From this time, through several weeks while Drake remained there, the multitude also remained. At first they brought offerings every three days as sacrifices, until they learned that this displeased their English king. Like other sovereigns who have had much to do with this race, he found that he had to feed his red retainers. But he had mussels, seals, “and such like,” in quantity sufficient for their rations.
Drake made a journey into the country. He saw “infinite company” of fat deer, in a herd of thousands. He found a multitude of strange “conies” in large numbers, with long tails, and with a bag under the chin in which to carry food either for future supply or for their children.
Drake erected on the shore a post, on which he placed a plate of brass. Here he engraved the Queen’s name, the date of his landing, the gift of the country by the people, and left her Majesty’s portrait and arms. The last were not designed by his artists, as some historians have carelessly supposed, but were on a silver piece, of sixpence, “showing through a hole made of purpose in the plate.”
When the people saw that Drake could not remain, they could not conceal their grief. At last they stole on the English unawares with a sacrifice which “they set on fire,” thus burning a chain and bunch of feathers. The English could not dissuade them till they fell to prayers and singing of psalms, when the sad natives let their fire go out, and left the sacrifice unconsumed. On the 23d of July the friends parted, the English for the shores of Asia, the savages to the hills, where they built fires as long as the “Pelican” was in sight. Thus did England take possession of the region which, after near three hundred years, proved to be the richest gold-bearing country in the world. Drake gave to the country the name of New Albion, and it bore that name on the maps for centuries. He called it so “for two causes: in respect of the white banks and cliffs which lie towards the sea; and the other because it might have some affinity with our country in name.” Curiously enough, the original narrative says, “There is no part of earth here to be taken up wherein there is not some speciall likelihood of gold or silver.”[151]
From the time when the Government’s ships crept along the coast to Cape Mendocino, and then turned, unwilling, to their long voyage to Asia, observations on that coast were doubtless repeated by navigators. The line of coast took different courses and different names accordingly. But it is well-nigh certain that from the time of Drake until 1770 the California now a part of the United States had no European inhabitants. The part of California which is in Mexico was first settled by Jesuit missions, whose first successes date from the year 1697.
Drake returned to England by way of the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived at Plymouth in triumph on the 26th of September, 1580. He had given the name Nova Albion to the western coast of North America thus discovered; he had taken possession for his sovereign, Elizabeth, with better color of right than most discoverers could urge. But under this title the Queen never claimed, nor her successors indeed, until, after three centuries, Drake’s voyage may have been sometimes cited as a vague or shadowy introduction to any rights by which England claimed the mouth of the Columbia River and the region northward.[152]
The name Nova Albion was generally applied on the maps to the more northerly region, the Oregon of our geography. But the name California held its place for the whole region known to us as the State of California, as well as for the peninsula and the gulf. The distinction between Upper and Lower California is still observed.
Drake’s reception at home was an enthusiastic one, by a populace always anxious for a hero. It was tempered somewhat by the cautious feelings of some, who regarded with no favorable eye the policy of private reprisals upon another nation in time of peace. The Queen had no such compunctions. She received him with undisguised favor, dined with him on board his ship, and made him a knight. She directed that the vessel which had borne her authority about the world should be carefully preserved; and when the ship was finally broken up, John Davis, the Arctic navigator, caused a chair to be made of the timbers, which is now one of the relics of interest in the Bodleian Library, and within whose seat Abraham Cowley wrote one of his well-known poems.
At length, in 1585, Queen Elizabeth determined on open hostility, and giving Drake his first royal commission, and an ample fleet and land force, he started on his successful expedition to the Spanish main, when town after town fell into his hands, and the Spanish settlements experienced most poignantly ravages similar to those which they had so abundantly for nearly a century inflicted upon the natives of those regions. Of his subsequent exploits in European waters this is no place for the recital; but in 1595 he prevailed upon Elizabeth to put him, in connection with his old patron and companion, Sir John Hawkins, once more in command of another expedition to Spanish America. They sailed from Plymouth in August, with the purpose of seizing Nombre de Dios, and then of marching his twenty-five hundred troops to Panama to capture the treasure which took that route from Peru on its way to Spain. The expedition was a melancholy failure. The Spaniards were forewarned. Porto Rico successfully resisted the English in the first place, and the attack on Panama was abortive.