The so-called
Drake's Plate of
Brass is a
forgery that purports to
be the
brass plaque that
Francis Drake posted upon landing in
Northern California in 1579. The
hoax was successful for forty years, despite
early doubts. After the plate came to public attention in 1936,
historians immediately raised questions
regarding the plate's
wording,
spelling, and
manufacture. The hoax's perpetrators even tried
to tip off the plate's finders as to its origins. But many presumed
the plate to be real after an early
metallurgical study concluded it was
genuine. Then, in the late 1970s,
scientists determined that the plate was a modern
creation after it failed a battery of physical and chemical tests.
Much of the mystery surrounding the plate continued until 2003,
when historians finally advanced a theory about who created the
plate and why, showing the plate to be a
practical joke by local historians gone very
awry.
The
plate was acquired by – and until 2005 was on display at – The
Bancroft
Library
of the University of
California, Berkeley
.
The historical plate
It is
known that Drake landed somewhere north of the Golden Gate
and San Francisco Bay
in 1579. According to a contemporary account
by Francis Pretty, a member of Drake's party, Drake left behind "a
plate of brasse" as "a monument of our being there" that claimed
"her maiesties, and successors right and title to that kingdome."
The memoirs also say that the plate included the date of the
landing, Drake's name, and the queen's portrait on a sixpence coin,
showing through a hole in the plate.
Pretty's detailed description of the plate became the recipe for
the prank that became the Drake Plate hoax.
The found plate: description and text
The plate that came to light in the 1930s matched the description
in historical record in many ways. It was made of brass, with
lettering that appeared to have been chiseled into its face. There
was the hole for a sixpence coin, and the text contained all the
content that Pretty described:
- BEE IT KNOWNE VNTO ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS.
- IVNE.17.1579
- BY THE GRACE OF GOD AND IN THE NAME OF HERR
- MAIESTYQVEEN ELIZABETH OF ENGLAND AND HERR
- SVCCESSORS FOREVER, I TAKE POSSESSION OF THIS
- KINGDOME WHOSE KING AND PEOPLE FREELY RESIGNE
- THEIR RIGHT AND TITLE IN THE WHOLE LAND VNTO HERR
- MAIESTIEES KEEPEING. NOW NAMED BY ME AN TO BEE
- KNOWNE V(N) TO ALL MEN AS NOVA ALBION.
- G. FRANCIS DRAKE
- (Hole for sixpence)
Origins: a practical joke gone awry
The origins of the found plate have been a matter of debate and
rumor for much of its history. Historians have only recently
painted a clear picture of the beginning of the hoax. Over the
space of a decade, a team of four researchers pieced together a
complete narrative of the out-of-hand joke. The four – Edward Von
der Porten, Raymond Aker, Robert W. Allen, and James M. Spitze –
published their account in
California History in
2002.
Creation
According to this account, the plate was intended to be a joke
among members of a playful fraternity of California history
enthusiasts, the Ancient and Honorable Order of
E Clampus Vitus ("ECV"). G. Ezra Dane, an
ECV leader, initiated the hoax as a joke intended for fellow
"Clamper" George Bolton to find. Dane's fellow conspirators in
creating the plate, George Barron, George Clark, Lorenz Noll, and
Albert Dressler, were not members of ECV, but were all active in
the California history community.
Dane was the leading figure in reviving ECV as a fraternity of
(exclusively male) historians and Western lore enthusiasts. ECV
describes itself as "dedicated to the erection of historical
plaques, the protection of widows and orphans, especially the
widows, and having a grand time while accomplishing these
purposes." Pranks at fellow Clampers' expense were a regular part
of the group's activities.
The target of the hoax,
Herbert
Eugene Bolton, had a special interest in the plate. Bolton was
a distinguished professor of California history and director of the
Bancroft Library at the University of California. Over his long
career, he was known to have exhorted generations of students to
look for the plate – and contact him if they ever heard of an
artifact matching the historical description.
According to the 2002 account, Dane initiated the plot.
Barron, a
former curator of American history at the De Young Museum
in San
Francisco
, designed
the plate and bought the brass at a nearby shipyard, where a worker
cut the plate from modern brass with a modern guillotine
shear. George Clark, an inventor and art critic and
appraiser, hammered the letters into the plate with a simple cold
chisel. Clark told his wife that the "C.G." – interpreted later to
stand for 'Captain General' – before Drake's name was essentially
his signature. And, as a final mark of the gag, Noll and Dressler
painted "ECV" on the back of the plate in paint visible only under
ultraviolet light.
Discovery and loss
Von der Porten, Aker, and Allen surmise that the conspirators
probably planted the plate in Marin in 1933, not far from the
supposed location of Drake's landing.
William Caldeira, a
chauffeur, found the plate while his employer, Leon Bocqueraz, was
hunting near the shores of Drake's Bay
with a companion, Anson Stiles Blake. Bocqueraz was
a banker, while Blake was a prominent and active Berkeley alumnus.
Both were members of the California Historical Society.
Caldeira showed the dirt-covered plate to Bocqueraz, then stowed
the plate in the car to investigate later and then forgot about it.
Some weeks
later, he found it again while cleaning the car on the San Rafael
Ferry and threw it away on the side of the road in San
Rafael
– several miles from its original location, but
still in the Marin
area. This was the first of a series of
events that ultimately spun the joke out of the conspirators'
control.
Re-discovery and publicity
The plate was found again three years later in 1936 by Beryle
Shinn, a shop clerk. Shinn showed it to a friend, a Berkeley
student, who suggested he take the plate to
Bolton. In February 1937, Shinn
brought it to Bolton, which to Bolton was fulfillment of a
decades-old professional dream. Bolton compared it to Francis
Pretty's contemporaneous description of the plate. He alerted
Robert Gordon Sproul, the
University of California president, and Allen L. Chickering, the
president of the
California Historical Society,
to the possibility of a major find. Chickering and Bolton
negotiated to buy the plate, offering to pay $2,500 and to assume
all risk regarding the authenticity of the plate.
Then another series of events took the hoax to the next level. One
day after agreeing in principle to sell the plate, Shinn took it
back from Bolton, saying he wanted to show it to his uncle and then
return it. Bolton and Chickering did not hear from Shinn again for
four days. Apparently frightened that they might lose this major
opportunity, Chickering moved to quickly buy the plate for $3,500.
The plate was then donated to the University's Bancroft
Library.
Bolton soon announced at a California Historical Society meeting on
April 6 1937, "One of
the world's long-lost historical treasures apparently has been
found! . . . The authenticity of the tablet seems to me beyond all
reasonable doubt." Now, having only minimally investigated the
plate, Bolton and Chickering had publicly committed themselves,
personally and professionally, and their institutions to the
authenticity of the plate.
Early doubts
Skeptics pointed out many suspicious elements of the plate.
Reginald B. Haselden, a specialist in Elizabethan literature,
published a critique of the plate in the September 1937 issue of
California History, outlining a list of problems. The
spelling seemed modern. The wording did not match normal
Elizabethan forms; for example, the plate reads "Queen Elizabeth",
not "Elizabeth, by grace of God, Queen of England". Physically, the
plate seemed too uniform and the
patina
suspect. Yet none of these elements by itself seemed to determine
the matter, alternative interpretations of each being available.
Haselden's points were immediately disputed. Chickering published a
defense of the plate in the same issue of California Monthly.
The conspirators' warnings
The joke, originally intended as an internal Clamper affair, had
quickly and suddenly broken out into the public eye. Rather than
unveiling their prank at an ECV dinner among friends, revealing the
hoax would now be a very public and painful proposition for all
involved. As Von der Porten and others wrote: "Private confession
could not be kept private, and public confession was fraught with
great peril."
The conspirators found a number of ways of trying to tip off Bolton
without actually coming forward themselves. V. L. VanderHoof, a
fellow Clamper and Berkeley professor, actually created a spoof of
the plate only a few weeks after the announcement of the find,
hoping to show Bolton that modern tools could make a plate that
looked remarkably like the "real" plate. Clamper Edwin Grabhorn, a
Western history publisher, published a spoof letter from the
"Consolidated Brasse and Novelty Company" offering a "special line
of brass plates" guaranteed to "make your home-town famous."
Finally, ECV produced a small press run of a book,
Ye
Preposterous Booke of Brasse, detailing problems with the
metal content, wording and spelling. The book even instructed the
reader to look for the "ECV" in fluorescent paint on the back and
stated outright "we should now re-claim [the plate] as the rightful
property of our ancient Order", meaning ECV.
'Confirmation'
While
Bolton and Chickering
continued to defend the plate, doubts and rumors continued to
circulate. Sproul, the University president, had become concerned
as well.Bolton selected Professor Cohn Fink, chair of the Division
of Electrochemistry of
Columbia
University, to authenticate the plate. While the California
history community, and certainly Bolton, would have been aware of
the Clampers' book of clues, Fink may not have been. In any case,
in 1938 Fink and his colleague E. P. Polushkin confirmed the plate
as genuine in no uncertain terms: "[I]t is our opinion that the
brass plate examined by us is the genuine Drake Plate."
For most observers – and certainly for Bolton and Chickering – this
was the definitive statement on the plate's origins. Photos of the
plate appeared in textbooks.
Copies were sold as souvenirs, and a copy was
also displayed in the library of Sir Francis
Drake High School
in San Anselmo
(the only high school named after the
explorer). On several ceremonial occasions, copies of the
plate were presented to
Queen Elizabeth II. Yet
rumors of E Clampus Vitus involvement in the plate continued to
circulate.
Forty years later, science sheds new light
In the early 1970s, physics caught up to Haselden's original
findings. Professor James D. Hart, director of the Bancroft
Library, assembled a re-testing plan in preparation for the 400th
anniversary of Drake's landing.
Hart reached out to Research Laboratory for
Archaeology and the History of Art at Oxford University
and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
for a detailed analysis. The tests included
x-ray diffraction,
stereo microscopy, and additional metallurgical
analysis. X-ray diffraction and gamma-ray absorption tests revealed
the plate to be too smooth, made by modern rolling equipment, not
hammered flat by a sixteenth century hammer. The brass contained
far too much zinc, while containing trace metals that corresponded
to modern American brass, not Elizabethan English brass.
Prof.
Cyril Stanley Smith of MIT
examined the plate under a stereo microscope and
found the edges to be consistent with modern cutting
equipment.
No paint visible under ultraviolet light has been detected on the
back of the plaque.
Reference in fiction
In
Philip K. Dick's science fiction novel
Dr. Futurity (1960) the main character,
Dr. Parsons, finds himself central to an effort to travel back in
time to
Nova Albion where the
Golden Hind had been
careened for repairs in order to kill Drake and
alter history. Chapter 15 reads, "For an hour [Dr. Parsons]
searched up and down the beach, seeing no sign of the ship or the
men having been there. No marks, no refuse. What about the brass
plate? Where had Drake actually left it? Lying in the sand? Buried
in the face of the cliff?"
See also
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