Francis Drake's Course in the North Pacific, 1579

The year 1979 is to be a magical one. We will be reUving the excitement of the passage of a tiny ship called both the Pelican and the Golden Hind (also speJled Golden Hinde) and her dashing commander, Captain Francis Drake, and his crew as they visited the Pacific Coast of North America exactly tour hundred years ago this summer. We are celebrating a cuadricentennial. For over twenty years now it has been the privitege of the writer as a serious historical scholar to seek to iron out the details of the Drake voyage in our part of the globe. Such research is really detective work. At a moment's notice Kenneth Holmes, the teacher of college students, has become Sherlock Holmes, a kind of historical and geographical detective. It has been necessary to search for clues in such varied places as the Pacific Northwest, California, western Canada, and England. The sleuthing has called not only for a search in historical documents and ancient maps, but for the acquiring of knowledge of winds and weather, of ocean currents, of bays and headlands, and of the ways of windjammers in the distant past. Then, having gathered clues of all kinds in many places, there comes the time to bring them together and to seek out the answers to a number of searching questions that have bedeviled every swish of the sails. The entire project demands discipline and impartiality . as much as is possible in a human endeavor. The answers are often gnawingly tentative· hardly ever as certain as one would wish. Yet it is the task of the historian to ask the right questions and to come up with the most plausible answers.