I will look into any sir Francis Drake treasure you want to commission me on. I'm ~2 hr. south of Drakes bay
But if the source of the material and map you send me seems to be the caliber of the stuff from the 1970s treasure magazines, I'm going to have my doubts. Eg.: He-said-she-said type telephone game stuff. Unless it is some source material (that you can document the source of your info), then I would lump it into the camp-fire-lore stuff.
The west coast, during Drake's time, was at the REMOTEST ends of the world, so-to-speak. Because the currents went south, not north. So exploration up the coast of Alta CA (and into Oregon, Washington, etc... direction) was extremely rare and infrequent. Very easy for ships to return southbound back to the mother country of Mexico, but very difficult for ships to ply northwards. It was almost faster to cross the entire ocean to the Philippines (the Manila trade route) and then skirt the CA coast on the way south bound. And/or faster to simply walk north from San Diego, as it was to try to take a ship northbound along the coast.
So you almost have to ask yourself: Why in the HECK does some Drake dude come all the way to the most remote area on earth (at the time), to ... what ... bury his stuff ? It's just not making sense. Not saying that "impossible unlikely things don't happen", but ... at a certain point, .... you have to wonder if it's just not "lore".
If you were to look at all the dug artifacts of the CA missions (which, yes, I know post-date Drake) you would see that they have ZERO gold coins or objects. They all have some reales in their dug collections (past archie digs) . But zero escudos. Of hundreds of reales found here by md'rs (some getting into the earliest ground-zero mission locations of the 1770s) they are all silver reales. I have only ever heard of 3 or 4 escudos being found. And those were all Mexican era (post 1822), not Spanish era.
So what does that tell you about the Spanish missions and explorations of our coast ?? That contrary to the "colorful legends" of "filthy rich gold laden missions", this was NOT the case. They were doing good just to get shipments of trinkets for the mission effort. Thus the Hollywood image of stores of gold rooms is simply fancy. Perhaps in Mexico city or wherever the gold was coming from heading back to Europe (ala Mel fisher's wreck, etc....). But not so in Alta CA. The shipping traffic was NOT going to Europe from the south American gold producing regions. Any ship traffic skirting our coast here in the pre-mission era, was returning manila galleons. And those had GOOD aboard them (porcelin, wax, silk, spices, etc....) NOT gold and silver. Any gold and silver they'd have had was going TO the Asia trade markets to BUY the goods. And returning with goods, not gold and silver. Any other explorations (that explored north into what is now Canada etc...) was explorations.
Do flukes exist ? Sure. But I'd be very discerning of any treasure story along the time-period that you are talking about (Drake). It just defies normal logic. I'd have to see the sources for the story. And if you say a map, ok, where did the map come from .
