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By Kevin Starr, MLS '74
Exposed as a fake, the origin of the plate remained a mystery until four intrepid researchers uncovered the full story. Their findings were recently published in California History, the journal of the California Historical Society.
Certainly the most "successful" of their pranks took place in the early 1930s, when a group of ECV members fabricated a brass plate based upon a description in The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (1628), in which Drake claimed California (New Albion) for the English crown. It was all good fun, one supposes. The perpetrators had even daubed the back of the plate with the letters ECV, using a transparent fluorescent paint, as a clue. The plate of brass was placed on the Marin peninsula, where it was ultimately discovered in the summer of 1936 by Beryle Shinn, a young clerk from Oakland. Bolton, the 67-year-old dean of Borderland and Spanish Colonial history, immediately vouched for its authenticity. Shinn accepted $3,500 for the plate, a considerable sum in those days. Bolton then put the plate on display at the Bancroft Library, where it remained for 40 years. Right from the start, there was skepticism about the plate's authenticity. In 1937, after the California Historical Society published Drake's Plate of Brasse: Evidence of His Visit to California in 1579, ECV countered with Ye Preposterous Booke of Brasse. Evidence mounted: the lettering was wrong; the language was not authentically Elizabethan; the chiseling seemed so recent; there had been no scientific study of the metal or its alleged erosion; and the Clampers themselves were broadly hinting at the fraud. Professor Bolton should have taken the hint, but it appears he wanted to believe in this miraculous discovery. In many ways it validated his career and field of study at a time when Borderland and Spanish Colonial history was slipping in status at Berkeley. When the full story of the plate's origin was published in February of this year, the press by and large viewed the hoax as a good joke. Perhaps it might have been, had the prank been revealed within a few months of the plate's discovery at an uproarious ECV dinner in San Francisco. But, even in the last years of his life, Bolton held on to his faith in the plate. His final error does not, in my mind, diminish Bolton's greatness. His lifetime of scholarship remains, and so does the grandeur of Drake’s voyage and one day, perhaps, the authentic Plate of Brasse, now buried beneath the sands of Drake’s Estero on the Marin shore, will be discovered. Kevin Starr is the State Librarian of California. |
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