Tudor-era coin found in Victoria mud may proove Sir Francis Drake visited B.C.

A tarnished silver coin recovered from the mud of a Victoria waterway is being touted by some as proof that legendary explorer Sir Francis Drake reached the B.C. coast 200 years before Captain James Cook.

Drake is best known as a leader of the English fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada, saving the country ruled by Queen Elizabeth I from invasion. He was a notorious raider of Spanish ships and colonies in the New World (some consider him little more than a pirate) but also a giant of exploration, the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe in a secret four-year odyssey of discovery and plunder on behalf of the Queen.

During that trip, Drake is known to have sailed up the West Coast as far as California or possibly Oregon in search of the western entrance to the Northwest Passage. He reportedly gave up at that point and turned his ship, the Golden Hinde, west across the Pacific and eventually home in 1580.

Some have theorized Drake reached what is now British Columbia, though there's no documentary evidence to support the claim.

Former B.C. government cabinet minister Sam Bawlf is a big proponent of the theory. He wrote a book in 2003 arguing bits of physical evidence, such as recovered artifacts, coins and details of maps that could not have been known any other way, point strongly to Drake's presence well before Cook and Spanish explorers arrived in the 1770s.

Bawlf now is excited by the discovery of a silver shilling dating from the mid-1500s that was discovered in mid-December by Bruce Campbell.

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The 59-year-old retired Victoria security systems installer was enjoying his new pastime of metal detecting when he unearthed the coin on a tidal mud flat of the Gorge waterway that cuts into the city.

His expedition with a friend had already turned up an 1891 nickel, a dime dating from the 1960s and a old penny. Then he pulled the blackened silver shilling out of the mud.

Campbell posted photos of his finds on Canadian Metal Detecting, a forum for hobbyists, he told the Victoria Times Colonist.

"I thought everybody was going to ooh and ah over the 1891 nickel, and it turned out I'd made a discovery that was a little more important than that," he said.

"Some of the guys started saying, 'That's not just any old coin. That's an English hammered silver coin.'"

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Bill Herbst, a hobbyist from the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam, recognized the coin as a shilling dating from the brief reign (1551-53) of Edward VI, who succeeded his father Henry VIII.

"You don’t find things like that in Victoria," Herbst told the Times Colonist. "The fact that it was found in a layer of mud on the foreshore, to me, I recognized that that was probably an ancient aboriginal village down there. … I knew it was possibly significant."

Herbst tipped Bawlf, who said the coin buttresses other evidence, including a 1571 sixpence dug up from a Victoria backyard in 1930 and another coin found on Quadra Island.

"It makes perfect sense that as [Drake] went along the coast, he would give out English coins to the Indians he met as evidence … to later visitors that England had already been here and laid claim to the coast," Bawlf told the Times Colonist.

"I just think that it's an exciting discovery. It further corroborates the evidence that Drake discovered and claimed British Columbia's shores for England 435 years ago."

But the discovery hasn't diminished skepticism about Drake's purported visit. Some on the metal-detecting forum noted coins can travel and be dropped inadvertently at a later date.

And Grant Keddie, curator of the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria, told Agence France Press there's simply not enough documentary evidence to support Bawlf's theory. Drake's logs from the secret expedition were destroyed in a fire a century after his death.