[Sca-cooks] Penguins and potatoes was medieval dog recipes

[Terry Decker]

The island was actually in the Straits of Magellan.  To quote Drake (or more 
probably his nephew, IIRC), "The 24 of August (1578) we arrived at an island 
in the straits (probably Isla Isabel), where we found a great store of fowl 
which could not fly, of the bigness of geese, whereof we killed in less than 
one day 3,000 and victualled ourselfs thoroughly therewith."  (The famous 
voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Sea, and there hence about the 
globe of the earth, begun in the year`of our Lord, 1577., as taken from 
Haklyut)

I gather from Morison, the accounts of Rev. Francis Fletcher and the 
Potuguese pilot, Nuno da Silva, provide more detailed information.  Fletcher 
refers to the birds, "...which the Welch men call Pengwin."  (Welsh, "pen 
gwyn" or white head).  BTW, the primary rookeries are actually on a couple 
of rocks near Isla Isabel, Santa Marta and Santa Magdalena.

A little later in Drake's account is a passage I find of interest.  The 
encounter is on the 29th of Novmber 1578 on an island off the coast of 
Chile.  "The people came down to the waterside with show of great courtesy, 
bringing to us potatoes, roots, and two very fat sheep..."

The potato Drake was familiar with was the sweet potato, often referred to 
as the common or Spanish potato.  Given the location, the roots are very 
likely to have been white potatoes as Chilean potatoes are the root stock 
for most of the potatoes we use today.  As pure speculation, the encounter 
may have set the stage for the delivery of "potatoes of Virginia" to John 
Gerard in 1586.  The logic is Drake knew the value of white potatoes as food 
and moved stocks of them to his ships when he resupplied after the siege of 
Cartagena.  One the return to England, Drake's fleet rescued the members of 
the colony at Roanoke, Virginia, and that potatoes were delivered to Gerard 
and he mistakenly attributed them to Virginia rather than Peru.  It's one of 
those fun debates that will probably never be settled.

Bear

> Drakes men ate Penguins, well within our period while circumnavigatring 
> the globe.  They were not in Antartica, they were on South America.  You 
> have to get around the cape to do that and that is pretty far down the 
> Southern Hemisphere.  It was actually on an island in the vicinity of the 
> cape.
>
>
> Ranald De Balinhard