Whale Cove.
To learn more about these issues, email the Drake in Oregon Society.
‘Lost Harbor Found’
Own a copy of the publication that made this website possible.
This website is built on the work of British Historian Bob Ward, whose publication, ‘Lost Harbor Found,’ can be purchased for $10 (plus shipping for printed copies; no additional charge for emailed copies) from Mr. Ward directly. Click here to order yours! Proceeds will help fund the ongoing search for archaeological evidence of Drake’s time on the Oregon Coast.