Now this is interesting - early history of Vancouver Island
From Canada's
National Post:
How the discovery of a 460-year-old English shilling in B.C. could help rewrite the early history of Canada
The discovery of a 16th-century coin buried in clay on a Vancouver Island shoreline is rekindling interest in a controversial theory that English explorer Sir Francis Drake made a secret voyage to Canada�s Pacific Coast in 1579 � two centuries before Spanish sailors and the legendary British navigator Capt. James Cook made their famous �first� European visits to the future British Columbia in the 1770s.
Former B.C. cabinet minister Samuel Bawlf, the leading proponent of the Drake theory and author of a 2003 book on the subject, says the discovery of the coin by a Victoria metal-detector hobbyist adds to the substantial documentary evidence that Drake � well known to have reached California during his 1579 expedition � actually sailed to Vancouver Island and well beyond, but was ordered by Queen Elizabeth I to hide the true extent of his northward travels to protect England�s strategic interests in the New World.
And one of the province�s top archeologists, Royal B.C. Museum curator Grant Keddie, told Postmedia News that he�s made plans to examine the 460-year-old shilling, noting that �this now makes three coins from the 1500s� that have been found along the B.C. coast.
�I am encouraging [relic hunters] to take another look at things they may have found here that are not identified � such as ceramics or glassware � that might date to the same time period as the coin,� added Keddie, who has described Bawlf�s theory as compelling and worth continued investigation by scholars.
Now that would cause a major re-write of history.
More at the site. Oh to be renting metal detectors on Vancouver Island this summer...
Posted by DaveH at January 13, 2014 9:29 PM