Part 14: Sir Francis Drake off Lobito, Angola

On the world voyage that Drake sailed between 1577 and 1580, he had no contact with land between Java, Indonesia and Sierra Leone in West Africa. He set the world record for non-stop sailing which lasted for over 200 years. After leaving Indonesia there was a reference made to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, contact with the locals off the river mouth in Liberia, the Rio Sesto, and then he dropped anchor in Sierra Leone. But the only reference to the coastline of Angola is made by the boy veteran of the world voyage, Drake's nephew John Drake, who was captured in the mid-1580s in South America, and in his deposition which he gave to the Spanish authorities, he said that Drake reconnoitered the coast of Angola. He found no port therein because of contrary winds. That means the winds are either blowing from the southeast or from the southwest. But if Drake was off the coast of Chile, he'd have probably found a way into any port, especially if there were Spanish ships waiting to be unloaded. The geography, latitude per latitude, on the west coast of Africa was the same as the west coast of South America, and Drake would have had a geography lesson and a discovery here. He would have noted that in Namibé area of southern Angola today it's desert. Here in central Angola the coastline shows a landscape that is savannah grasslands to a Mediterranean. Further up the coast he would have seen the tropical rainforest area of northern Angola, which is in the province of Cabinda, and he would have sailed on through West Africa through grasslands, desert scrub, the Sahara desert. He would then come to the Mediterranean climate landscape of Portugal and the temperate landscape of northern Spain and this would have matched exactly the geography that he saw in Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico. Baja California would have equaled the geography of the Sahara desert. Oregon would have equaled the geography of Spain and this part of Angola is the only reference made between Indonesia and Liberia. I've never come to a country just to photograph a coastal profile because although we're looking at the land just north of Lobito in central Angola, Drake may have passed here during the night. So I'm now taking this photograph from the end of a sand spit over a kilometre off the coastline so I don't need to pay exorbitant fees in Angola to hire boats. This picture shows that I've been looking at in Drake's Wake in a part of the world that I've never visited before and I hope to do a similar video by Digital Draking in the desert of Chile in the future. So stay tuned to In Drake's Wake.