don't know what went wrong: Drake article re-send.

[Mike Cleven]

That's really weird; I know I saw the text in the compose window; but
there's nothing to be seen except egroups' credit card ad.  Let's try
this again, and I'll tidy up the space-formatting that happened from
copy-pasting from the sunwebpage (www.vancouversun.com) where I got this
from.

Headline: Honour historic Drake mission: expert

Subheadline: A U.S. advisor says parks officials want to establish sites
to mark the secret
mission.

Author:  Stephen Hume Vancouver Sun


The uncovering of a secret mission by Sir Francis Drake to chart the
northwest coast of North America in
 1579 has sparked interest in a string of joint American-Canadian
international historic sites commemorating the event.

"We've got high potential for a very important addition to both national
parks systems or an international park," said Robin Winks, an adviser to
the U.S. national park service and former chairman of the U.S. historic
sites board who is now teaching at Oxford University.

"The American national parks people are quite interested."

Canadian and British Columbia parks officials could not be reached for
comment on the holiday weekend.

The extent of Drake's voyage of discovery up the B.C. coast was
disclosed in Saturday's Vancouver Sun by Saltspring Island geographer
Samuel Bawlf.

He spent five years researching English and Spanish maps and documents
from the Elizabethan era at the British Library in London.

The evidence shows that Drake was searching for a western entrance to
the Northwest Passage thought to have been discovered by Martin
Frobisher a year earlier. Drake's findings were of such strategic
importance that they were concealed to prevent them falling into the
hands of the Spanish, who were then trying to topple Queen Elizabeth I
from the throne and destroy England as a rising maritime power.  The
coverup was so effective that when the principals died 15 years later,
Drake's journey remained hidden for more than 420 years.

Eminent international scholars have described Bawlf's work as
groundbreaking and of sufficient significance to require a reappraisal
of Elizabethan maritime history in the Pacific.

Until now, the first known European explorers to arrive on the West
Coast were thought to be Juan Perez and James Cook, about 200 years
after Drake.

Bawlf, who was the cabinet minister responsible for parks in the Social
Credit government
of premier Bill Bennett, said Winks first discussed the subject of an
historic park some months ago when the
Yale University history professor reviewed his research manuscript.

"Just how do we commemorate this thing?"  Bawlf said. "We have
parliament buildings that are already draped with Cook and Vancouver.  I
envisaged a linear park system noting the historic sites and points
where Drake landed on the coast in the U.S. and Canada.

Some, of course, would be simply historic monuments at the most remote
areas like Cape Cook or Cape Chacon."

But he said there might be the possibility of an international park, for
example, at the Stikine River, the final 20 kilometres of which passes
from B.C. into Alaska. The mouth of the Stikine appears to be the most
northerly point identified on the Elizabethan maps.

Bawlf has had experience in developing international parks before. As a
minister for the B.C. government he helped negotiate the establishment
of a joint historic park to commemorate the Klondike gold rush.  It now
covers the route stampeders followed from Skagway, Alaska, over B.C.'s
Chilkoot and White passes to the Yukon River system.

There are other precedents for international parks and historic
monuments.  Waterton Lakes National Park in southern Alberta is twinned
with Glacier National Park in Montana to form an international peace
park. And,
of course, there is the popular 20-hectare park at the Peace Arch on the
Canada-U.S. border near White Rock, which is jointly managed by B.C. and
Washington.

Meanwhile, Bawlf's discoveries have triggered a flurry of interest among
American, British and
Canadian historians and archeologists regarding further research into
Drake's voyage and the possibility of finding physical evidence.

"There's a wealth of archival material still to be found," Bawlf says.
For example, Napoleon seized many Spanish documents and removed them to
Paris, where they remained largely unnoticed until the 1940s, when
they were returned to Madrid.

It was in those archives that scholars Bernard Allaire and Donald
Hogarth recently found a coded message from a Spanish spy planted on
Frobisher's mission to the Northwest Passage in 1576.

"I wish I were 15 years younger,"  said Richard Ruggles, professor
emeritus at Queen's University and one of Canada's leading experts on
early maps and exploration. "I'd love to get into this question of
Elizabethan
political geography and the search for routes into the Pacific."

As for the search for physical evidence, there's a growing urgency to
the process, Bawlf says.

Some of the best sites are already threatened by highways and real
estate development.

"We are going to work with him very closely," said Jim Thomson, in
charge of archeological history in the Columbia Cascades region for the
U.S. national park service.

"His work, if it proves correct -- well, it will influence the history
of all America and it will impact on our parks in California."

Thomson said one priority would be to try to do a satellite-based global
positioning survey and apply it to evidence suggesting an attempt to
find longitude occurred at Neahkahnie Bay in Oregon long before European
settlers arrived.

Bawlf observed that while finding his position of longitude would have
been crucial for Drake, at the time there there was no way of doing so
at sea. However, a contemporary named William Bourne had just developed
a
theoretical procedure for finding longitude from land.

 A pattern of siting cairns and rocks engraved with navigational symbols
found at Neahkahnie Bay are identical to Bourne's rudimentary procedure,
Bawlf found.

 "Whether it was Drake or not, something to do with determining position
occurred there,"  Thomson said. "Those rocks and inscriptions predate
the white settlement."

 Stephanie Toothman, the Seattle-based regional coordinator of cultural
resources for the U.S. national park service, confirmed in a March 10
letter to Bawlf that internal recommendations to provide funding for
future research had been made on the basis of Thomson's evaluation.

"Jim Thomson has carefully read and analyzed the document and has
privately discussed many of your theses with several prominent experts
within the fields of cartography, history and archaeology," Toothman
said.

"Jim has convinced the National Park Service's chief historian, Dr.
Dwight Pithcaithey, and me that your proposal that Drake ventured far
north of what is conventionally accepted has considerable merit and he
recommends that our agency commit funds to assist you in pursuing
certain goals to further document
your thesis."

She said funds were being requested from the U.S. park service's
national historic landmarks program as well as other grants.

Among the research the Americans would like to see continued are
photographic investigations of ancient documents that might reveal more
obscured, changed or erased notations and a major review of
archeological
collections from the northwest coast in an attempt to identify any 16th
century artifacts that might be
related to Drake's voyages.

Of particular interest would be a new investigation of an Oregon State
University engineering report on the
Neahkahnie Bay site that also suggests that an archaic survey might have
occurred there. This site has
already been damaged by a highway.

Relating these findings to new cartographic evidence might help
determine whether the cairns and inscriptions are the remnants of an
attempted longitudinal survey by Drake.

In addition, the Americans would like to use side scan sonar and
underwater magnetometry to see if remains can be found at Whale Cove in
Oregon of any Elizabethan ballast that would have been jettisoned when
Drake
careened his ship.

The Elizabethan captain would likely have taken on ballast in Central
America and if rocks of that geological origin were identified it would
support the theory that he stopped at Whale Cove.

They would also like to see terrestrial magnetometry and ground
penetrating radar used to survey the site of a long-abandoned Indian
village reported in the immediate area to see if any 16th century
artifacts are present.

Several of the ancient Indian pit-dwellings, perhaps even those where
Drake's men stayed, are included in a site that has recently been
offered for public sale, Bawlf said.

Finally, both Bawlf and the Americans would like to see a conference of
distinguished scholars to discuss the results of the investigations. A
similar academic convention was convened to discuss Frobisher's
expeditions to the Arctic and proved highly successful.

Bawlf said much work also needs to be done re-evaluating the provenance
of iron objects found already in the possession of aboriginal peoples by
early explorers.

For example, when Perez first sighted the Queen Charlotte Islands in
1774, he noted that to his great surprise the Haida who came out to
greet his ship had a harpoon with an iron head.

"The British Museum has in its collection two iron knives that Captain
Cook found among the Nootka in 1778," Bawlf said, "And there's a
15th-century coin that was found on Quadra Island a couple of feet
underground
in somebody's garden."

He said the British Museum, the Royal B.C. Museum and the Makah tribe
are now discussing a cooperative research project to do some
metallurgical analysis of steel tools found in a buried 16th-century
house site
at Ozette.

Later this week the Royal B.C. Museum will begin analysing some early
iron objects in its own collections that were previously assumed to be
derived from the Hudson's Bay Company.


-30- (end of article)

Just wanted to add that as far as I rememeber the Frobisher conference
enjoyed the enthusiastic patronage of the Canadian federal government
and the Newfoundland and Labrador provincial government (I'm not too
sure about the Quebec provincial government).  The Canuck feds are
conspicuous in the above story by their absence, with most federal-level
initiatives apparently coming from the Boston Illahee Hyas Pepah House
kopa Ahnkuttie Illahee; I may be being too cynical but I suspect that
Hume's article and its front page placement by the Sun's editors are
intended to put the burr under the federal government to support this
research to the same degree the Americans are prepared to.

By the way, if you were to do a web search on Nova Albion and Drake,
you'd come up with a lot of websites that hinge upon the theory/dogma
that Drake never made it north of Point Reyes CA, and the defenders of
that theory have pooh-poohed all other northward claims quite avidly,
both on the Web and in UseNet; it'll be interesting to watch their
revisions and retractions - or retrenchments - in the next while.

Hume glossed over a remaining boundary dispute vis a vis the Stikine;
twenty miles of the river are now in the US; that's because of
siltation.  The boundary is supposed to be the river's _mouth_; today it
is where the estuary was put 100 years ago, at the time of the
Rooseveltian campaign to seize BC if Britain didn't give the US the
boundary they wanted.  It was then, too, that the various theories about
Drake surfaced and were in contention, with Britain/Canada trying to
establish exploratory primacy.  Any old shaggy dog story will do when
the Empiah's at stake.

And concerning cultural imperialism here, I'd like to head things off at
the post (if not whip them up) by saying that I know that there may
likely be
some knee-jerk reactions to this story that "smelly European explorers
in small boats
aren't important [to native people's interests]; that money should be
spent on repairing the damages of colonialism, not celebrating its
onset".  Perhaps so, but for one thing such research is important to
non-natives, who do actually live "here" and do actually have their own
history (and a right to it), and Drake _was_ a bona fide
historically-important person in European history as well as of maritime
exploration; and exploration it was, although you can claim they were
lost and lonely if you like.  The other point here is that (as with
Vancouver, Cook, and the later Spaniards) the natives of the day
welcomed Drake - and Drake himself, in particular amongst all the
captains, seems to have been quite civilized towards them (and also a
better and much flashier dresser; lots of velvet, silk and ruff,
compared with the frock coats and stockings of Vancouver and Quadra).
It's one thing to say "he represents the evils that follow" and another
to recognize that he meant no harm, and that natives in those times did
not repel him; in fact, they seem to have picked up a lot of valuable
iron goods, if Bawlf's story is correct; implicit in those findings is a
revision of _native_ history in the region, like it or not.......just my
two bits (big fat ones though they may be).

Mike Cleven