Old St. Francis History Pub

Presented by Melissa Darby, historian and author

In the summer of 1579 Francis Drake and all those aboard the Golden Hind were in peril. The ship was leaking and they were in search of a protected beach to careen the ship to make repairs. They searched the coast and made landfall in what they called a ‘Fair and Good Bay’, generally thought to be in California. They stacked the treasure they had recently captured from the Spanish onto on this sandy shore, repaired the ship, explored the country, and after a number of weeks they set sail for home. When they returned to England, they became the second expedition to circumnavigate the earth, after Magellan’s voyage in 1522, and the first to return with its commander.

Based on the speaker’s book of the same name, this presentation unravels the mysteries surrounding Drake’s famous voyage and summer sojourn in this bay. Comparing Drake’s observations of the Natives’ houses, dress, foods, language, and lifeways with ethnographic material collected by early anthropologists, Melissa Darby makes a compelling case that Drake and his crew landed not in California but on the Oregon coast. She also uncovers the details of how an early twentieth-century hoax succeeded in maintaining the California landing theory and silencing contrary evidence.

About the Speaker:

Melissa Darby is a visiting research scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Portland State University and a private consultant in cultural resource management. She has worked for over thirty years as an archaeologist and historian in the Northwest and is a noted authority on the ethnohistory of the Native people of western Oregon.