The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580 (2003) by Samuel Bawlf

“The name Sir Francis Drake is emblazoned in history as one of England’s greatest heroes.” So writes author Samuel Bawlf in the prologue to his 2003 biography The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577–1580. Drake’s reputation on the other side of the pond has become decidedly more mixed as of late. He is one of those mostly forgotten, swashbuckling white men from long ago who got cancelled in the San Francisco Bay Area in the wake of the George Floyd riots in May 2020. Sir Francis Drake High School is San Anselmo was changed to Archie Williams High School in 2021 (Williams, a black American, was an Olympic gold medalist in track and field and longtime math teacher at Drake High) and the Sir Francis Drake Hotel was renamed The Beacon Grand in 2022. In the end, it was less about Drake’s specific actions centuries ago and more about what his legacy symbolized – making him an easy lightning rod for controversy and a target of progressive agitation.

In The Secret Voyage Bawlf seeks to place Drake in his proper historical context by illuminating, as far as the evidence allows, the explorer’s long-suppressed voyage along the North American west coast in search of the fabled Northwest Passage (known as the Strait of Anian to the British and the Strait of Bacallos to the Spanish). Along the way, Bawlf’s highly speculative theories sparked considerable controversy of their own within the academic community dedicated to the period and place during which Drake lived and explored.

The English had been looking for the Northwest Passage for a long time. In 1508 English sea captain Sebastian Cabot first explored the Canadian coast in search of the strait. In 1552 a joint stock company called the “Merchant Adventurers of England for the Discovery of Lands” (later the Muscovy Company) was established to find an alternate route to Asia through the Arctic. In 1576 Martin Frobisher returned to England claiming to have found the eastern entrance to the famed Northwest Passage on the southeastern coast of Baffin Island in present-day Nunavut, Canada – and what is now called Frobisher Bay. He also returned with some unusually heavy rock from the supposed strait that he claimed contained gold. The purported discovery of the gold ore attracted even more attention than the supposed discovery of the Northwest Passage. 

Drake left England with 164 men and five small ships on December 13, 1577. He would not return for three years. From the very beginning his voyage was cloaked in secrecy. Elizabeth, the last surviving off-spring of Henry VIII and daughter of Anne Boleyn, became Queen of England in 1558 at the age of twenty-five. Bawlf says that Elizabeth’s “vigor and personal magnetism” quickly captured her subjects’ hearts. She had three primary objectives from the start. First, avoiding war with either of the major Catholic powers – France and Spain – and if possible balancing them off against each other. Second, for almost a century England had been a mere onlooker to the spectacular exploits of the Age of Discovery and her second strategic goal was to change that. Finally, and related to the second, she was determined to find new markets and trade routes for England’s moribund spinning and weaving industry to bolster the beleaguered economy.

By the 1570s the Spanish had an estimated 160,000 Spaniards residing in the New World along with 40,000 enslaved Africans. An estimated 1.5 million native men were of tribute-paying age. The Spanish treasure fleets were officially shipping five million ducats a year from New Spain and Peru, nearly all of it in silver. An additional one to two million ducats likely was extracted annually as contraband.  

The Portuguese, meanwhile, took an entirely different approach to exploitation via imperialism and colonization. They established thriving trading centers at strategic locations – Goa, Malacca, Macau – and used thousand-ton and well-armed trading ships called carracks to facilitate trade with the Far East, especially China.

Dr. John Dee was a sixteenth-century English mathematician, astronomer, and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. He was also a devoted alchemist and occult philosopher, seeking to blend science with magic in his pursuit of hidden knowledge. Dee gave the geopolitical vision and intellectual justification that linked the Northwest Passage search with the emerging idea of a British Empire. The threat of Spain – under command of Don Juan of Austria, hero of Lepanto – invading England with ten thousand soldiers to depose Queen Elizabeth and replace her with Catholic Mary Stuart seemed all too real in 1577 and it was a primary reason that Drake’s daring voyage was approved by Whitehall.

Drake’s naval career was the stuff of legend. In addition to his exploits along the coast of Peru and Central America in 1578-79, he was the second person to lead a complete circumnavigation of the world; in 1572, in partnership with some local cimarrones (African slaves who had escaped from their masters in New Spain and banded together as outlaws), Drake led a daring raid against the Spanish treasure house of Nombre de Dios on the eastern shore of present day Panama that netted £40,000 in loot or roughly a fifth of Elizabeth’s annual revenues; in 1585-86 he sacked King Philip’s possessions in the Caribbean; in 1587 he led a devastating raid on the Spanish port of Cadiz, Drake’s “most brilliant raid,” according to the author; and, perhaps most famously of all, he played a pivotal leadership role at sea in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Everyone remarked upon “Drake’s audacity … across Protestant Europe he was proclaimed the greatest naval genius of the age.” “Friend and foe alike,” Bawlf says, “regarded him as the finest seaman and naval commander of the age.” 

Drake’s true objective, according to Bawlf, was not to circumnavigate the globe but to circumnavigate the Americas – to locate the western entrance to the Northwest Passage and return to England by sailing over the top of North America. Bawlf, writing as though unaware of Columbus or Magellan, describes Drake’s secret mission as “the most daring naval expedition and most ambitious voyage of exploration ever conceived.” Queen Elizabeth would treat the expedition’s records as a matter of national security. Maps, logs, and journals were highly classified to prevent Spain (and even rival English factions) from learning the route, the extent of his plunder, or the details of claimed territories. Much of this material has simply been lost.

Later retellings, such as Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589, 1598–1600), blurred fact and propaganda. They aimed to glorify Drake’s voyage rather than provide a reliable log, and they sometimes omitted inconvenient details. No definitive artifacts from Drake’s stay have been found on the Pacific Northwest coast. Most scholars today argue Drake landed just north of modern San Francisco Bay, around Point Reyes (Drake’s Bay). The coastline description in accounts — white cliffs, a sheltered cove, and abundant natural resources — fits this location. A minority theory places Drake as far north as Vancouver Island. Advocates cite English ambitions to push into the far North Pacific and some  geographic details that could match parts of British Columbia.

Much like Magellan’s voyage half-a-century earlier, Drake’s expedition was plagued by intrigue and drama fomented by politically well-connected senior leaders, such as Thomas Doughty, who claimed equal authority to Drake and, when he didn’t get it, threatened to go his own way. Drake would try and convict Doughty of treason at the Port St. Julian in 1578, the same location that witnessed the mutiny against Magellan fifty-eight years before. Doughty was beheaded. Drake consolidated his fleet down to three vessels (Golden Hinde, Marigold, Elizabeth) and, again like Magellan before him, ruthlessly tightened his grip of command over the expedition.

It had taken Magellan thirty-seven days to pick his way through the 363-mile long straits that now bear his name; Drake did it in just sixteen days, “by far the fastest westward passage of the strait in that century,” Bawlf says, “and probably for a long-time afterward.” Drake’s Golden Hinde became separated and proceeded alone immediately after leaving the Strait of Magellan in October 1578, following storms that destroyed or drove back the other ships. The Elizabeth returned to England in June 1579 with the shocking news of Doughty’s execution. 

Drake then boldly sailed up the coast of Chile and into Peru, catching the Spanish completely by surprise. None of the Spanish merchant ships – even those laden with small fortunes in gold and silver – were armed, nor did they sail with military escorts or enjoy the protection of regular coastal patrols by Spanish warships.

In February 1579, after capturing the treasure-laden galleon Nuestra Señora de la Concepción off present day Ecuador, Drake sailed into the Peruvian port of Callao, the harbor of Lima, which was located six miles inland and the second largest city in the Americas after Mexico City. Finding only a few ships with little treasure, he cut their cables, left them adrift, and then learned that a richly laden Spanish galleon, the Cacafuego, had recently departed north – which he immediately set off in pursuit. The capture of the Cacafuego yielded treasure valued at 693,000 pesos, including 1,300 bars of solid silver weighing twenty-six tons. The haul was so immense that Drake replaced the Golden Hinde’s ballast of gravel and stone with silver coins. Drake’s surprise raids on Valparaiso (Chile, December 1578) and Cape San Francisco (Ecuador, March 1579) netted the English raider a further 447,000 pesos worth of gold, silver and assorted jewels, plus hundreds of thousands more from other ships. The total value of Drake’s plunder may have reached 1.5 million pesos and weighed in excess of thirty tons. Officials in Madrid were stunned. English merchants were further alarmed by news of Drake’s daring and highly successful raids as one hundred English merchant ships, 2,500 British sailors, and £1 million of English property were in Spain. 

The last clearly reported sighting of Drake by Spanish officials was in March 1579 off the coast of present day Ecuador. Bawlf then skips over the details of Drake’s “secret voyage” to the Pacific Northwest and picks up the story six months later when the Golden Hinde emerged 10,000 miles away in the Moluccas in November 1579. Drake and an exhausted crew of 59 sailors returned to Plymouth on September 26, 1580. They were immediately put under an injunction to disclose any details of their voyage “on pain of death.”

Drake’s crew was awarded £14,000; Drake alone was granted £10,000, which was more than the annual budget of the Royal Navy at that time. The British investors who spent £4,000 to outfit the expedition received in the vicinity of £200,000, an internal rate of return (IRR) of nearly 270% per year for three years. Drake quickly found himself famous and at the center of court life; Bawlf says he was Queen Elizabeth’s “new star” – the object of profound admiration (and jealousy) all across Europe. He was knighted on April 4, 1581, aboard his ship Golden Hinde.

Drake was celebrated as a national hero for his role in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Yet within just six days a few weeks after the miraculous English naval victory, two events greatly weakened Drake’s standing at court. First, the Earl of Leicester – one of his most powerful patrons in London – died suddenly. Then Thomas Cavendish returned to Plymouth, having duplicated Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe from eight years earlier. Cavendish brought with him a staggering prize: an estimated one million pesos seized from a Manila galleon off the Pacific coast of Mexico. Moreover, his voyage from Mexico to England had taken only ten months, compared to Drake’s seventeen. Worse still, Cavendish claimed that Drake’s supposed discovery of Tierra del Fuego was mistaken, casting doubt on his reports of the Northwest Passage as well. Overnight, Drake’s once-dazzling achievements seemed diminished, his discoveries questionable, and his reputation unsettled. Worse was to come.

In February 1589, Drake was given command of an expedition that historian Bawlf describes as “impossibly ambitious”: a fleet of 180 ships and 17,000 men tasked with seizing Lisbon to place a new king on Portugal’s throne, while also plundering the Azores. Within three months, nearly half the force had perished from disease and malnutrition, and none of the objectives were realized. The failure, compounded by Cavendish’s triumphs and his challenges to Drake’s discoveries, drove a lasting wedge between Drake and Queen Elizabeth. The blow became final with the death of Sir Francis Walsingham, Drake’s closest ally on the Privy Council, in 1590 – an event that effectively ended the once-great naval hero’s career. Around the same time, Richard Hakluyt’s monumental compendium of English voyages and discoveries appeared, pointedly omitting Drake’s supposed discovery of the Northwest Passage or even mention of a search for the northern strait, which remained closely guarded as state secrets. 

A follow-up English expedition in 1593, launched to verify Drake’s supposed discoveries in the Pacific Northwest, ended in disaster before even reaching the Pacific. Two years later, in 1595, Drake himself died of dysentery at sea in the Caribbean. Spain’s King Philip would send a fleet with 3,500 men to fortify the Straits of Magellan and ensure that no English marauder would ever terrorize his treasure fleets along the eastern shores of the Pacific, which he considered a Spanish Lake. From that point forward, English efforts to locate the Northwest Passage were confined to approaches from the Atlantic, a pattern that persisted until James Cook’s third and final voyage nearly two centuries later, and definitively disproved by the exhaustive efforts of George Vancouver in the early nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the Privy Council continued to suppress charts and journals from the early explorations of Frobisher and Drake; kept secret for decades, they were ultimately lost in a fire in 1698. On the other side of the world, Russian expeditions under Vitus Bering reached the Aleutian Islands in 1741, and Russian fur traders pressed as far south as Alaska in the 1760s – discoveries that Moscow in turn kept secret in an effort to deter rival powers from entering the region.

Bawlf reserves the core of his argument – his controversial account of Drake’s secretive and suppressed explorations of the Pacific Northwest – for Part Four of his book, “The Northern Voyage, April to September 1579,” which does not begin until page 267. Drawing together the available evidence and a few key assumptions, Bawlf writes that “it becomes possible to reconstruct Drake’s [Northwest Passage] explorations with remarkable clarity.”

To begin with, Drake did not sail north along the California coast. Instead, he set out westward from Mexico, crossing some 1,500 miles of open Pacific before turning northwest and then northeast to make landfall somewhere along the west coast of North America. The voyage – roughly 5,000 miles in all – took forty-eight days. Bawlf contends that Drake came ashore near 50 degrees north latitude, corresponding to present-day Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Moreover, he claims that the oral traditions of local Indigenous peoples preserve accounts of his visit. This would have placed Drake’s landing as far north of the equator as the Strait of Magellan lies to the south. According to Bawlf, several distinctive geographic features described by Drake and his crew – such as Pillar Rock – correspond to identifiable landmarks in the region. He further argues that Drake explored deeply into the maze of coastal islands and inlets around modern Prince of Wales Island, reaching as far as 57 degrees north, near the entrance to Chatham Strait. The opening to the 350-mile-long, labyrinthine passage known as the Straits of Magellan is located at 52 degrees south; the close parallel in location and topography must have made a strong impression on Drake. “There can be no doubt,” Bawlf writes, “that [Drake] was convinced he had discovered the Strait of Anian.” In fact, Chatham Strait comes to a dead end 180 miles to the north at present-day Skagway, Alaska.

Bawlf argues that Drake claimed to accomplish more than merely discovering the long-sought passage over the top of North America – he also identified an ideal site for an English commercial colony, which he named Nova Albion, on the Pacific coast. According to Bawlf, this location corresponds to Comox, an estuary on Baynes Sound, about 143 miles north of present-day Victoria, British Columbia. “[Drake] could not have hoped for a more commodious place in which to establish a colony,” Bawlf writes. However, it was not deserted. There were perhaps 1,500 indigenous inhabitants in Comox when Drake arrived, with as many as 30,000 living in the vicinity of the strait. Bawlf says the Drake sailed on after only four days meeting with the natives.

Drake badly miscalculated the longitude of his future colony. Believing himself to be at 140 degrees west of Greenwich – roughly 16 degrees, or more than 700 miles (the distance between Chicago and Washington, D.C.) farther west than his actual position – Drake estimated that the distance between his Strait of Anian and Frobisher’s eastern entrance was no more than 3,000 miles.

Much of Bawlf’s argument rests on interpreting coded or “encrypted” map features, place-names, and supposed deletions or distortions (e.g. “ten degree rule” claiming he subtracted ten degrees of latitude from his actual discoveries), rather than discovering solid new logs, journals, or charted navigational data. Historians have raised doubts about whether Drake, with the ship Golden Hind, the navigational technology of the time, and the known time constraints, could realistically have made the journey Bawlf proposes — traveling up past Vancouver Island, through challenging coastal waters, and then still completing the Pacific crossing back to Asia within known time margins. They say Bawlf downplays or neglects strong counter-arguments and existing work that casts doubt on the northern hypothesis. Scholars of British Columbia historians, for instance, say that Bawlf provides only “thin shreds of evidence.” Their objections focus on insufficient primary sources, implausible navigation/timing calculations, over-interpretation of maps, and speculative conspiracy narratives that outstrip what surviving sources can reliably support.

Bawlf concludes with an encomium to Drake’s legendary voyage of 1577–1580, describing it as “one of the greatest in the history of global exploration.” He celebrates it as “a singular display of navigational skill, leadership, improvisation, and sheer tenacity unparalleled in that or any subsequent age.” Yet not all scholars share this view. In his review for BC Studies, historian Christon Archer counters that “without the existence of any journals or charts and with only crude maps to guide him, Bawlf’s conclusions are imaginary, to say the least.”