Landing in California, Remembering Tolstoy and Other Letters to the Editor

Landing in California, Remembering Tolstoy and Other Letters to the Editor
Queen Elizabeth I knighting Francis Drake, 1581.Credit...Alamy
April 9, 2021
To the Editor:
Even a reviewer as skillful as Nigel Cliff, reviewing Laurence Bergreen’s “In Search of a Kingdom” (March 28), lacks space to do more than touch on the wide-ranging adventures of a man like Francis Drake, so I would like to add a bit about Drake’s reported sojourn on the coast of California in 1579. The great navigator desperately needed a safe harbor to repair the Golden Hind and found one at present-day Point Reyes National Seashore.
The area was well inhabited by the Miwok people who came to visit — singing, crying, falling on their knees. The English assumed they were being worshiped as gods, but what the Miwok believed was that these were their own dead returning for an unknowable purpose from the offshore region where they were supposed to spend eternity.

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