“The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580”, by Samuel Bawlf

416 pages, Penguin Books, ISBN-13: 978-0142004593

As an interested non-expert on this subject, I found The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580 to be engaging and readable…HOWEVER, potential readers should be aware that how far Drake traveled up the west coast of North America and where he careened the Golden Hind are contentious subjects for historians. A little research reveals that many academics do not support Bawlf’s theory that Drake made it as far north as the Canadian coast – notably, in 2012, after undertaking their own extensive research, the U.S. Department of the Interior placed a Historic National Landmark at “Drake’s Bay” in northern California to mark the spot of Drake’s landing. The case for this site seems to be based primarily on the latitude from the official published account of Drake’s voyage and the discovery of some Chinese porcelain at the site, but from what I’ve gleaned on the topic, various theories have been floated (heh) and each theory has its own supporters who might have their own personal motivations.

And therein lies perhaps the biggest problem with Secret Voyage, in that Bawlf reveals no new sources, no new documents and no new evidence for his contentions; instead, he takes second-hand information about Drake’s voyage, attributes it to Drake himself and proceeds to weave what purports to be a new story. Bawlf was, incidentally, not the first to propose that Drake made it to Canada, and he seems to have largely avoided the harshest academic condemnations, like those that have been leveled at Gavin Menzies, another popular historian whose books 1421 and 1434 have been downright skewered. To me – again, no expert – Bawlf presents a tantalizing case based on a creative interpretation of a large amount of circumstantial evidence and inference. He makes it seem entirely plausible that Drake traveled farther up the coast than northern California, but I also find it unlikely that Drake was able to navigate among the treacherous straits of the Canadian coastal islands (one of the chief doubts raised by other historians), and there is a lot of conjecture in this section of the book.

And this is just for starters: this book is filled with errors, discrepancies and misstatements (at one point Bawlf refers to the “seven-and-a-half” month gap between Drake’s leaving Huatulco in modern-day Mexico and his arrival in the western Pacific; in fact, the period was April 16^th to September 30^th, 1579, about two months less than Bawlf states). Another example of sloppy scholarship is Bawlf’s definition of “knots” as “sailing speed in miles sailed per hour”; while the length of a nautical mile has changed in the last four hundred years, in Drake’s day it was 800 feet longer than a statute mile, or 6080 feet (at no time have knots been synonymous with miles). Bawlf also makes absurd claims about various mapmakers, suggesting relationships between them and Drake that are mere supposition, unsupported by any evidence…come to think of it, that might be the best description for this book, written by a failed Canadian politician.