Bold as Brass

NATHAN: Thanks for downloading this episode of BackStory, which explores myths in American history from the root of the folk legend, John Henry, to Robert E. Lee, the man and the myth. If you liked the show, check out BackStoryRadio.org for more episodes.

Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

BRIAN: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

JOANNE: I’m Joanne Freeman.

NATHAN: I’m Nathan Connolly.

BRIAN: We’re going to start today’s show in California in 1936. A young man was walking on a hillside above the San Francisco Bay.

NATHAN: And he stumbled across this piece of metal sticking out of the ground.

BRIAN: This is Peter Hanff, the Deputy Director at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. He says the man who pulled the metal plate out of the dirt didn’t think much of it.

PETER HANFF: He had a hole in the bottom of his car, and the plate with metal seemed about the right size to cover the hole. So it was only later, apparently, that he discovered that it had writing on it.

BRIAN: He took it to a historian at the Bancroft Library named Herbert Bolton. Bolton had been telling his students for years to keep their eyes out for a piece of metal just like this. It was an almost mythic piece of California history.

NATHAN: So what is it? Something from, like, the gold rush?

JOANNE: Yeah, I’m totally stumped and now you have to tell us what it is.

BRIAN: Well, to Bolton, it was proof that Sir Francis Drake, the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, had actually landed on the California coast in 1579. Two years before that, the Queen of England had secretly commissioned the British sea captain to attack Spanish colonies in Central and South America. So that’s what he did.

Drake sailed up and down the Pacific coast, plundering Spanish ports and galleons. He noted in his journals that at one point, he put in for repairs somewhere north of Spanish California.

PETER HANFF: He was able to pull into a safe and fit harbor. And he careened the ship there, which I think meant that he put it on its side, so that they could scrape the barnacles, and re-cock the wood, and make the thing seaworthy again. He apparently encountered local natives, and somehow got the impression that they had ceded to him, on behalf of Elizabeth I in England, this area that he called Nova Albion, which we would think of in English as New England.

NATHAN: Just like an Englishman, to get, like, a plot of land after a pit stop. I’m just saying. Go ahead.

BRIAN: Well to note that pit stop, Nathan, before he sailed off again, Drake engraved this English claim to Nova Albion onto a metal plate. And he left it behind.

Herbert Bolton, the Berkeley historian, fervently believe that Drake’s plate was hidden somewhere along the California coast. It was just waiting to be found. So when the man brought this metal plate to Bolton for authentication, the historian was euphoric.

Here was physical proof of Drake’s landing. And it was now in Bolton’s very hands.

NATHAN: This is actually pretty amazing.

JOANNE: It is amazing. It is amazing.

PETER HANFF: I think once he made out the words, he got rather excited. He said, one of the world’s long lost treasures apparently has been found.

BRIAN: Bolton published the news of the plate’s discovery and helped make it a national story. It also got picked up by the British press. Drake’s name had already been stamped across local landmarks in the Bay Area. Now, the plate became part of local history that was taught in California schools.

Hanff says that when he started working at the Bancroft library in the early 1970s, Drake’s plate was one of the university’s treasures. It was also popular with the public.

PETER HANFF: School kids from all over the state, when they came to Berkeley, came in to look at it, together, in groups. And people would trek from all over the world to come and look at Drake’s plate.

BRIAN: There was just one problem. The plate was a fake.

JOANNE: Ooh.

PETER HANFF: All through the years, there were arguments, published and not published, that the plate was a forgery.

BRIAN: So in the 1970s, officials at the Bancroft Library decided to resolve the controversy and have Drake’s plate tested. They discovered that it was machine-made American brass, likely beaten with a hammer, and then thrown in a fire to make it look old.

JOANNE: Why in the world would someone do that?

NATHAN: You hear the fear in the early Americanist voice there, don’t you?

JOANNE: Exactly. Eek! What do you mean fake evidence that looks old?

BRIAN: Well, Hanff says the leading theory is that some members of a local historical society were trying to pull a prank on their pal, Herbert Bolton.

JOANNE: Oh, no.

BRIAN: Remember, Bolton really wanted proof of this local lore. And when he thought he’d found it, he published his findings before his friends had a chance to tell him that it was a joke.

JOANNE: So why did it even matter where Drake landed in the 16th century? Why did certain people want to believe this plate was real?

PETER HANFF: It was something that people had a large amount of passion about. The significance, I think, is that this occurred quite a few years before the arrival of English to the eastern coast, certainly before Jamestown, and then certainly, as well, quite a few years before the pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts.

NATHAN: Yeah, I mean, just think about the way that American history usually gets taught, right? I mean, it usually starts with the English showing up somewhere, either in Jamestown in 1607, Plymouth Rock in 1620. That leaves places like California, Florida, really most of the country, out of that origin story.

JOANNE: Unless there is a famous English sea captain who shows up in California 30 years before Jamestown.

BRIAN: That’s right, Joanne. It’s a way of including California in that early part of our national narrative, and keeping the British at the center of that narrative. As it turns out, Drake’s landing is a part of local lore in lots of places. Communities up and down the Pacific coast, from California all the way up to Alaska, have claimed that Drake actually landed in their hometown. He’s a busy guy.

JOANNE: That’s amazing. And I had no idea that there was, like, a George Washington slept here thing happening on the other part– on the other coast of the country.

BRIAN: Hanff says that even after the plate was found to be a forgery, people continued to embrace it as part of local history.

PETER HANFF: There were definitely individuals, even with the evidence before them, that simply would not accept the new evidence. They were sure this was Sir Francis Drake’s plate.

BRIAN: Strangely enough, more recent evidence suggests Drake did land near San Francisco Bay. But the rush to claim the fake plate as proof shows the power of the stories we tell about our past. The plate was accepted because it reflected a version of history some people wanted to believe.