Last Updated: Saturday 5 August 2000 OPINION
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'Compelling' discovery rewrites B.C. history: Elizabethan conspiracy hid
Francis Drake's true discovery for 400 years
Samuel Bawlf's passion for history led to startling findings that have
persuaded eminent international historians
Stephen Hume Vancouver Sun
Sir Francis Drake explored the British Columbia coast on a secret mission for
England more than 420 years ago, according to groundbreaking research by a
Saltspring Island geographer.
Samuel Bawlf had to unravel a web of state intrigues, encrypted maps and
official coverups that were entangled in the lethal jockeying for power
between Queen Elizabeth I of England and Philip II of Spain.
Experts are already describing the evidence he has assembled regarding the
expedition in 1579 as "compelling," "solid" and "significant" work that
challenges long-held assumptions about the history of European exploration on
Canada's west coast.
Drake became the most celebrated adventurer of the Elizabethan age by
circumnavigating the globe between 1578 and 1580.
Prior to his passage across the Pacific, Drake is known to have voyaged up
the west coast of North America, but it is widely accepted by historians that
he got little farther north than California before turning for home in the
fall of 1579.
Bawlf became curious about several months of Drake's time that appeared to be
unaccounted for.
"It was the tail wagging the dog," Bawlf says. "All the evidence indicated
that was the last place he stopped. The real question was, where did he go
before that?"
Bawlf, who set up B.C.'s Heritage Trust while serving as cabinet minister in
the Social Credit government that reigned from 1975 to 1986, spent half a
decade poring over ancient maps and maritime records from Drake's time at the
British Library in London.
Bawlf says Drake was in search of a western entrance to the strategically
important Northwest Passage, the eastern entrance of which was thought to
have been discovered in 1577, the year before Drake sailed from Plymouth
harbour.
Not only did Drake reach the mouth of the Stikine River where it cuts through
the Alaska Panhandle, Bawlf says, he explored the Strait of Georgia, probably
sailed into Puget Sound, found the crucial straits of the Inside Passage and
identified the most important islands in B.C.'s vast archipelago before
departing from the coast of Oregon.
And Bawlf argues that the Nova Albion that Drake claimed for Queen Elizabeth
I was never in the San Francisco Bay area, but was on the east coast of
Vancouver Island. He says one important clue actually lay in the very paucity
of published details about the journey.
When he examined what was reported, Bawlf found those details to have been
carefully contrived to conceal Drake's real whereabouts on the West Coast.
If such a coverup seems far-fetched, the Russians did precisely the same
thing to keep Vitus Bering's discoveries in western Alaska in 1741 from the
Spanish, who still claimed the entire west coast of North America.
It was in trying to reconcile fragmentary details from maps and apparent
discrepancies in the contemporary accounts that Bawlf says he discovered a
wealth of new information, including several previously unnoticed maps, that
enabled him to reconstruct Drake's hidden exploits.
Stories speculating that Drake might have visited what is now B.C. have
actually circulated on the coast for many years. The late Arthur Mayse, the
Vancouver Sun's legislature bureau chief more than 50 years ago, said Nanaimo
Indian elders told him in the mid-1920s of white visitors who pre-dated the
arrival of Spanish and British explorers by many generations.
In 1939, after studying the seasonal currents and carefully weighing the
errors in dead reckoning an Elizabethan sailor might reasonably make, Captain
R.P. Bishop concluded that Drake might have made landfall somewhere on
Vancouver Island.
Bawlf says he now has substantive evidence and after examining his research,
some experts agree that a major reappraisal of Elizabethan maritime history
now appears to be necessary.
"I thought, 'My God, this is a completely new approach which nobody has put
forth.' I was fascinated by it," said Richard Ruggles, a leading scholar in
the study of early mapmaking and exploration and the now-retired founder of
the geography department at Queen's University.
"I think it's a remarkable piece of work," Ruggles said. "His study is an
excellent piece of research. It is thorough. It's the first really detailed
study of the existing cartographic materials."
Ruggles said Bawlf's approach -- "going at it through the maps of the time"
and linking them to contemporary texts -- is something that hasn't been fully
explored before.
Francis Herbert, curator of maps for the Royal Geographical Society in London
and former president of the Society for the History of Discoveries, described
