Last Updated: Saturday 5 August 2000 OPINION ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- '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 Bawlf's investigation as both wide and deep. "A lot of the material is groundbreaking," said Herbert. "In that others agree that Drake could well have had good reason to voyage farther north to B.C. and Alaska, I am sufficiently convinced of his arguments." Dr. Marcel van den Broecke, an expert on the maps of Ortelius, whose atlas became the best selling book of the late Elizabethan period, said from the Netherlands that Bawlf's findings have already caused him to reappraise the extent of Drake's voyages in the Pacific Van den Broecke, who wrote the standard inventory of Ortelius' atlas maps, finding 30 "new" copies in the process, said that by combining a study of political documents with the cartographic evidence, Bawlf has produced important new insights. "This is quality research," van den Broecke said. "I read the entire manuscript and became convinced of its significance." He said Bawlf's work explains a number of place names on Ortelius's work. "It is hard to underestimate the significance of these names appearing at the places mentioned for the first time, explaining as Mr. Bawlf's research does, why they appear at the time they did, at the location they did and with the names they received, " van den Broecke said. Part of Bawlf's research involved finding the key that enabled him to decipher early Elizabethan maps, which had been drawn up as cryptograms to prevent their strategically valuable contents from falling into the hands of spies sent by King Philip II of Spain, England's chief rival for maritime power. He analyzed handwriting to determine the most likely authors of previously unidentified documents and employed spectral photography to detect hidden changes to manuscripts. "Whenever possible, I went back to primary documents," Bawlf said. "A lot of the material had no provenance. People didn't know who had made the maps. I had to determine all that. I wound up with an enormous jigsaw puzzle." He also examined Spanish intelligence reports intercepted by Elizabeth's spy-master, Sir Francis Walsingham, the testimony of English captives questioned by the dreaded Spanish Inquisition, and the work of early mapmakers in Holland and France. Next, he looked at archaeological evidence from Oregon and Washington and finally began comparing the great landmarks noted on the old maps with the actual topography of the coast. "What you wind up with is an incredible secret enterprise that was covered up so effectively for 15 years [after Drake's voyage] that when the principals died [Walsingham in 1590, Drake in 1596, Philip in 1598 and Elizabeth in 1603] it was forgotten for 400 years," Bawlf says. His assertion -- made in a research document that runs to more than 300 pages -- seems certain to cause an uproar in the rarified world of Elizabethan maritime history. American scholars have long insisted that Drake never got farther north than the coast of Oregon and that he landed to careen his ship near Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco Bay. Bawlf says he hopes nationalism won't intrude into the discussion. "I want people regardless of nationality to appreciate the historical significance of these events," he said. But some leading scholars say Bawlf's research already poses a major challenge to the conventional wisdom about Drake -- although all agree that more work now needs to be done. "His work is very good," said Robin Winks, the Townsend Professor of History at Yale University and a former chair of the U.S. national parks historic sites advisory board. "It's a considerable manuscript," he said from Oxford University where he has been teaching. "I read it with a critical eye. I think it's a very convincing study and a very significant work." "We think his research is top notch," said James Thomson, historical archaeologist for the U.S. national parks service, who is based in Seattle and responsible for the Pacific Northwest. "He certainly has the backing of some very heavy artillery on the scholarly front. When Professor Winks calls, we usually listen." "It will be a very significant historical and geographic aspect of British Columbia and Canadian history," said Ruggles, who himself did extensive work on the early mapping of the Canadian west and recently provided a chapter on cartography and the Northwest Passage for the book Meta Incognita, a major multi-disciplinary study of Frobisher's three expeditions to the Canadian Arctic beginning in 1576. "I really believe that his approach is correct. He has done really solid research. It changed my whole approach to understanding the past historical aspect of exploration [on the west coast of North America]. "I had the opinion that Drake had gone to 48 degrees and Nova Albion was in California. I am now convinced that Drake travelled to southeast Alaska, came down the Inside Passage and that Nova Albion is on Vancouver Island," Ruggles said. "More work has to be done, of course, but if Nova Albion was up there at Courtenay, the whole historical understanding of the coast changes. This is going to catch a lot of people's attention." "I think it's significant," said James Delgado of the Vancouver Maritime Museum, just before departing for the Arctic to study the lost Franklin expedition of 1845. "What's compelling for me is the methodical research. The book has some compelling arguments that Drake was in these latitudes. If Sam is correct, we would have something that would rival the discoveries of the [presence of] Vikings and Frobisher on the east coast." That's a point that Ruggles also makes. Those who are skeptical that evidence should come to light so long after the fact should remember that discoveries confirming the visits of Vikings and Frobisher to the Atlantic coast only began to be made in the 1960s. "He's presented an excellent case for showing that Drake came much farther north than was previously believed," said Grant Keddie, curator of archaeology for the Royal B.C. Museum. "It's very significant. It opens up a whole new window of research that needs to be done in the history of this province." Crucial proof emerged from Bawlf's meticulous tracking of the timing by which details about the west coast of America mysteriously became available to a select group of mapmakers associated with Drake during a period when there was no known exploration. "Before Drake, the maps were bland and featureless," observed Keddie. "After Drake, all of these little bays, headlands, rivers and place names appear. That has to be coming from somewhere. So the question he [Bawlf] addressed was: 'Where is that information coming from? 'What evidence do we have from the maps?'" Ruggles said these details show the mapmakers were suddenly made aware of a series of islands off the West Coast. "In retrospect, it's so obvious," he says. "The only place there are islands on the West Coast is north of the 48th parallel. Even if you took the largest island away, there is still the distinctive indentation on the mainland into which Vancouver Island fits." In his study, Bawlf also points to the mystery of 28 steel tools found in an Indian house buried by a mudslide at Ozette on the outer coast of Washington long before the arrival of English and Spanish explorers. It has been speculated that the metal is of Japanese origin, perhaps salvaged from a wrecked junk blown across the Pacific in a typhoon. Bawlf argues it is equally possible Drake's expedition would offer metal trade items to earn the goodwill of local inhabitants. Herbert said Bawlf's work lays the groundwork for more ethnographical and archaeological research that might help corroborate the documentary evidence. Keddie said a metallurgist will begin next week an attempt to determine the provenance of iron found in archaeological sites on the Northwest Coast but previously assumed to have originated with the Hudson Bay Company. 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