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Bawlf strikes back with The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, a persuasive, 400-page volume illustrated with dozens of historical and modern maps and documented with extensive references to sources written in Drake's lifetime, all suggesting that the British admiral and pirate may indeed have travelled to areas of North America's western coast, including Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands, 200 years before the first Europeans officially explored the region.
Bawlf, geographer, sailor and former British Columbian cabinet minister, convincingly argues that Drake's ambitious around-the-world voyage was, in fact, an elaborate cover for a scouting mission to find the elusive Northwest Passage. Afraid that spies for King Phillip II of Spain might learn of the venture, which was intended to open an important trade route, Queen Elizabeth insisted that the mission remain absolutely secret.
When Drake set out with five ships from Plymouth in 1577, the official story was that they were headed to the Mediterranean. Instead, they sailed directly to the Straight of Magellan and returned almost three years later after circling the globe. "Reworking his narrative", Bawlf writes in his dense and informative prose, "[16th-century British propagandist Richard] Hakluyt eliminated all mention of a search for the northern strait and said upon departing Guatulco, Drake had taken a 'somewhat northerly' course to the Moluccas, but after encountering bitterly cold winds at latitude 42 degrees, he turned back toward land and found the harbour he called Nova Albion at 38 degrees. However, Hakluyt neglected to instruct the printers to remove the note in the margin of the old page which read 'the purpose of Sir Francis to return by the Northwest passage', and this incongruous statement was printed alongside the carefully expurgated account."
Bawlf also demonstrates how official accounts of the voyage appear to describe many coastal features exactly 10 degrees of latitude south of where they actually occur, and these same accounts leave a gap of almost six months between Drake and his company leaving Mexico and arriving in the Philippines--just long enough for a quick hop up to Alaska and back. --Deirdre Hanna, Amazon.ca
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. First Edition. On September 26, 1580, Francis Drake sailed his ship, the Golden Hinde, into Plymouth Harbor on the southwest coast of England. He had long been given up for lost, and rumors quickly circulated about where he had been on his three-year round-the-world voyage, and about the plunder he had brought home to fill Queen Elizabeth's treasury. However, a veil of secrecy was immediately imposed on the expedition: Drake's journals and charts were impounded, and his men were forbidden, on pain of death, to divulge where they had been-especially during the summer of 1579, when they had dropped from sight in the North Pacific.In hindsight, Drake's journey was arguably the greatest sea voyage of all time. In a ship barely one hundred feet long, he sailed more than 40,000 miles, much of the voyage at extraordinary speed; disrupted the Spanish Empire in the New World; encountered often hostile native peoples on four continents; narrowly escaped disaster on numerous occasions; and became the first captain to circumnavigate the globe.Samuel Bawlf masterfully recounts the drama of this extraordinary expedition within the context of England's struggle to withstand the aggression of Catholic Europe and Drake's ambition for English enterprise in the Pacific. He offers fascinating insight into life at sea in the sixteenth century-from the dangers of mutiny and the lack of knowledge about wind and current to the arduous physical challenges faced every day by Drake's men. But it is Bawlf's assertion of Drake's whereabouts in the summer of 1579 that gives his book even greater originality. From a seminal study of maps of the period, Bawlf shows with certainty that Drake sailed all the way to Alaska-much farther than anyone has heretofore imagined-thereby rewriting the history of exploration. Drake was, Bawlf claims, in search of the western entrance to the fabled Northwest Passage, at which he planned to found England's first colony, which could wrest control of the Pacific, and the wealth of the East Indies, from Spain. Drake's voyage was, in fact, far ahead of its time: another 200 years would pass before the eighteenth-century explorers of record reached the northwest coast of North America.A cast of luminous characters runs through The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: Philip II of Spain, Europe's most powerful monarch; Elizabeth's spymaster and powerful advisor, Francis Walsingham; the encyclopedic cosmographer John Dee; and Abraham Ortelius, the great Dutch mapmaker to whom Drake leaked his Pacific discoveries. In the end, though, it is Francis Drake himself who comes most fully to life through the lens of his epic voyage. Remembered most as a privateer and for his victory over the Spanish Armada, the Drake that emerges from these pages is so much more: a dynamic leader of men, a brilliant navigator and sailor, and surely one of history's most daring explorers. Seller Inventory # DADAX0802714056
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