Colchero's information and the state of the ship must have decided Drake's next move after Guatulco, with Anian as an entirely compatible secondary factor.^[76] To leave New Spain for ‘China’ after mid-April would be to risk arriving at the height of the typhoon season, and he could not sail at once since the Golden Hinde, probably straining from the weight of bullion aboard, needed a full overhaul. A northern sweep would at one and the same time secure a place for thorough careening well beyond any risk of Spanish interference; fill in time until a less hazardous season for crossing the Ocean; and perhaps disclose a short and safe passage for home, should there really be a Strait of Anian near the Sierra Nevada of Ortelius and Gilbert's map. Not the least of Drake's gifts- 255 -was a flexibility of mind which enabled him to make good use of an enforced waiting-time, as on the Isthmus in 1572–3, and again now.

Even apart from the risk of interception from an aroused Acapulco, a direct course along the coast was impracticable; before reaching Guatulco, Drake had ‘notice that we shoyld be troubled with often calmes and contrary windes, if we continued neere the coast, and did not run of[f] to sea to fetch the wind.’

- 256 -From Guatulco, then, he sailed west for some 500 leagues, then swung north in a great arc to meet the coast again: the northern mirror-image of Juan Fernandez’ passage from Callao to Chile. They made a landfall on 5 June, above 42°N and perhaps as high as 48° or even Vancouver Island; the sources are confused and confusing.^[77] Like Arellano, they met with a very surprising degree of cold for the latitude and season (but then they were straight from the tierra caliente), with snow lying even on low coastal plains. Mount Olympus (47°43′N, c. 2240 metres) carries snow in June, but this scarcely suffices, nor does the tree-ring evidence for cooler and longer winters in this region and period.^[78] It seems likely that dense mists, or the great dunes which blanket the coast in many places, were mistaken for snow. As evidence for a landfall well to the north, Eva Taylor stressed contemporary reference to ‘that part of America … running on continually North-west, as if it went directly to join with Asia’; but so tangled is the argument that even that formidable lady was willing to defer to the authority of Wagner, who drew an opposite conclusion from the same text.^[79] The weight of much discussion is for Cape Arago (Oregon) in 43°20′N.

If there is some doubt as to the landfall, the case is even worse as to the precise site where Drake careened the Golden Hinde; the polemic is almost a minor industry in the Bay area, and an adequate review would fill a monograph. The linguistic, cultural, and archaeological evidence (which includes undoubted relics, such as Ming porcelain, of Cermeño's camp at Drake's Bay in 1595) establishes that the landing was in the territory of the Coast Miwok Indians (Figure 23, “NOVA ALBION. ”), so that basically the choice lies between Bodega, Drake's, and San Francisco Bays, though Wagner favoured Trinidad Bay, north of the Miwok area. This has scarcely anything to recommend it except his own authority, and he pretty conclusively demolishes Bodega Bay. As he says, it was until recently almost an article of local faith that Drake's Bay was precisely what its name asserts, but there is now a party for San Francisco Bay itself. The protagonists handle their cases with such skill and detail that the outsider finds himself in a sad state of alternating conviction. Sub specie aeternitatis, it does not matter much; but ‘There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not’.^[80]

Everything has been pressed into service, literally from lettuces to coneys, and the texts have been analysed with a close exegesis usually reserved for Holy Writ: inferences have even been drawn from the imputed attitudes and gestures of engraved human figures on the Hondius map, which in the original are under 3mm high and when enlarged not 10mm. But it is at least agreed on all hands (except, perversely, by Wagner) that the ‘white bancks and cliffes, which lie towards the sea’ and led Drake to call the country Nova Albion, are those inside Point Reyes, at Drake's Bay, which indeed bear a striking resemblance to the Seven Sisters near Beachy Head; but it does not follow that this was the actual careening place. A. S. Oko made out a strong navigational case that it was so, showing for example how easily a small ship might miss the Golden Gate; he- 257 -is implicitly supported by Alan Villiers,^[81] and the views of practical seamen are entitled to respect.

Any identification, however, must come to terms with the tiny (64×44mm) but quite detailed inset of ‘Portus Novae Albionis’ on the 1593 Hondius map; as Power has shown, this may derive from Drake's own record (known to have been presented to the Queen), since in 1589 Hondius was in close association with Thomas Talbot, keeper of the records in the Tower. It is true that the main map shows Drake's course inaccurately—there is no call shown between Mocha and Callao, nor at Guatulco, and the track is laid down close to the Californian coast; only the latter error could perhaps be ascribed to ‘security’. But the track may be conventionalised, while the inset is circumstantially detailed, and Aker shows that the other insets have a high degree of specificity. It is true that when he has to get rid of a crux, he rather weakens the argument by remarking that ‘Hondius did not really understand what he had engraved’;^[82] but the insets do represent real places, and it seems extreme to set the Portus map aside altogether.

Accepting it as evidence, the crux is the island lying parallel to the ‘Portus Peninsula’, which cannot be reconciled with any existing claimant except within San Francisco Bay itself. To the Drake Navigators Guild, the solution is found in regarding the island as a temporary but recurrent sand spit formed in Drake's Estero, the inlet within the Bay.^[83] This may be so, but obviously it can only be hypothesis that the Estero had this conformation in 1579, and while the geomorphological argument is persuasive, it is not the absolute demonstration that the Guild rather dogmatically asserts. The Guild's arguments in other respects—notably the ecological—are much less convincing, and the problem is not to be solved on one criterion only. Above all, perhaps, much archaeological digging in and around Drake's Bay has produced nothing that can with probability be referred to Drake's visit, but plenty to Cermeño's; and yet the Golden Hinde’s cargo must have been piled on the beach, and some eighty men ashore for over seven weeks where the Guild claims to have found the probable careening basin. (This argument is not available against San Francisco Bay sites, since these are built over.)

For Power, the island can be matched by Belvedere Island, which lies in the right relation to the Tiburon Peninsula: the problem now becomes one of accounting for the omission of Angel Island, off the tip of Tiburon, and of San Pablo Strait. Power gets over this by regarding the inset as a ‘cartographic view’ from Angel Island itself, rather than a map in the strict sense—a much more likely sixteenth century device than Fletcher's bifocal scale for Cape Horn. In my opinion Power deals successfully with the navigational problem, always regarded as a strong point for Drake's Bay, and is very convincing on the ecological side.

Either case can be made without appeal to the famous Plate of Brass (or lead, in one contemporary account) with an inserted sixpence, set up to record Drake's Act of Possession. Such a plate was found near the Tiburon Peninsula in 1936; it has been claimed that it was first found near Drake's Bay in 1933; much- 258 -ink has been wasted on this side-issue. Some Californian scholars had almost invited a hoax, and there was initially an odd reluctance to submit the Plate to test; nor is it true, as has been claimed, that the metallurgical analysis when made was not challenged; challenges were made but brushed aside or ignored.^[84] The orthography and style of the inscription have been generally suspect to experts in these matters, and Wagner has shown that lead and not brass was used for such plates, for good reasons.^[85] Altogether, pending a metallurgical analysis with more refined techniques than were available in the 1930s, the Plate must be regarded with much suspicion; but even were it genuine, so portable an object, unless it had been found in a definite archaeological context, can say nothing as to the actual site of Drake's camp. As to that, the weight of evidence and argument, particularly as presented by Power, seems to me to point, though not strongly, to San Francisco Bay; but see p. 261.

A question of much more import than ‘this bay or that bay?’ is that of the significance to be granted to Drake's formal acceptance from the Miwok Indians of sovereignty over their country, ‘the King and diuers others [having] made seuerall orations, or rather, indeed, if we had understood them, supplications, that hee would take the Prouince and kingdome into his hand.’ To British students, this has seemed simple opportunism; as we have seen, the Draft Plan does not support any premeditated scheme of colonisation, and Zelia Nuttall mistook a wish that the country might ‘have layen so fitly for her maiesty to enjoy … that the riches and treasures thereof … might with as great conuenciency be transported’ to England into a statement that they were to be so transported.^[86] Any tentatives towards a follow-up of Drake's action were forgotten; even when Oregon was disputed between the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1840s, ‘Drake's discovery appeared out of the haze again for a brief moment’, but Britain had debarred herself from pressing any claim based upon it, because since the Nootka affair in 1790 (if not since Henry VII) she had insisted on occupation as well as discovery being necessary to secure title.^[87] Recently, however, the claim that Drake was in effect the founder of British dominion in North America has been revived, in a more sophisticated style than Nuttall's hero-worshipping rhetoric.

Like Nuttall, proponents of this view attach a rather literal significance to the dotted lines between Nova Albio [sic], Nova Hispanie, and Nova France on maps such as the French version of ‘La Herdike Enterprinse’ (Figure Plate XVIII, “DRAKE IN THE PACIFIC: ‘LA HERDIKE ENTERPRINSE’. ”). Setting aside all doubts as to the date of this document,^[88] reputedly of the 1580s, and the undoubted fact that though allegedly ‘veuee et corige par le dict siegneur drack’ it shows his track wrongly, those who assert that it represents a conscious claim for English dominion from sea to sea should explain why the Atlantic frontage claimed between New France and New Spain is squeezed into the peninsula of Florida, where the Spaniards had founded St Augustine in 1565, and slaughtered a Huguenot colony: a region surely in the obedience of that- 259 -Christian Prince Philip II. More weight should be given, not only in this case, to J. A. Williamson's words:

Nevertheless, these lines of dots presumably did not spring out of thin air, they

- 260 -must have had some rationale, even if a distorted one, and the question cannot be resolved by a mere denial of significance.

To begin with, Power points out that Drake's patron Hatton was also the patron of John Dee, who was undoubtedly a protagonist of a British Empire—indeed, it was he who coined this term which was to have so long a history. In 1577 Dee published an Arte of Navigation with a highly symbolic title page showing Elizabeth as patroness of a fleet of five ships prepared for overseas enterprise. In the same year Richard Willes issued his History of Travayle with an epistle to Anne, Countess of Bedford, whose husband was none other than Drake's godfather. Both these books were clearly propaganda for expansion, and their publication may well have some relation to Drake's enterprise, then on the stocks. It is also perhaps significant that immediately after Drake's return, according to William Camden, Elizabeth responded to Mendoza's protests by asserting, very forthrightly, the right not only to trade in the New World, but to ‘transport colonies thither’.^[90]

Probably more significant is a manuscript map in the Mellon Library, similar to La Herdike Enterprinse and possibly derived from a great wall map known to have existed in Whitehall Palace. This shows the Nova Albion/Nova Hispania boundary and a very suggestive distribution of banners of St George, which are placed on Meta Incognita (Baffin Land), Virginia, the Straits of Magellan, and Nova Albion. This recalls Grenville's project with its desire to secure an English foothold on both the northern and the southern approaches to the Mar del Sur: it will be noted that two of Drake's Acts of Possession fit in with Grenville's ideas. This certainly suggests a conscious rather than an absent-minded claim to Empire.^[91]

Finally there is the remarkable poem De Navigatione…Humfredi Gilberti…Carmen (1582) by the young Hungarian scholar Stephen Parmenius, who was drowned off Newfoundland on Gilbert's 1583 voyage.^[92] This is a most high-spirited call for English (and Protestant) colonisation, and Power very plausibly argues that the ‘Speech of America’ is an imagined plea by the Miwoks for the protection promised by Drake. The one brief mention of Drake himself in the poem is conventional, but notable for its early date, when publicity about the voyage was seemingly still not favoured; and a poem of 1582 is of course not evidence that Drake himself had any definite ideas of a continent-spanning dominion when he proclaimed Nova Albion. It might also be said that the ‘America’ of the poem is merely one of the standard rhetorical personifications so dear to Renaissance poets; but the phrasing seems too explicit for this:

In any case, Drake's Californian activities, even were they merely opportunistic, were intensely interesting to Gilbert, Hakluyt, and others of the ‘forward school’- 261 -with whom Parmenius was on intimate terms; and indeed in Hakluyt's 1600 reprint of the poem there is a marginal note ‘Nova Albion’ at the beginning of America's appeal.^[93]

It is more difficult, however, to trace any continuity of this incipient imperial idea. It is all very well to cite the seventeenth century charters to English colonisers of America, running ‘from sea to sea’; but there is the difficulty that these do not begin until after 1606.^[94] It is probably too much to claim with Power that the maps and the poem amount to ‘a continental claim, [a] concept [which] was later identified by historians as a manifest destiny’; but even the hard-headed Wagner admitted that ‘If a navigable Northwest Passage had been found by John Davis in his voyages after 1585, perhaps there would be another story to tell’ of Nova Albion.^[95] At the least we have here a new and challenging view on an old question, a new field for enquiry which might well lead to the revision of some received ideas.

[Although it is now generally accepted that the Plate of Brass is most likely a hoax, a Brazen Plate, controversy is not yet dead. Robert Power has issued A Study of Two Historic Maps (Nut Tree 1978), in which he abandons his original idea that the Hondius ‘Portus Novae Albionis’ was a ‘perspective rendering’ in favour of its being a properly surveyed ‘planimetric map’. Computerised comparisons of distances and bearings on this inset and on a chart of San Francisco Bay (1856) show a close fit, although at one point it is necessary to invoke two separate maps and an erroneous scale reduction of one of them when they were put together. There remains the very difficult crux that Angel Island is omitted on the ‘Portus’, and San Pablo Strait is crossed by a shoreline. One cannot see why ‘these points are no longer material to the identification’.

Admitting the likelihood of some lingering subjectivity in one's personal choice, I now feel inclined to attach rather more weight to the Drake Navigators Guild geomorphological argument, admittedly not a conclusive demonstration, as indicating the probable solution.]