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Sir Francis Drake
The British explorer, Sir Francis Drake, sailed up the coast of
California in 1579.
It is possible he traveled through the Channel in
his voyage.
A recent archeological discovery suggests there is a possibility that
Sir Francis Drake's Golden Hind visited the Channel in the late 1500s.
On January 21, 1981, a beachwalker found two rock encrusted objects
about a half mile east of Goleta Beach Park. Returning the next day at low
tide, he found three more exposed by the scouring surf. The following day,
assisted by volunteers from the University of California at Santa
Barbara's Archeology and History Departments and by rangers from
the County Park Department, he managed to haul the five canon out of the surf.
The cannon muzzle loaders, about five feet long and heavily encrusted with
asphaltum and rocks, were found almost in a straight line across 50 feet of
beach. Several weeks later, the State Parks Department conducted an
underwater magnatometer search of the area offshore from the discovery spot
in an attempt to locate any shipwreck or other artifacts.
Nothing more was found.
Adding to the theory that Drake visited the Channel,
back in 1891, woodcutters working nearby in the Goleta Slough found a
Sixteenth Century anchor in the mud near where a natural spring had fed into
the slough. It is known that the Golden Hind did stop for emergency
repairs in a bay somewhere along the shores of Alta California, and that
when it returned to England, the Hind was missing five canon and an anchor.
Other historians believe it is more likely the Hind sheltered in further
north near San Francisco where a 1567 English sixpence was found in 1974.
The exact location of his landing is still unknown, although two of
the canon have been x-rayed and were shown to be of Sixteenth Century
English design and manufacture.
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