drakes_bay_historic_landmark
LANDMARKS: The new plaque on Limantour Beach commemorating the designation of the Drakes Bay Historic and Archeological District as a National Historic Landmark joins two other plaques on Drakes Beach commemorating the anchoring of Sir Francis Drake’s boat in the area.    David Briggs

For some people, the new Drakes Bay Historic and Archaeological District National Historic Landmark, commemorating contact between Sir Francis Drake and the Coast Miwok—the first documented contact between Europeans and California’s native people—is a cause for celebration. The federal government made the landmark official in 2012, but a plaque was recently installed at Limantour Beach, where a crowd gathered last weekend to hear remarks about it. The landmark is the outcome of over six decades of research—undertaken by the Drake Navigators Guild, the group that submitted the landmark application in the ‘90s—into just where Drake landed on the coast. “Sixty-seven years ago, the Drake Navigators Guild was formed to seek the traces of English and Spanish contacts with our shores, to learn about the relationships with the native peoples, and to tell those stories to all the people who now inhabit this land,” Edward Von der Porten, of the guild, said at the ceremony. But for others, particularly the Coast Miwok, the first contact is an omen of what was to come later, when their lands were overtaken and their culture eviscerated. “We come together and establish this national historic landmark not to celebrate history, but to honor history, to learn from history,” said Gordon White, chief of cultural resources for the seashore, on Saturday. According to the guild’s research, Drake, born in about 1540, set off on a trip around the world in an effort to expand Britain’s maritime power and score Peruvian gold taken by the Spanish. After a failed attempt to find the nonexistent Northwest Passage, he needed to fix his ship, the Golden Hind. It was difficult to find safe harbor on the coast, but he finally discovered a bay in which to work. Though no one can be 100 percent certain that Drakes Bay was that site, the National Historic Landmarks program says it is “the most probable site of the first encampment of Englishmen on U.S. shores.” Drake and his crew spent about five weeks at the site in 1579, naming it Nova Albion. In the Englishmen’s written accounts, they said the Miwok acted “as men ravished in their mindes” and wanted to “worship us as gods,” the guild’s history says. In fact, the Miwok did not believe they were gods, but rather the ancestors of the dead, in part because the ships appeared from “a place where we say the dead step off to go follow the moon—the line of the moon to the land of the dead when they die,” said Greg Sarris, chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. “So it’s very interesting that when the white people and Drake landed here, we thought the dead were returning. After all, they were pale-faced, they looked sickly, and when they came ashore they smelled terribly.” For Mr. Sarris, one of the main lessons of the encounter is one of misunderstanding. “If you don’t understand the way your stories are shaping your relationship with other people and with the land, and if you don’t start talking about ways to modify those stories, we’re probably not going to make it. But we can start here today, and use this point of contact to continue the story and create what did not happen in the past, which is a dialogue.”