The Historiography of the Activities of Francis Drake along the Pacific Coast of North America in 1579

1969 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-36
Author(s):  
Kenneth L. Holmes

Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the world (1577-1581) marks the first certain approach of Europeans to what later became known as the Northwest Coast of America. Historical research on this voyage has stemmed from Great Britain and the United States. British scholars concerned with the subject as part of English maritime activity have included Richard Hakluyt, James Anthony Froude, E. G. R. Taylor, James A. Williamson and A. L. Rowse. The latest British scholar to inquire into the motives and events of the great voyage is Kenneth R. Andrews. These writers have generally given little space to Drake's experiences on the Northwest Coast. However, the late California scholar Henry Raup Wagner published a monumental study of the subject in 1926. This work and two volumes published by the Hakluyt Society provide most of the documents relating to the voyage.The pertinent passages describing Drake's activities in the North Pacific are as follows: From Guatulco [a village near Acapulco on the Mexicanwest coast] we departed the day following, viz. April 16.setting our course directly into the sea: whereon we sayled500. leagues in longitude, to get a winde: and between thatand June 3. 1400. leagues in all, till we came into 42. deg.of North latitude. ….The land in that part of America, bearing farther out into the West, then we before imagined, we were neerer on it than wee were aware; and yet the neerer still wee came unto it, the more extremitie of cold did sease upon us. The 5. day of June, wee were forced by contrary windes, to run in with the shoare, which we then first descried; and cast anchor in a bad bay, the best roade we could for the present meete with: where wee were not without some danger, by reason of the many extreme gusts, and flawes that beate upon us; which if they ceased and were still at any time, immediately upon their intermission, there followed most vile, thicke, and stinking fogges; against which the sea prevailed nothing, till the gusts of wind were againe remowed them, which brought with them, such extremitity and violence when they came, that there was no dealing or resisting against them.

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 382-411
Author(s):  
Chris Madsen

Henry Eccles, in classic studies on logistics, describes the dynamics of strategic procurement in the supply chain stretching from home countries to military theatres of operations. Naval authorities and industrialists concerned with Japanese aggression before and after Pearl Harbor looked towards developing shipbuilding capacity on North America’s Pacific Coast. The region turned into a volume producer of merchant vessels, warships and auxiliaries destined for service in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Shipbuilding involved four broad categories of companies in the United States and Canada that enabled the tremendous production effort.


2006 ◽  
Vol 134 (12) ◽  
pp. 3567-3587 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda M. Keller ◽  
Michael C. Morgan ◽  
David D. Houghton ◽  
Ross A. Lazear

Abstract A climatology of large-scale, persistent cyclonic flow anomalies over the North Pacific was constructed using the National Centers for Environmental Prediction–National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP–NCAR) global reanalysis data for the cold season (November–March) for 1977–2003. These large-scale cyclone (LSC) events were identified as those periods for which the filtered geopotential height anomaly at a given analysis point was at least 100 m below its average for the date for at least 10 days. This study identifies a region of maximum frequency of LSC events at 45°N, 160°W [key point 1 (KP1)] for the entire period. This point is somewhat to the east of regions of maximum height variability noted in previous studies. A second key point (37.5°N, 162.5°W) was defined as the maximum in LSC frequency for the period after November 1988. The authors show that the difference in location of maximum LSC frequency is linked to a climate regime shift at about that time. LSC events occur with a maximum frequency in the period from November through January. A composite 500-hPa synoptic evolution, constructed relative to the event onset, suggests that the upper-tropospheric precursor for LSC events emerges from a quasi-stationary long-wave trough positioned off the east coast of Asia. In the middle and lower troposphere, the events are accompanied by cold thickness advection from a thermal trough over northeastern Asia. The composite mean sea level evolution reveals a cyclone that deepens while moving from the coast of Asia into the central Pacific. As the cyclone amplifies, it slows down in the central Pacific and becomes nearly stationary within a day of onset. Following onset, at 500 hPa, a stationary wave pattern, resembling the Pacific–North American teleconnection pattern, emerges with a ridge immediately downstream (over western North America) and a trough farther downstream (from the southeast coast of the United States into the western North Atlantic). The implications for the resulting sensible weather and predictability of the flow are discussed. An adjoint-derived sensitivity study was conducted for one of the KP1 cases identified in the climatology. The results provide dynamical confirmation of the LSC precursor identification for the events. The upper-tropospheric precursor is seen to play a key role not only in the onset of the lower-tropospheric height falls and concomitant circulation increases, but also in the eastward extension of the polar jet across the Pacific. The evolution of the forecast sensitivities suggest that LSC events are not a manifestation of a modal instability of the time mean flow, but rather the growth of a favorably configured perturbation on the flow.


1959 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 232-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. D. Dondale

Grammonota Emerton, 1882, is one of the many uniform genera that constitute the large and complex family Erigonidae. All of the 28 species and one subspecies recognized by the present writer are American in range, and representatives occur from southwestern Alaska and James Bay in the north to Central America and the West Indies. A few species are arctic-alpine, or are restricted to the Pacific coast, but most occur east of the Rocky Mountains from southern Canada to the Gulf States.


1965 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Margolis ◽  
Hilda Lei Ching

The generic diagnoses of Bacciger and Pentagramma are emended. Recognized as members of the genus Bacciger are the type, B. bacciger (Rudolphi, 1819), from the Mediterranean, Black, and Azov Seas; B. nicolli Palombi, 1934, from Atlantic waters near the British Isles; and B. opisthonemae Nahhas and Cable, 1964, from Jamaican waters. Pentagramma consist of P. symmetricum Chnlkova, 1939, the type, from the Black and Azov Seas and P. petrowi (Layman, 1930) n. comb, from the northern part of the North Pacific region. Synonyms of P. petrowi are Monorcheides(?) petrowi Layman, 1930: Orientophorus sayori Yamaguti, 1942; Faustula sayori (Yamaguti, 1942); Orientophorus petrowi (Layman, 1930); and Bacciger petrowi (Layman, 1930). Pentagramma petrowi is redescribed and additional details of morphology are included for P. symmetricum, B. bacciger, and B. nicolli. Measurements of the species discussed and extensive host and locality records are tabulated.


1969 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-322
Author(s):  
Helen Kitchen

The membership of the African Studies Association now numbers 1,731— 734 fellows, 618 associates, and 379 student associates. Some 700 of these participated in the eleventh annual meeting of the Association. Although attendance was considerably below the 1,300 registered at the New York Hilton in 1967 and the nearly 1,000 who made their way to the University of Indiana in 1966, there is no indication that this reflects a declining interest in African studies in the United States. Rather, the A.S.A. custom of bringing its annual meetings in turn to scholars in the north-east, on the Pacific coast, and in the Middle West results in predictable fluctations in registration.


1995 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-388
Author(s):  
Nicholas A. Doe

Captain George Vancouver's survey of the North Pacific coast of America has been characterized as being among the most distinguished work of its kind ever done. For three summers, he and his men worked from dawn to dusk, exploring the many inlets of the coastal mountains, any one of which, according to the theoretical geographers of the time, might have provided a long-sought-for passage to the Atlantic Ocean. Vancouver returned to England in poor health but, with the help of his brother John, he managed to complete his charts and most of the book describing his voyage before he died in 1798. He was not popular with the British Establishment and, after his death, all of his notes and personal papers were lost, as were the logs and journals of several of his officers.


Author(s):  
Edward R. Slack

Called “Mar del Sur” [South Sea] when first spotted by Balboa in 1513 and dubbed “Mar Pacifíco” [Peaceful Calm Sea] by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, the historical relationship between the Pacific Ocean and the people of Mexico is multilayered and dynamic. During the Spanish colonial era (1521–1821), the viceroyalty of New Spain (Nueva España) supervised the Asian and Polynesian colonies of the Philippines and Guam (and briefly Taiwan and the Spice island of Ternate) across the Pacific. Acapulco became a mythical emporium of exotic luxury supplied by the galleons from Manila that for 250 years tied Asia to the Iberian New World. Beyond this famous port, littoral native communities dotting the Pacific coast, from Oaxaca in the south to the forty-second parallel of Alta California in the north, gradually fell under Spanish secular and religious control. The enormous coastline measured approximately 5,400 miles, more than double the length of seaside territory facing the Gulf of Mexico. Following the War of Mexican Independence (1810–1821), the United Mexican States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos) emerged. For the next fifty years, Mexico experienced domestic political instability exacerbated by wars against the United States (Mexican-American War, 1846–1848) and France (1862–1867). When political order was finally established under the regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910), regionalism was confronted by the centrifugal power of a modernizing, technocratic state. Despite losing 840 miles of California coastline, and a lucrative trade route with Manila, in the Mexican-American War, Mexico’s Pacific littoral in the south grew to incorporate the formerly Guatemalan territory of Chiapas, and a new shipping network evolved. Traditional research on pueblos, cities, or states along the Pacific coast emphasizes purely local or regional contexts within the colonial or independent Mexican state; or it is grouped thematically into studies about the galleon trade or California mission settlements. Recent scholarship is encouraging a more balanced approach, accentuating the many threads that wove a rich tapestry of Mexico’s unique relationship with the “Pacific World” (as opposed to the more popular “Atlantic World”); not only in a nationalist framework, but with inter-American and trans-Pacific or global dimensions.


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