About Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake’s Fair and Good Bay
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.
Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake’s
Fair and Good Bay can be purchased at: https://uofupress.lib.utah.edu/thunder-go-north-2/
