Gaye LeBaron: The time a band of merry pranksters rewrote Sir Francis Drake’s history

All regions, counties, towns or neighborhoods that have been populated more than 10 minutes have stories that should not be allowed to die.

Around here, we have a long list — from as old as Santa Rosa’s “theft” of the courthouse from Sonoma in 1854 to why the freeway cuts our town in half.

Some qualify as “ancient,” and, in the regional category, Drake’s “Plate of Brass” tops that list.

Everyone who went to grammar school in the U.S. of A. knows — or should — about Francis Drake. The bold privateer and the first English sea captain to — as the old text books phrase it — “circumnavigate the globe.” Big words to highlight big history.

Drake and his crew were capturing Spanish ships and relieving them of their cargoes of New World gold as they toured. That could be tough work and hard on the sturdiest of English galleons. So he took a timeout from his profitable world tour to beach his Golden Hind for repairs. The crew and their captain, who was destined for knighthood, hoisted the Hind out of the sea and tilted her up for scraping, cleaning and mending.

According to logs kept by the chaplain and other crew members, they spent 39 days ashore on our Pacific Coast, lingering just down the road, on the Point Reyes peninsula, introducing themselves to the Coast Miwoks and, with Drake, of course, claiming everything in sight and beyond for QE1 and jolly olde England.

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THAT WAS 450 years ago and Sir Francis is still making headlines.

Just last month there was yet another “Drake story” in the news. A site on the ocean side of the Point Reyes National Seashore was officially designated as Drake’s Cove, making a cluster of four official Drake sites along that rugged Marin coastline.

There’s Drakes Bay, Drake’s Beach, Drakes Estero and now the most sheltered spot, Drake’s Cove, which historians say, is the place where the Golden Hind was careened and the actual work was done. (An editor’s aside: The inconsistent apostrophe use across the various names is correct.) But there is still no trace of the metal plate Drake put up to claim the land for England, a move which historians like to remind us made “Nova Albion” as he christened it, England’s first claim in the “New World” — 28 years before Jamestown, or the designation of the East Coast as “New England.”

According to the National Parks’ website: “Once the repairs to his ship, the Golden Hind, were completed, Drake claimed the land for England by setting up a stout post to which he nailed a metal plate engraved with his declaration and a sixpence and named the land Nova Albion.”

It’s not surprising, given the weather and the sea and the fact that sand moves with wind and water, that there is no trace, no reported “sightings” of that original sign nor its post, however “stout” it was.

But as the result of a prank conceived by fun-loving historians 50 years hence, the whole notion of the landing site got juggled in the public mind and, almost immediately, was out of control.

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IT IS a complex tale told in “The Mystery of the Plate of Brass,” a little book subtitled “California’s Greatest Hoax” written by a quartet of Drake historians, including the longtime Santa Rosa High history teacher and tireless Drake tracer, the late Edward Von der Porten.

It’s far too long a story to tell in this space. Suffice to say the hoax survived, in one form or another, for several decades.

What began as a joke in the early 1930s wasn’t clearly defined and explained until somewhere around 2003. If then.

By that time, of course, the 400th anniversary celebration of Drake’s visit in 1997 had been canceled. The esteemed Dr. Herbert Bolton, UC Berkeley history professor and director of the campus’s prestigious Bancroft Library who was pranksters’ target, had died. So had all of the jolly members, many academics, of E Clampus Vitus, of an organization dating to the California Gold Rush that was favored by scholars and prided itself, then and now, on a roaring good combination of history and old-fashioned carousing.

It was the “Clampers” who created a phony “Plate of Brass” that resembled what Drake’s original was thought to be, and left it to be found in or near Drake’s Cove.

The supposition was that it would be “discovered by” or “reported to” one of their members, Dr. Bolton, who was the leading Drake scholar on the Pacific Coast — at least. And he would have a good laugh.

To say it “went awry” would be the understatement of the Bay Area’s 20th century history.

Squeezing a century of complexities into a paragraph, we can explain that in 1933, the same year the fake plate was produced, a Bay Area banker’s chauffeur, killing time while his boss was hunting on the peninsula, poked around in the sand and turned up the plate.

He showed it to his employer, Leon Bocqueraz, coincidentally a Cal alum, and then chucked it into the trunk to investigate later. Several weeks passed, as the story goes, before he found it as he cleaning out the car on an auto-ferry ride across the bay from Richmond. (It would be 20 years or more before there was a bridge). Once ashore, deeming the piece of sheet metal worthless, whatever the inscription said, he tossed it out along the road to San Rafael.

Now, fast forward three years to 1936 when a shop clerk named Shinn found it in the weeds at roadside, and showed it to a friend who was a Cal student, who suggested he take it to Professor Bolton, whose Drake interest was well known.

“The rest,” as they say, “is history.” Bolton believed it! Took it and ran with it, calling on the greatly respected UC president, Robert Gordon Sproul, to share the glory. His scholarly joy was overwhelming. The perpetrators dared not speak truth to such historical power. It became history gone awry.

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FAST-FORWARD to the late ‘70s, well past the demise of Professor Bolton and many (maybe all) of those who knew the whole truth of the Plate of Brass that sat proudly in its glass case at the entrance to UC’s Bancroft Library.

In all the kerfuffle over how to celebrate the quadricentennial of Drake’s voyage, questions were raised. One at a time, family members spoke up — at least within the circle of the Drake Navigators Guild — and the Clampers.

The fake plate was now widely acknowledged, if not widely publicized. But the damage was done. Among those who had apparently believed in it was a president of the California Historical Society who persisted in his belief that Drake had entered the bay and landed somewhere near San Quentin point. So arguments grew louder as revelations increased, making more headlines. The notion of a grand celebration for the 400th became less and less likely and faded into the coastal fogs.

But the Drake scholars, many members of the Guild, continued to sift sand and explore on the peninsula for three more decades, finding shards of Chinese pottery believed to come from Drake’s cargo, pacing off measurements based on the dimensions of the Golden Hind. Almost to a man, they were convinced. And convincing.

The fact that there are now official site designations is a credit to the persistence of these dedicated historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, who documented, many times over, the landing site.

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THE PHONY Plate of Brass was a prank, pure and simple. And, in retrospect an amazingly silly move by educated people who should have known better. The controversy flooded the letters-to-the-editor columns of Bay Area newspapers, arguing all sides of the issue relentlessly. Columnists, as you might imagine, were delighted to dip their oars in that sea of controversy.

Maritime writer Harold Gilliam filled the pink section of the Sunday Chronicle with multiple Drake stories. The great Herb Caen chipped in when things got comical — or outrageous. Those who delighted in the culpability of the pundits checked in regularly.

There was plenty of local participation in the anniversary nonevent. Ed Mannion — the droll South County historian used his “Rear View Mirror” column in the Argus-Courier to say that Drake’s navigator had become confused in the “stinkynne fogs” mentioned in the log books and reached the mouth of a northern slough on a high tide that carried the Golden Hind all the way to downtown Petaluma.

Meanwhile another Argus columnist, Bob Wells, a straight-faced comedian who held forth in the backroom at Volpi’s grocery in the ‘70s, correctly, as it turned out, blamed the “historical pranksters” of E Clampus Vitus. They were ones, Wells insisted, who instigating the longest-lasting fiasco in Clamper history.

Wells was also the author of a column which claimed to “settle the matter.” He wrote of a Drake descendant’s recent death and reported that heirs, going through personal effects on his Devonshire estate, found a tin trunk in the attic with the inscription “F.Drake” on the lid.

Inside, on top, was a handwritten note — with lots of ruffles and flourishes, which read: “Tell Gilliam I landed at Drake’s Bay.”

So be it.

With all four Drake sites officially recognized now, can we please breathe a sigh of relief and say:

“Thanks to the heavens and the Virgin Queen, we’ve finally settled the Drake issue.

Dare we say ‘once and for all’?”