Sixteen years before the San Agustin sank, another European vessel sheltered in this same bay. On June 17, 1579, Francis Drake brought the Golden Hind into the lee of Point Reyes during his circumnavigation of the globe. He was looking for a place to repair his ship and rest his crew after months of raiding Spanish ports along the Pacific coast. What he found was a sheltered cove on the windward side of the peninsula, protected from the coastal current by the long arm of Point Reyes itself. Drake stayed for roughly five weeks, claiming the surrounding territory for Queen Elizabeth I and naming it Nova Albion - New England - reportedly because the white cliffs of Point Reyes reminded him of the chalk cliffs of Dover. His crew interacted peacefully with the Coast Miwok during this stay, an encounter the Miwok's descendants acknowledge through their tribal council to this day.

The San Agustin was a Manila galleon, one of the great trading vessels that carried goods between the Philippines and Mexico along a route that tracked the North Pacific currents. Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeno and his eighty-member crew left the Philippines on July 5, 1595, carrying Chinese silk, porcelain, beeswax, and other luxury goods. After four months crossing the Pacific, Cermeno reached the California coast and anchored in the bay to reprovision and assemble a small launch for coastal exploration. For more than a month, his crew interacted with the Coast Miwok - one of the earliest documented contacts between Europeans and indigenous peoples on the northern California coast. Then a storm struck. The San Agustin broke apart in the November winds, taking its cargo to the bottom. Cermeno and his surviving crew crowded into the small launch and made a harrowing voyage south to Mexico. The Miwok were left with the wreckage.

Archaeologists have identified fifteen Miwok settlement sites around Drakes Bay where European trade goods have been found. The most telling artifacts are the pieces of Chinese export porcelain - nearly one hundred fragments recovered from sites in the vicinity of Drake's Cove alone. What makes these finds remarkable is not their presence but their transformation. The Miwok did not simply collect the porcelain as curiosities. They modified the shards using traditional techniques: grinding them into shapes that mimicked abalone pendants, drilling holes to create clam-shell-style disk beads, reshaping foreign material into familiar cultural forms. The porcelain pieces from the San Agustin's cargo became raw material for the same artistic traditions the Miwok had practiced with shell and stone for generations. In 2012, the region was designated a National Historic Landmark District, recognizing both the European contacts and the Miwok settlements that preceded them by centuries.

Drakes Bay stretches eight miles along the Point Reyes National Seashore, formed on the lee side of Point Reyes where the headland blocks the prevailing coastal current. Drake's Estero, an expansive tidal estuary, feeds the bay from the interior of the peninsula, its branching channels creating rich habitat for shorebirds, harbor seals, and marine invertebrates. Multiple marine protected areas now overlap the bay: Estero de Limantour State Marine Reserve, Drakes Estero State Marine Conservation Area, and Point Reyes State Marine Reserve all contribute to a network of protections that function as underwater parks. The bay sits roughly thirty miles northwest of San Francisco, at approximately 38 degrees north latitude - close enough to the city to be a day trip, remote enough to feel like a different world. Fog rolls through the estero channels on summer mornings, and the white cliffs that reminded Drake of home still catch the afternoon light.

In October 2021, the California State Parks Director designated the Site of New Albion as California Historical Landmark number 1061, a 215-acre location at Drake's Cove. The designation capped centuries of scholarly debate over where exactly Drake had landed. Competing theories placed his anchorage at Bolinas Lagoon, San Francisco Bay, and even sites as far north as Oregon, but the archaeological evidence at Drakes Bay proved decisive. The porcelain fragments, iron nails, and ships' fittings found in Miwok middens matched the known cargo of both the Golden Hind and the San Agustin. The Coast Miwok called this place Tamal-Huye long before any European named it. They watched Drake's ship arrive and depart. They salvaged the San Agustin's cargo and wove it into their material culture. Two empires claimed this bay, but neither held it. The Miwok, who were here first and whose descendants remain, are the ones who made something lasting from what the storms left behind.