Drake's Plate of Brass
A brass plate claiming California for Elizabeth I, found in 1936 and treated for forty years as the oldest English artefact in the American West. It was a practical joke by a fraternity of history enthusiasts, aimed at one professor, that got away from them.
Why this verdict
Debunked twice over: metallurgical and chemical analysis at Berkeley in the 1970s showed the brass was rolled by a modern process and its trace-element composition was wrong for the sixteenth century, and in 2002 four historians published the reconstructed story of the prank, naming the men who made it.
- Period
- Region
- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
That the inscribed brass plate found in Marin County, California, is the plaque Francis Drake nailed up in June 1579 to claim the land for Queen Elizabeth I — the plate described by the expedition's chaplain Francis Fletcher, complete with the hole for a sixpence bearing the queen's portrait.
02Where it came from
Fletcher's account was well known, and Herbert Bolton, professor of California history and director of the Bancroft Library, had spent his career urging students to look for the plate. That was the setup. Members of E Clampus Vitus, a revived Gold Rush fraternity of historians and Western-lore enthusiasts given to elaborate pranks, made a plate to Fletcher's description and planted it for Bolton to find. Brass was bought at a shipyard and cut with a modern shear; George Clark chiselled the letters; the conspirators painted 'ECV' on the back in paint visible under ultraviolet light so the joke could be revealed.
It then escaped them. The first finder threw it away by a roadside miles from where it was planted. Three years later a shop clerk found it again and took it to Bolton, who announced it, and the California Historical Society bought it for $3,500 before the pranksters could get in front of the story. Attempts to tell Bolton were made and did not land.
03What the record shows
✕ DEBUNKED — Investigated and refuted. Here is what actually happened.
Doubts about the wording and spelling were raised as soon as the text was published in 1937, but an early metallurgical study concluded the plate was consistent with sixteenth-century manufacture and that finding held for forty years.
The physical case closed in the late 1970s. Cyril Stanley Smith's metallurgical examination found the sheet had been produced by modern rolling rather than by hammering, and the edges cut by a machine shear. Helen Michel and Frank Asaro at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory published a chemical study in Archaeometry in 1979: the trace-element profile, particularly the zinc content and the low levels of impurities characteristic of pre-industrial brass, ruled out a sixteenth-century origin.
The human account came later. Edward Von der Porten, Raymond Aker, Robert Allen and James Spitze worked for ten years on the surviving letters, recollections and paint traces and published the reconstruction in California History in 2002: who designed it, who bought the brass, who cut the letters, and how a joke intended for one man ended up in a university library.
04What it cost
The plate is still at the Bancroft Library, exhibited as a forgery. Its forty years as a genuine artefact shaped the popular history of the West and put a fabricated object into textbooks and museum displays across California. The 2002 account is unusually complete for a hoax of this kind, and it makes a point that recurs through this archive: the people who make these things frequently try to confess, and are frequently not believed, because by then the object has become more valuable to its custodians than the truth about it.