GLOBAL ODYSSEY 2010 BLOG #24: WE KNEW THERE WAS A REASON TO DISLIKE LA SERENA

You’ll recall that our only partially negative experiences so for was at Coquimbo/La Serena, in Chile. Maybe it’s a family thing! Sam recently came across the following, excerpted from Samuel Bawlf’s The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580 (2003), at p. 129.

On December 19 [1578] they anchored in the Bay of la Herradura, and the next morning, after finding a stream, they began refilling their water casks. The Spanish town of La Serena was only eight miles away, however, and its inhabitants had been watching Drake’s ships sailing back and forth along the coast for several days, during which word had come from Valparaiso that they were corsairs.

A dozen of Drake’s men were working on shore when a lookout on the Golden Hinde saw a large body of Spanish horsemen with 200 Indians running alongside on the ridge above the beach. Hearing the signal gun on the ship, and seeing the Spaniards, the sailors began wading out to a large rock where their boat could retrieve them. Richard Minivy, turned and stood in defiance of the on rushers and was promptly shot dead. After the others escaped, the Spaniards dragged Minivy’s body up on the beach, where they beheaded it and cut out his heart, and then the Indians shot it full of arrows. When they had departed with their trophies stuck on spears, Drake took some men ashore and buried Minivy’s remains.

So, while not the first Menefee to come to the area, we may have been the first to leave it….