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Tudor-shilling find turns Canadian history on its head

AFP, VICTORIA, British columbia


The 435-year-old coin discovered in westernmost Canada has rekindled a theory that a British explorer made a secret voyage there two centuries before it was discovered by Spanish sailors.

Official historical records show the Spanish were the first Europeans to set foot in what is now Canada’s British Columbia Province in 1774, followed four years later by British Royal Navy Captain James Cook.

Retired security systems installer Bruce Campbell found the coin in mid-December last year, along with a rare 1891 Canadian nickel, a 1960s dime and a penny from 1900.

“I was getting fat and tired of watching TV,” he said about what got him into his hobby, surrounded in his Victoria, British Columbia, home by a trove of adventure novels and a few dug-up treasures.

He never imagined stirring up controversy with his latest find, he said.

According to conspiracy theorists and some historians, the silver coin (produced between 1551 and 1553) is evidence that English explorer Sir Francis Drake traveled as far north as Canada’s Pacific Coast during an expedition to California in 1579, in search of the famed Northwest Passage.




He mentions two other finds that support the theory: A 1571 sixpence dug up in 1930 in the backyard of a Victoria home and another Tudor-era coin unearthed on nearby Quadra Island.

Drake would have given the coins to aboriginals he met “to show to later comers that England had already found [and staked a claim to] these lands,” Bawlf said.


He said his analysis typically looks at “what was written at the time and archeological artifacts.”

There is currently not enough evidence to support this theory, he said, adding that Drake’s logs were burned in a London fire a century later.

If it is ever corroborated, it could have implications for Canada and the US, whose shared border was drawn based partly on past European colonial land holdings.

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