That Time a Pirate Stopped Mid-Heist to Claim California for England While the Locals Thought He Was a Ghost

On June 17th, 1579, Francis Drake sailed his ship the Golden Hinde into what is now Drake's Bay, just north of San Francisco, and did something that must have absolutely baffled the indigenous Coast Miwok people who lived there. He claimed the entire territory for England and named it Nova Albion, which is Latin for New England, though that name would later get recycled for a completely different part of North America. Now here's where it gets wonderfully strange. The Miwok, upon encountering these peculiar pale visitors who had arrived in an enormous wooden vessel, apparently believed Drake and his men were returned spirits of the dead. The English, being English, decided the best response to this case of mistaken identity was to hold a formal annexation ceremony complete with a brass plate nailed to a post. Drake's chaplain Francis Fletcher recorded that the native people placed feathered crowns on the explorers' heads and seemed to be offering them sovereignty over the land, which Drake interpreted as the locals voluntarily surrendering their territory to Queen Elizabeth. The chances that both groups understood what was actually happening in remotely the same way are essentially zero. The truly peculiar part is that Drake was actually on the run. He had just spent months pillaging Spanish ships and ports along the Pacific coast of South America, his vessel was loaded with an absolutely obscene amount of stolen treasure, and he needed to careen his ship to repair it before attempting the journey home. So this grand imperial claim was really just an elaborate rest stop during what was essentially a very successful piracy expedition. The Spanish were so furious about his raids that returning the way he came was out of the question, which is why Drake eventually became only the second captain to circumnavigate the globe.