followed most vile, thick, and stinking fogs’ with still more numbing cold.  The meat froze when taken off the fire.  The wet rigging turned to icicles.  Six men could hardly do the work of three.  Fresh from the tropics, the crews were unfit for going any farther.  A tremendous nor’wester settled the question, anyway; and Drake ran south to 38 deg. 30’, where, in what is now Drake’s Bay, he came to anchor just north of San Francisco.

Not more than once, if ever at all, and that a generation earlier, had Europeans been in northern California.  The Indians took the Englishmen for gods whom they knew not whether to love or fear.  Drake with the essential kindliness of most, and the magnetic power of all, great born commanders, soon won the natives’ confidence.  But their admiration ’as men ravished in their minds’ was rather overpowering; for, after ’a kind of most lamentable weeping and crying out,’ they came forward with various offerings for the new-found gods, prostrating themselves in humble adoration and tearing their breasts and faces in a wild desire to show the spirit of self-sacrifice.  Drake and his men, all Protestants, were horrified at being made what they considered idols.  So kneeling down, they prayed aloud, raising hands and eyes to Heaven, hoping thereby to show the heathen where the true God lived.  Drake then read the Bible and all the Englishmen sang Psalms, the Indians, ’observing the end of every pause, with one voice still cried Oh! greatly rejoicing in our exercises.’  As this impromptu service ended the Indians gave back all the presents Drake had given them and retired in attitudes of adoration.

In three days more they returned, headed by a Medicine-man, whom the English called the ‘mace-bearer.’  With the slow and stately measure of a mystic dance this great high priest of heathen rites advanced chanting a sort of litany.  Both litany and dance were gradually taken up by tens, by hundreds, and finally by all the thousands of the devotees, who addressed Drake with shouts of Hyoh! and invested him with a headdress of rare plumage and a necklace of quaint beads.  It was, in fact, a native coronation without a soul to doubt the divine right of their new king.  Drake’s Protestant scruples were quieted by thinking ’to what good end God had brought this to pass, and what honour and profit it might bring to our country in time to come.  So, in the name and to the use of her most excellent Majesty, he took the sceptre, crown, and dignity’ and proclaimed an English protectorate over the land he called New Albion.  He then set up a brass plate commemorating this proclamation, and put an English coin in the middle so that the Indians might see Elizabeth’s portrait and armorial device.