(In addition to the below, it is noteworthy that at this writing (September 12, 1997) something over 2,000 visits per month are being made to this Sir Francis Drake web site, indicating that interest in Drake is constant and considerable. Also, I am fielding a steady stream of email from site visitors who wonder when and where the book will be available.)
Who will be interested in this book? The primary subject
seems rather specialized, dealing as it does with a bit of
zig-zagging and a short stop or two by a small sailing ship
during a very long journey over 400 years ago. But so many
different sorts of things happened within and around that
voyage, and during later efforts to reconstruct its events,
that any analysis of either that part of the circumnavigation
or of the subsequent search for Drake's harbor necessarily
covers a lot of territory. So, in addition to addressing those
whose interests are focused on Drake, or on the
circumnavigation, or on the anchorage questions, this work
speaks to persons interested in fields as diverse as
cartography, bibliography, climatology, anthropology,
linguistics, the history of the Pacific Northwest in general
and California in particular, early European contacts with
Native Americans, nautical history, and hoaxes. Because
the work is heavily documented it will also be of service to
scholars who are looking into related subjects, and it will
end pervasive and sometimes embarrassing confusion
among librarians about the literature of the
circumnavigation.
This work can also be viewed in a more abstract sense, as a
study of how the history of a well-known and much-discussed event can turn into something resembling fiction
or parody more than fact. Thus it will find some readers
who are more interested in the mechanisms of historical
research than in any particular events.
Finally, the transcriptions of the source material included
in the appendices will be the only accurate and
unadulterated copies in print of these fascinating
documents, which should give the book more than usual
endurance and will place it, on some shelves, near if not
among basic reference works.
Author's Note: Some of this material is adapted from or relates to my yet-unpublished book Francis Drake in Nova Albion - The Mystery Restored, in which these and neighboring thickets are explored much more deeply than on these few web pages. Thus there may be references here not fully explained, or answers missing their questions. Also lacking here is documentation, provided in the book by 782 endnotes. - Oliver Seeler