Oregon Assertions

Oregon State Historian Laureate and executive director of the Oregon Historical Society, Thomas Vaughan, was a supporter of the DNG’s findings and fully endorsed the identification of Drake’s first Oregon landfall to be Cape Arago, a bay a south of Coos Bay, and his later landing to be in California.  In his April 13, 1977 letter (copied below) to Dr. Norman J. W. Thrower of the Sir Francis Drake Commission, Vaughan wrote: 

            Quite obviously the exceptional Drake activity is on the California coast, but we wish to do our very best to commemorate this very striking occasion of the first landfall in Coos County.

Drake’s chaplain, Francis Fletcher, wrote about a bad bay the Englishmen used to seek shelter on June 5, 1579. Numerous sources, including the Oregon State Parks and the Oregon Historical Society, identify this bad bay, as characterized by Fletcher, to be South Cove at Cape Arago, Oregon. Today, Cape Arago State Park is a 28 minute drive south from Coos Bay, Oregon. A monument placed at the park by the Oregon State Parks and the Oregon Historical Society reads:

Drake dropped behind this headland to escape gale winds anchoring in a “bad bay” . . . near South Cove.