Drake's Plate of Brass
The hoax's perpetrators, members of the fraternal organization E Clampus Vitus, attempted to apprise the plate's finders as to its origins.
The memoirs also say that the plate included the date of the landing, and under it Drake's name, and the queen's portrait on a sixpence coin.
There was the hole for a sixpence coin, and the text contained all the content that Fletcher described: Working for ten years, 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.
[1] According to the 2002 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").
The ECV had originated during the 1849 California Gold Rush and was revived in the 1930s by Carl Wheat, George Ezra Dane, and Leon Whitsell as a fraternity of historians and Western lore enthusiasts.
George Clark, an inventor, art critic, and appraiser, hammered the letters into the plate with a simple cold chisel.
[1] 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 Drakes Bay with a companion, Anson Stiles Blake.
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.
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 joke, originally intended as an internal Clamper affair, had quickly and suddenly broken out into the public eye.
Just before the Preposterous booklet was printed, fellow Clamper (and the person accused of the hoax) George Ezra Dane sent Bolton a promotional flyer soliciting preorders.
Printed in the flyer was an interesting comment that may have alluded to the truth of the scheme: “As history thunders down the corridors of time, the name of E Clampus Vitus and the Francis Drake Plate will be forever joined.” [7] While Bolton and Chickering continued to defend the plate, doubts and rumors continued to circulate.
A good photograph was not available even by August of 1937 when the editor of Antiquity wrote to Bolton “surely in the case of an object which, if genuine, is of the highest historical importance, at least one really adequate photograph should be made available!” [8] Bolton chose Professor Colin Fink, chair of the Division of Electrochemistry of Columbia University, to authenticate the plate.
Professor James D. Hart, director of the Bancroft Library, assembled a re-testing plan in preparation for the 400th anniversary of Drake's landing.
Dr. Frank Asaro, at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, working with colleague Helen Michels, used neutron activation analysis to study the plate and found that it contained far too much zinc and too few impurities to be Elizabethan English brass, while containing trace metals that corresponded to modern American brass.
[9][10][11] Cyril Stanley Smith of MIT examined the plate under a stereo microscope and found the edges to be consistent with modern cutting equipment.
