Sir Francis Drake seems to be every where I turn these days. Living on the Tennessee - North Carolina border, words like Virginia and Roanoke are in constant use; the movie Elizabeth: Golden Age played on the plane on the way back from Barcelona; and today I find out that Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, stretching from 101 to the tip of the Point Reyes National Seashore, is named appropriately.
Back down along Route 1, after a stay at Timber Cove with fabulous blueberry pancakes and a spinach omlette for breakfast, and a quick check of the map to see if a drive inland to 101 would yield a shorter trek to the Point Reyes area on the way back to Silicon Valley (no, for the record, it makes no difference in time or windingness).
Point Reyes, like other areas, has plenty of dairy cattle. At times along Route 1, signs warn of cattle every so many miles, and at one point there was a cow contentedly chewing in a pocket between a cliff and the road that was not much bigger than she was.
The fact that Point Reyes is a national seashore, though, means the farms are called “Historic Farm F”, “Historic Farm G” and so on - seven historic farms on a very large penisula. The 30 minute drive past cows and historic farms finally brings one out to Drake’s Bay.
Before Drake flipped his cape to cover a puddle, before he circumnavigated the globe, even before he helped defeat the Spanish Armada, Drake stopped in this cove to repair his ship after a futile attempt to find the Northwest Passage. He sat here for two months, trading with Indians, raiding the Spanish and preparing to set out across the Pacific - a sea the English had no knowledge of save for captured Spanish trade route maps.
He also used the time to dedicate this part of the world as New Albion, a name that stuck until just prior to California entering the United States. It’s a bit of irony that he helped drive the Spanish out of this area, and then had his name for it stripped away so that Spanish names could be used as California gained statehood.
“Oh, but just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage . . . ” - Stan Rogers
No comments:
Post a Comment