Secret Voyage
Did Drake beat other Europeans to Alaska?
Francis Drake had plenty to crow about as he as sailed into England's Plymouth Harbor in the fall of 1580. After all, since setting out three years earlier, he had succeeded in circumnavigating the globe. But if a renegade historian is correct, the story of his accomplishment has been only partly told. In the recent book The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, Samuel Bawlf argues that Drake also explored the Alaskan coast, finding an inlet that he believed was the entrance to the Northwest Passage, a fabled trade route that would have opened up the Orient's riches to British ships.
It is no secret that upon Drake's return Queen Elizabeth ordered him and his men not to reveal the particulars of their voyage. Her fear was that Spain would fortify the route against the British Navy. But according to Bawlf, who spent seven years poring over period documents and maps, Drake couldn't keep himself from sharing his secret discoveries with cartographer friends, who recorded a chain of islands he had discovered off the coast of British Columbia and Alaska in privately published maps of the New World. "But to conceal the extent of his explorations, they placed the islands 600 miles south of their true location," says Bawlf.
Although controversial, Bawlf's theory has won some converts among historians who say a Drake landing on the coast may explain why forged steel, perhaps from knives traded by the explorer to natives, has been found in coastal Indian ruins from the same period. "All we need is one specimen that's English to prove Drake was here," says Grant Keddie, archaeology curator at the Royal British Columbia Museum.
This story appears in the February 23, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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