Francis Drake’s 1579 Voyage: Assessing Linguistic Evidence for an Oregon Landing

This article surveys and analyzes data from a number of aboriginal languages of Oregon, investigating the hypothesis that Sir Francis Drake may have landed somewhere on the Oregon coast in 1579 rather than in California, as is usually assumed. This study is partially motivated by conflicting navigational records in surviving accounts of Drake’s voyage. There is no hard linguistic evidence for an Oregon landing, though there are a few plausible semantic and phonetic matches between items on Drake’s word list and data from Oregon languages. Though themselves inconclusive as evidence, these data should be reconsidered in light of any new archaeological evidence.