Point Reyes declared Drake landing site
HISTORY
Updated 11:00 pm, Friday, October 19, 2012
A man and his dog explore Chicken Ranch Beach on Drakes Bay in Point Reyes National Seashore.
A man and his dog explore Chicken Ranch Beach on Drakes Bay in Point Reyes National Seashore.
The federal government has quietly ended a 433-year-old historical controversy by officially recognizing a cove on the Point Reyes Peninsula as the site where Sir Francis Drake landed in 1579 and claimed California for England.
The mystery of where England's most famous and feared sea captain landed has long intrigued maritime scholars. Many of them claimed Drake landed in a cove near Point Reyes in what is now Marin County, but others cited what they said was evidence that Drake put ashore in spots ranging from San Francisco Bay to Alaska, Oregon, British Columbia or several other sites on the California coast.
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Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar apparently put the controversy to rest this week when he designated 27 national historic landmarks as "places that possess exceptional value and quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States."
Three of the 27 are in Northern California - the Drake site, the U.S. post office and Courthouse at Seventh and Mission streets in San Francisco, and the Knight's Ferry covered bridge in Stanislaus County.
The designation of the San Francisco post office and the Knight's Ferry Bridge were not controversial. But arguments about where Drake landed have been going on for years.
Need for dry dock
There is no dispute that Drake sailed north along the Pacific Coast after raiding Spanish settlements in Panama. His ship, the Golden Hind, was leaking badly, and he had to find a harbor on the unexplored coast of what is now California.
On June 17, 1579, he sailed around the hook of an unnamed point of land, and found what he thought was good harbor, protected from the westerly winds and the mist Drake called "fogges." He thought it looked like England - the Albion of ancient times.
Drake's crew made contact with local people - possibly the Miwok people who lived in the region - repaired the ship, nailed a plate of brass to a tree claiming the land for Queen Elizabeth and sailed home, around the world.
However, the description Drake and his officers left behind for future historians was somewhat vague. For years, scholars said they were sure Drake landed near Point Reyes. But over the years, other scholars and amateur historians claimed Drake landed on their coast.
Some said he landed as far north as Alaska, others said that the fair harbor that reminded him of England was San Diego.
As recently as last spring, advocates of a site at Nehalen Bay in Oregon had made their case to the National Park Service and on National Public radio. They said they had evidence - including a mysterious stone survey marker - that Drake had landed there.
Decades of lobbying
Members of the Drake Navigators Guild, a Northern California organization of historians, has been lobbying for the Point Reyes site for more than 60 years. The guild said it had more than 50 detailed clues, including 16th century reports, identifying Drakes Cove, an inlet near the larger Drakes Bay, as the site where Sir Francis Drake landed.
The guild submitted a detailed nomination that was studied by several National Park Service historians, archaeologists and scholars. They recommended unanimously that Salazar pick the Point Reyes site.
Point Reyes had other factors going for it as well. The landmark designation noted that the area near the Drake site was also the location of the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Agustin in November 1595, 16 years after Drake sailed these waters.
The galleon, which was bound from Manila in the Philippines to Acapulco in Mexico, was carrying a cargo of Chinese goods, including priceless Ming porcelain items, which were salvaged by the Indian people and traded across the San Francisco Bay Area.
The wreck of the San Agustin is the earliest known shipwreck on the West Coast of the United States, and the contact between the English crew of Drakes ship and the Indians was "the earliest cross-cultural encounter" between native California people and Europeans, the citation said.
More evidence
The Point Reyes claim, as submitted by the Drake Navigators Guild, "had more evidence than any other possible site," said John Dell'Osso, chief of interpretation at Point Reyes National Seashore.
Edward Von der Porten, president of the Drake Navigators Guild, said naming the Point Reyes site as a national historical landmark is "an important milestone in the guild's more than 60 years of historical research." Von der Porten cited the late Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, who years ago had compared the site of Drake's landing to other famous historic sites such as Roanoke, Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.
Carl Nolte is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: cnolte@sfchronicle.com