When Sir Francis Drake returned to England in 1580, many questions concerning his momentous voyage were left unanswered—his journals were impounded and his men were forbidden, on pain of death, to divulge where they had been. Drawing on newly uncovered evidence, geographer and maritime historian Samuel Bawlf masterfully reconstructs Francis Drake’s historic round-the-world expedition, exploring the drama surrounding the voyage and offering intriguing insights into life at sea in the sixteenth century. But it is Bawlf’s assertion of Drake’s whereabouts in the summer of 1579 that gives the book even greater originality: from an intensive study of maps of the period, Bawlf shows with certainty that Drake sailed all the way to Alaska—much farther than anyone has heretofore imagined—thereby rewriting the history of exploration in North America.