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Does anyone know why Queen Elizabeth I kept Northern California a secret?

June 6th, 2010 1 comment

In 1579, Sir Francis Drake landed 50 miles north of present day San Francisco and claimed Northern California in the name of Queen Elizabeth i. He named it New Albion. When he returned to England, Queen Elizabeth i made all the crew of the Golden Hind swear upon penalty of death not to mention New Albion, had the wrong latitude and longitude recorded in the ship’s logs, and never published a map of New Albion. She kept it a secret until her death. King James later published the maps shortly after her death. Even the true location of Drake’s landing was disputed until this century. Why keep it a secret? Wouldn’t it have made good bragging rights to flaunt the fact that England had claimed land on two sides of a continent? The only reason I can think is she wanted to make Portus Albion (now Drake’s Bay) a hidden way station for ships plundering the Spanish on the West Coast so they could dock and repair and evade the Spanish. Better guesses? I’m curious because I live near Drake’s Bay.

There doesn’t have to have been a specific reason. In that era, new geographic discoveries were closely guarded national secrets. Not publishing information, or publishing deliberately false information, was as normal a practice as it is today to not publish reliable information about something like a country’s encryption/decryption capabilities or the exact size of its military. Later, when it became clear that England’s superior navy gave them the capacity to prevent any other nation from exploiting new discoveries to England’s detriment, publishing accurate information about new discoveries became standard practice, but even then, some information like the best route to avoid dangerous rocks while approaching a specific landing were often kept as secrets given only to English pilots.

In general, Spain at the time had more permanent bases established in the Americas than England did, and Elizabeth certainly wouldn’t have wanted to give them further information about possibly valuable new bases.