This 'treasure' rewrote California history. It was an elaborate hoax
Herbert Bolton died believing his plate was the genuine article
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Updated: 4:04 PM PST Mar 1, 2021
By Katie Dowd/SF Gate
KCRA
Herbert Bolton died believing his plate was the genuine article
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Updated: 4:04 PM PST Mar 1, 2021
By Katie Dowd/SF Gate
Beyrle Shinn, a 26-year-old department store clerk from Oakland, knew how to look on the bright side.While on a Bay Area drive one day in 1936, his car began to shudder. A tire had gone flat. This was no disaster for Shinn, who pulled over near San Rafael and decided, on account of the nice weather, to go for an impromptu hike. He headed up a bluff overlooking San Quentin prison, shimmying beneath a barbed wire fence for a better view of the bay beyond.This was nice. But Shinn decided it would be even nicer to roll rocks down the steep incline. As he searched the ground for rocks, he noticed a flat metal plate. Shinn thought it would make a good scrap piece in case his car busted another hole. He tucked it under his arm and took it home.Then, he forgot all about it. Some time later, a few friends noticed the brass plate — and the odd writing on it. Though caked in dirt, it appeared to say “Francis Drake.” One of the friends suggested Shinn take it to UC Berkeley, where a historian could take a look. “History never meant anything to me,” the high school dropout later told newspapermen with a shrug.Nonetheless, Shinn arranged a meeting with Professor Herbert Eugene Bolton, one of the world’s great experts in the history of the Americas. When Shinn showed him the five-by-eight inch brass plate, covered in scrawled handwriting, Bolton’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head.Within moments, without a shred of evidence, Bolton decided the thing he’d searched his whole life for was here in the hands of a confused Oakland shop clerk. He’d found something that would change California history forever.“He flustered all over the place,” Shinn would later recall. “Boy, was he excited.”--Professor Herbert Bolton was no stranger to excitement.In 1921, he was approached by a man named Adam Fisher who needed a Spanish document translated. After a quick look, Bolton told Fisher it detailed the location of a buried cache of gold, hidden in Mexico 100 years prior during a period of civil unrest. The man offered Bolton half of anything he found, which Bolton declined. “I’m too busy for a treasure hunt,” he said.A few months later, word reached the states that Fisher had applied for an export permit from the Mexican government. He needed to ship 50 tons of gold back to the United States. It was worth $36 million. Bolton took the news serenely.So Bolton’s demeanor on April 6, 1937 came as something of a surprise to his colleagues. He’d called hundreds of them to the Sir Francis Drake hotel in San Francisco with the promise of one of the “most sensational” discoveries in California history. He was ebullient as he took the stage.“Behold!” he said, holding the plate aloft. “Drake’s plate! The plate of brass. California’s choicest archaeological treasure.”A murmur ran through the crowd. This, indeed, was a seismic revelation.For centuries, historians had searched for Drake’s plate, the only physical evidence of Sir Francis Drake’s expedition to the California coast. The English privateer, fresh off raiding Spanish ships and towns along the Pacific coast, found safe harbor in the Point Reyes area in June 1579. While resting and restocking there, he claimed the territory for Queen Elizabeth I. He named it New Albion.According to crew member accounts, Drake left an inscribed brass plate in the area to stake his claim. But in the 350 years since, no one had seen it.Bolton was convinced it was still out there. Whenever his students said they’d be taking a weekend trip to the seashore, he asked them to keep an eye out for Drake’s plate.Now, he had it. It was not what he expected, sure, but Bolton had explanations for everything. He told the assembled crowd and the media there was no doubt this plate was real. Its craftsmanship and writing (“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,” it read in part) was consistent with the 1500s.In addition, he said, a prankster would have left it near Drake’s Bay. It made no sense to leave it near a muddy creek in San Rafael. This could only mean one thing: Historians were wrong. Drake had entered San Francisco Bay, almost 200 years before Gaspar de Portolá “discovered” the area.“If the Drake plate is bogus, the hoax was perpetrated by someone who had not only studied the history of his voyages minutely but who also had knowledge of ship fittings of the 16th century,” Bolton told the Oakland Tribune.The find “may remake California history,” the newspaper trumpeted. And it did. California history books changed to reflect the possibility that Drake, not Portolá, was the first non-native person to sail through the Golden Gate. Bolton was pleased as punch.There were whispers, though, that something wasn’t right. It was all very strange, almost too serendipitous. A few experts in Elizabethan English said the writing didn’t match the spelling or semantics of the era. A Princeton chemist doubted the metallurgic makeup of the plate matched anything produced in the 1500s, and he wrote a private letter to UC President Robert Sproul expressing his concerns. Sproul apparently kept the letter a secret.Drake’s plate made headlines around the world and drew great acclaim for Bolton and the University of California. As the decades passed, it quietly became accepted as a part of the state’s history.Then, 1977 rolled around. The year marked the 400th anniversary of Drake’s landfall in California and the state planned a grand slate of celebratory events, including sailing a replica of his Golden Hind into the bay. Drake's plate was to be part of the celebration, but before that happened, UC Berkeley professor James D. Hart wanted to verify the plate with modern technology. Hart commissioned a series of lab tests.The results were conclusive: The plate was a fake. Chemists at Berkeley and Oxford found the plate had too much zinc and too little copper to be manufactured in the 16th century. Metal working experts identified the cuts around the edges as made by a modern saw. No one could give it an exact date, but most guessed it was made in the late 19th or early 20th century.At a press conference, Hart speculated it was a prank by Bolton’s well-meaning students, who knew how badly he wanted someone to stumble onto Drake’s plate.“When this great scholar accepted the plate so completely and enthusiastically, they were too embarrassed to reveal it,” Hart guessed.He wasn’t too far off, but it wasn’t until 2003 that the full scope of the deception became public knowledge.---E Clampus Vitus has been interchangeably called historical drinking society and a drinking historical society.For over 100 years, it’s been a fraternal society of choice for California’s top Western history scholars. Bolton and many of his colleagues were members. They called themselves Clampers.Sometime in 1933, five Clampers decided it would be fun to play an innocent prank on their earnest friend Herbert Bolton. Everyone who knew him knew of his quest to find Drake’s plate, so they thought they’d give him a little thrill. They employed an Alameda ship worker to make the brass plate, and they hand-carved the inscription. On the back, they painted the initials “ECV” in transparent fluorescent paint.Then, they drove the imposter plate down to Drake’s Bay and left it there for someone to find. And someone did — it’s believed the first person to find it kept it for a few years before tossing it out of their car, firmly planting it on the hill where Shinn discovered it soon after.The Clampers’ plan had always been to unveil their hoax at an ECV meeting, but things happened too fast. Bolton immediately went public with the news. It spun wildly out of control.The Clampers tried for a time to rein it back in. They ran snarky op-eds in local papers questioning the find, made another plate to show how easy it was, and even published a booklet called “Ye Preposterous Booke of Brasse” that suggested an imposter might paint a secret message on the back of their plate.It was all to no avail. Eventually, the pranksters decided the forgery had gone too far beyond their grasp and was now in the hands of fate. The hoax was only fully unraveled in 2003, when four historians published the story in the California Historical Society magazine."Every one of us is vulnerable to something like this," historian Edward Von der Porten said at the time. "Professor Bolton believed it because he wanted to believe. But it does not detract from his work.”---Bolton died believing his plate was the genuine article.He passed away in his Berkeley home in 1953, a year after he had a stroke that finally limited his prodigious productivity. The morning he died, he was working on notes for a new book.“Up to the time of his June illness, a late light burning in the Bancroft Library on the Berkeley campus meant the eminent scholar was at work,” the Tribune wrote in his front-page obituary. “The light burned so often that university students affectionately started the ‘Save Bolton from Overwork League.’”No one contacted Beyrle Shinn for his recollections of the great historian that day, but if they had, perhaps he would have told this story:Back in 1937, Shinn was standing in Bolton’s office, ready to give up a brass plate for pennies. But Bolton told him he needed to press for more money. This was a significant historical find, Bolton said. Don’t let the university sell you short.In the end, Shinn was able to negotiate a payment of $2,000. He used it to pay for a wedding to his sweetheart and save for their first home.Bolton “made it possible for me to get the $2,000,” Shinn once said.“He’s a good guy all right,” he added, “and smart, too.”