Francis Drake's brass plaque

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Francis Drake's brass plate (English Francis Drake's Plate of Brass ) was a forgery planned as a joke in California in 1933 in the vicinity of the E Clampus Vitus (ECV) association. Such a plaque is described when Francis Drake took possession of California in 1579. The artifact was artistically modeled on this description. Contrary to the intentions of the forgers, it was recognized as genuine by several scientists and important historical institutions. The forgery was not discovered until around forty years later.

background

Francis Drake's Landing in California 1579, Theodor de Bry 1590

In 1933, G. Ezra Dane, one of the new founders of the order E Clampus Vitus, inspired four of his friends to commit a fateful forgery. The quintet, along with Dane, the museum curator George Barron, the critic George Clark and the art dealers Lorenz Noll and Albert Dressler, knew the report of one of Drake's officers about his stay in California. According to this, when Sir Francis Drake landed in 1579 in the vicinity of the Golden Gate and San Francisco Bay, a brass plate with a dedication in honor of the British Queen and a sixpence silver coin with her image had been nailed to a post.

The plan was to slip a fake record onto the historian and ECV member Herbert Eugene Bolton and to dissolve the whole thing as part of a clamp assembly . However, only Dane was a member of the order. Barron was a curator at the MH de Young Memorial Museum and obtained a sheet of brass from a shipyard. This was cut there with a pair of scissors . The forgers worked the sheet metal several times with a hammer and glowed it several times before and after the inscription by Clarke (who drew with his initials) and marked the back with ECV with a color only visible under UV light.

The elaborately inscribed and patinated forgery was hidden in the right place in 1933 and, what was not intended, found a short time later by the chauffeur of a hunting company and thrown away several miles further without much notice.

Inscription and appearance of the plate

Original text
BEE IT KNOWNE VNTO ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS.
IVNE.17.1579
BY THE GRACE OF GOD AND IN THE NAME OF
HERR MAIESTY QVEEN ELIZABETH OF ENGLAND AND
HERR SVCCESSORS FOREVER, I TAKE POSSESSION OF THIS
KINGDOME WHOSE KING AND PEOPLE FREELY RESIGNE
THEIR RIGHT AND TITLE IN THE WHOLE LAND VNTO
HERR MAIESTIE. NOW NAMED BY ME AN TO BEE
KNOWNE V (N) TO ALL MEN AS NOVA ALBION.
C G. FRANCIS DRAKE

Translation
Be known to all people through those present here.
June 17, 1579
By the grace of God and in the name of Her
Majesty Queen Elizabeth of England and all her
successors, I take
possession of this kingdom, the king and people of which
voluntarily
cede their rights and titles throughout the land to Her Majesty. This is what I named and
from now on known to everyone as Nova Albion.
CG Francis Drake

The almost rectangular plate contained a hole in which a historical sixpence coin with the image of the queen would have had space and two rectangular recesses on the upper and lower edges so that it could be nailed to a post.

Recognition as authentic

It was not until 1936 that the record reappeared and was offered to Bolton by a student. This consulted with Robert Gordon Sproul, the university president, and Allen L. Chickering, the board of directors of the California Historical Society . Chickering and Bolton were quick to raise the proud amount of $ 3,500 for the record and immediately present the find to the California Historical Society. The fraud could therefore no longer be resolved within the framework of the ECV, since the resolution of the fraud would have been associated with considerable damage to the image of the institutions involved.

Bolton also asked Professor Cohn Fink, Dean of the Department of Electrochemistry at Columbia University , to verify the authenticity of the plate, which led him to examine it with his colleague EP Polushkin in 1938 and identify it as authentic.

Those involved in the forgery kept a low profile for decades and tried in vain to dissuade Bolton - also within the framework of the ECV - with indirect references to his conviction about the authenticity of the plate. As early as 1937, the ECV published a paperback Ye Preposterous Booke of Brasse (“A peculiar little book about Messinck”) with detailed descriptions of individual possible sources of error, including the letters “ECV” on the back of the plaque, which are only visible under UV light down. On May 29th of that year, the ECV also presented a successor to the Drake plaque: At an event with William Fuller, the former chief of the Miwok Indians and member of the ECV, he officially withdrew the alleged donation from California to the Queen of England. According to ECV claims, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt found out about this and was pleased that California could remain a member of the United States . The clamper Edwin Grabhorn, a publisher of history books, published an alleged advertising letter from a "Consolidated Brasse and Novelty Company" for mass-produced historical brass plaques.

Despite the doubts, many people in California continued to believe the record was real. Chickering, for example, rejected doubts about individual formulations and spellings, which were cited by the literature professor Reginald B. Haselden, among others. "Francis Drake's brass plaque" has long been considered California's greatest historical treasure.

Investigation of the forgery

Lorenz Noll began in the 1950s as the last survivor of the counterfeiters to explain and document the details to a small group. The plaque and lavishly made copies of it were given to Queen Elizabeth II, among others , or exhibited as a gem in the Bancroft Library of the University of California .

It was not until the 1970s that the public became aware of the forgery. Renewed metallurgical investigations into the composition, patina and processing marks have now confirmed the earlier doubts about the authenticity. Cyril Stanley from MIT demonstrated, among other things, the production of the sheet metal using modern rollers and the cutting with modern tools based on traces of processing that can be seen under the light microscope . The plate itself had too great a homogeneity and too modern a composition, which was detectable by gamma spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction . In addition, the patina was too even and underdeveloped to have been created through centuries of storage. Electrochemically, a longer fastening with iron ship's nails in the recesses as well as the electrochemical potential compared to the sixpence coin should have been reflected in selective bimetal corrosion , which was not the case.

However, there was no trace of the UV fluorescent paint on the back, which was supposed to indicate ECV.

literature

  • Edward Von der Porten, Raymond Aker, Robert W. Allen, James M. Tip: Who Made Drake's Plate of Brass? Hint: It Wasn't Francis Drake . In: California History 81, 2002, No. 2, pp. 116-133.
  • Francis Pretty: Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round The World, 1580 . In: Voyages and Travels. Ancient and Modern, with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations . PF Collier and son, New York [1910] ( The Harvard classics Vol. XXXIII, online in Paul Halsall (Ed.): Modern History Sourcebook . 1998).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Francis Pretty: Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round The World, 1580 . In: Voyages and Travels. Ancient and Modern, with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations . PF Collier and son, New York [1910] ( The Harvard classics Vol. XXXIII, online in Paul Halsall (Ed.): Modern History Sourcebook . 1998).
  2. ^ A b Edward Von der Porten, Raymond Aker, Robert W. Allen, James M. Point: Who Made Drake's Plate of Brass? Hint: It Wasn't Francis Drake . In: California History 81, 2002, No. 2, pp. 116-133 ( JSTOR 25177677 with restricted access).
  3. ↑ Albert Shumate: The Mysterious History of E Clampus Vitus. ECV Address, June 25, 1991. In: Julia C. Bulette Chapter 1864. The Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus , accessed August 2, 2010.
  4. ↑ a b Kathleen Maclay: Who made Drake's “plate of brasse”? Historical journal reports secrets behind infamous “Drake's Plate” hoax . UC Berkeley press release , February 18, 2003, accessed August 2, 2010.
  5. ^ Cyril Stanley Smith's 1976 Metallurgical Report on "Francis Drake's Brass Plate" . In: MIT Institute Archives & Special Collections , November 2001, accessed August 2, 2010.