[BCMA] CMA Clip Serv: 16th-century globe recasts BC's role?

Mon Jul 18 10:04:40 PDT 2011

Few reproduction projects ring-out for doing as much as Sam Bawlf's urging to digitize this 16th Century English globe purporting to display key features of our west coast shores.

If for no other reason, having it replicated online as well as a RBCM 3D exhibit would give us all a chance to study it for the details he claims it reveals.

If consensus was reached by studying these images that Bawlf's and Ruggle's hypothesis of Drake having been here in his world voyage, the impact on our historical grasp of early BC would be greatly changed and enhanced.

Here's an immediate and excellent opportunity for the RBCM and MMBC to collaborate and raise the $30K Bawlf estimates; appoint him honourary chairman to raise the money, and get the schoolkids of Greater Victoria to help him out, bigtime!

Dan Gallacher

-- Original Message ----- 
  From: Moderated BCMA subscriber listserv. 
  To: bcma at lists.vvv.com 
  Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2011 10:41 AM
  Subject: [BCMA] CMA Clip Serv: 16th-century globe recasts BC's role?

  A digital copy of 16th-century globe could recast 
  B.C.'s role in Canadian history 
  Unique and irreplaceable 1597 replica confirms Sir Francis Drake was off West Coast in 1579, and a former heritage minister says it fundamentally alters our understanding of the past 
  Stephen Hume, Vancouver Sun, Friday, July 1, 2011 

  An Elizabethan globe that exhibits accurate details of British Columbia's coast gathered 200 years before Captain James Cook's historic voyage of discovery in 1778 is tucked away in a private institution in Britain. 

  Former B.C. heritage minister Sam Bawlf thinks a faithful digital reproduction of this astonishing document from before the earliest European settlements in Newfoundland or Quebec should be accessible to every Canadian. 

  Now, there's a worthy project for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and new-minted Premier Christy Clark to announce -just in time for B.C. Day, a month from the Canada Day weekend. 

  The globe, made by Emery Molyneux in 1597, the year after English explorer Sir Francis Drake's death at sea off the coast of Panama, is also the earliest surviving document to exhibit geographic knowledge of all three of Canada's coasts-Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic-making it a map of remarkable historic significance. 

  Right now, the unique globe-it is an exact replica of one, since lost, that Molyneux first presented to Queen Elizabeth I in 1591 to commemorate Drake's circumnavigation of the world-is preserved in London's Middle Temple, where it can be viewed only by special appointment. 

  But Bawlf worries that this unique and irreplaceable document from the dawn of Canada's history remains inaccessible to all but a few scholars and is vulnerable-it's valued for insurance purposes at more than $3 million-to loss by fire, natural disaster, theft or terrorism. 

  The globe, Bawlf says, is important to B.C. because it confirms that Drake was off the West Coast in 1579 and claimed it for Queen Elizabeth I long before the first Spanish, Russian or French explorers arrived here. 

  "It is the preeminent document of English claims to northern and Western Canada, predating the Hudson Bay Charter by nearly a century," he says. "The globe is of extraordinary historical significance to British Columbia and Canada." 

  In fact, the globe also reveals several crucial clues to exactly where Drake sailed off the B.C. coast, a subject for scholarly brawls for more than a century. 

  For example, there's one remarkably distinctive geographical feature marked far up the coast of what the map identifies as Nova Albion, the land beyond the Spanish territories of Mexico that Drake claimed for his queen and patron, and which Cook sought 200 years later. 
  It's a sharp indentation where the coastline suddenly veers directly eastward from a general northward trend and then equally suddenly slants sharply again to the northwest. The faint markings that indicate Drake's course on the map turn into this indentation. 

  Compare the ancient globe with a contemporary map and its similarity to Cape Flattery at the entrance to the straits of Juan de Fuca and Georgia, to Puget Sound, to Admiralty Inlet and the lie of the coast of the mainland that is hidden behind Vancouver Island is immediately striking. 

  "Anyone who has studied a map of the B.C. coast will easily recognize that Molyneux's detail closely matches the configuration of the mainland coast behind Vancouver Island," Bawlf observes. 

  "The point at which Molyneux's coastline turns eastward is plotted almost precisely at the latitude of Cape Flattery (latitude 48 degrees and 23 minutes north) which marks the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca," Bawlf points out. "To the east, his coastline dips southward, indicating the entrance to Puget Sound, and then it runs northward past latitude 49 degrees before curving northwest, just as the mainland behind Vancouver Island does." 

  Clearly, Bawlf argues, the accuracy of Molyneux's detail means he was depicting a direct observation of the coastline by someone equipped to determine its latitude and compass bearing. The most reasonable explanation is that he got the information from the explorer in whose honour he was making the globe-Drake himself. 

  There's another telling detail. At the end of the indentation the coast suddenly swings north again and continues to about 54 degrees of latitude, at which point the known territory gives way to the unknown. That's precisely what the coastline does from the north end of Vancouver Island to Alaska. 

  Straddling the 50th parallel are the words Nova Albion. Beneath them, faintly inscribed, is the name F. Dracus. 

  Is the association of the explorer's name with the 50th parallel a coincidence? Or is it intended to mark the extent of his journey at a time when the details of the voyage were a state secret? 

  Molyneux's map is certainly accurate in other details. 

  On the East Coast it shows the St. Lawrence River, which Cartier began exploring in 1534, and identifies the territory as New France, indicating French interests there although the first attempt at settlement would not take place until 1599, two years after the globe was made. 

  It shows Labrador, Greenland, the Davis Strait and Cumberland Sound on Baffin Island and other identifiable features of the Arctic charted during other Elizabethan voyages in search of an eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage. The Maritimes and the New England seaboards are clear and identifiable. 

  In the centre of the map and spanning the unknown heart of this as- yet-unexplored continent are the arms of Queen Elizabeth, who dined aboard Drake's ship the Golden Hind, when it anchored in the Thames at the conclusion of his voyage to the West Coast of North America. 

  Bawlf spent 15 years researching The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, 1577-1580, a best-selling maritime history in which he makes his case that the voyage to Chile, Peru and what's now B.C. was not one of plunder but was a top-secret mission dispatched by Queen Elizabeth to find and secure the strategically important Strait 
  of Anian, a Northwest Passage believed to link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, before the Spanish could claim it. 

  It's long been known that Drake, loaded with bullion and plate from Spanish treasuries in South America, sailed up the West Coast far beyond Mexico. Many believe he reached at least the Oregon coast and probably Cape Flattery, dodging his Spanish pursuers by sailing westward across the Pacific. 

  However Bawlf, making an argument from the Molyneux globe, other ancient maps, once-secret documents and their political context in a 16th-century war of spooks, espionage and counter-intelligence, asserts that the Elizabethan sailor travelled much farther north along the coast than previously thought. 

  Drake's maps and journals were later suppressed during a bloody sectarian war for global maritime supremacy between England, its few allies and Spain's powerful empire, Bawlf says. 

  False and distorted reports of latitudes, locations and landmarks were deliberately issued as part of a sophisticated disinformation campaign intended to mislead and confuse Spanish spies in the Elizabethan court about the intent and scope of Drake's mission. Hence, the absence of Vancouver Island from the Molyneux globe, Bawlf says, although the crucial indicator of the coastline remains as a landmark for future navigators. 

  The Spanish, too, cloaked their maritime activities in secrecy and deception, hoping to conceal from English privateers the timing and the routes of treasure galleons sailing from South America and Mexico. 

  The late Richard Ruggles, one of Canada's foremost historical cartographers at Queen's University, concluded that Bawlf's evidence presented a strong and convincing case. 

  Ruggles said Bawlf's findings had caused him to seriously rethink previously established historical and geographical conclusions about early exploration on the West Coast. 

  "Information on Drake's remarkable journey along the Northwest Pacific coast was hidden, and publications by court officials gave false information," Ruggles wrote in 1998. "I now concur that geographical discovery by Drake has been misplaced far to the south, and his exploratory and geographical locations have been misapprehended." 

  Like Bawlf, Ruggles said, he'd been led by the evidence to understand that there was a realistic argument that B.C. "has been deprived of its historic role in early continental exploration." 

  Yet a decade later, Bawlf says, Canada's history continues to revolve around the assumption that the only early exploration of national significance occurred on the East Coast with explorers like John Cabot, Martin Frobisher, Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain. 

  The federal government's online Atlas of Canada, for example, doesn't even mention Drake's historic voyage in its interactive map of the earliest exploration. 

  "The idea which has been taught in our schools for generations, that the European discovery of Canada was a centuries-long progression from the Atlantic to the Pacific, has now been disproven and should be replaced with a new understanding of B.C.'s special place in Canada's earliest history," Bawlf argues. 

  One way to do that, he says, would be for federal and provincial governments -or some major corporate benefactor -to get behind his simple proposal. 

  He wants a high quality three-dimensional digital copy of the 414- year-old globe be created and then made available to unrestricted access on the Internet by Canada's national library and archives. 
  He says experts at the national archives estimate the cost of such a project, which is not in any of their budget priorities, would be about $30,000-a sum, take note, that seems trifling considering the spending on other projects by government. 

  The federal government, for example, recently authorized Canada's national gallery to bid $650,000 for a century old vase made by an American jewelry designer to celebrate his stake in a B.C. gold mine. And the B.C. government is spending $5 million to refurbish the CPR steamship terminal on Victoria's waterfront, a building that dates from 1924. 

  "British Columbians should understand and care that B.C. has been deprived in our national historical record of its rightful place in Canada's early history," Bawlf says. "The proof of the globe and in other documents that Drake explored and claimed the B.C. coast for Queen Elizabeth I in 1579-200 years before the first Europeans 
  were previously thought to have reached these shores-fundamentally alters understanding of Canada's early history." 

  Bawlf thinks the federal or provincial government, possibly supported by the private sector, should step up and, since they can't bring the Molyneux globe to Canada, at least try to create a virtual exhibit that all Canadians, particularly kids learning the history of their country, could visit online. 

  He envisages something that, like Google Earth, could be rotated and magnified, with links to other maps and annotations. 

  Imagine how the voyages of Drake and Frobisher, the intrigues of England's England's Elizabeth and Spain's King Philip, the Spanish Armada and Drake's daring raids on South American treasure forts, the explorations of Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic coasts could be integrated into a unifying context. 

  What a great and imaginative Canada Day gift to Canadians or a B.C. Day gift to British Columbians. 

  Prime Minister Harper, Premier Clark-over to you. And if the federal government won't do it, why doesn't the province fund a virtual exhibit for the Royal B.C. Museum? 

  ---   30   --- 

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