| When, slightly after the Portuguese Spanish explorers arrived in the Orient, they were also able to take a share of the new-found treasure from China. The journey, however, from the Philippines where the consignments were assembled, across the Pacific to Mexico, thence to Vera Cruz and home to Spain was perilous in the extreme. In the spring of 1579 one of their galleons carrying porcelain across the Pacific was captured by the English explorer Sir Francis Drake, who was later forced to make a landfall at a little bay, now known as Drake's Bay, just north of the modern city of San Francisco. It was here, while repairs to the Golden Hind were in progress, that a case of blue and white was accidentally dropped overboard. | Later washed ashore, this was to be the first Chinese porcelain to reach North American soil and today fragments of Wanli blue and white can be found adorning the graves of the Miwok Indians who then inhabited that part of the Californian coast. |
