Drake’s Plate of Brass
from Whole Stole Junipero Serra’s Heart in a Jar?
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An accurate account of writer John Graham’s visit to Hank Peabody, director of the El Fornio Historical, while covering the events surrounding the theft of Junipero Serra’s heart from the historical society.
By John Graham
Photo of the Citizens Federal Savings Bank ashtray
depicting Drake’s Plate of Brass.WHEN I VISITED HANK PEABODY on my second visit, he took me out to a swap meet. Of the many pursuits in Peabody’s oeuvre it’s hard to miss his accumulation of what I call Grand Californica (known to some as Great California Crap).
Within his milieu is a collection of Jackalopes—those apparent jack rabbits sprouting antelope horns, found more on postcards than in nature. Jackalopes are part tourist kitsch and part legend, the typical pull-your-leg kind of phenonema that locals love subjecting outsiders to. With an office containing old maps and glassed cases—some containing more than just dusty turd material and kids’ sugar cube missions—Peabody seems suited to his job as a curator.
On this particular outing,best replica watches we walked amongst the vendor tables set up in the bazaar. It was a Saturday. Everyone seemed to know him.
“Hank,” a lanky woman with red hair, in her late forties, came out from behind a table of beads, knives, pipes, brass doo-dads and manuscripts.
“Helene,” he greeted her.
“I’ve got something for you.”
Helene Zucker seemed to be waiting for Hank’s arrival. She had been plying her wears at flea markets and fairs up and down the coast for the last twenty-five years. She went to the other side of the table and brought back an ashtray. It was rectangular and charcoal glass-colored, about four inches wide and three inches tall, with yellow lettering and an image imprinted on it.
Hank looked it over. “Oh, yeah,” passing it in front of the sun to see if there were cracks.
“It’s from before the ruse was up,” Helene said.
Hank read aloud, “ `Drake’s Plate of Brass. Presented by Citizen’s Federal Savings’. “
Hank offered Helene ten bucks on the spot. Helene wanted twenty and like two old stage performers who had perfected their routine through the years, they settled on fifteen.
: The story of Drake’s Plate of Brass is a lot like that of the Jackalope, part truth and part myth-making, one of California history’s great holy grails. Here is how the plate, or in this case, the ashtray reads:“BEE IT KNOWNE VNTO ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS.
IVNE.17.1579
BY THE GRACE OF GOD AND IN THE NAME OF HERR MAIESTYQVEEN
E LIZABETH 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 MAIESTIEES KEEPEING. NOW NAMED BY ME AN TO BEE KNOWNE V(N) TO ALL MEN AS NOVA ALBION.
G. FRANCIS DRAKE!”
Hank remarked,bell & ross replica watches “For something that was supposed to be so official, it sure looks like some kid did it with crayons and construction paper. But still, a great story.”
In 1579, Sir Francis Drake, the English privateer, plunderer and slave trader, riding his bark the “Golden Hinde” with a crew of twenty one, traversed the West Coast in search of Spanish galleons and their spoils. While Drake was smart, ambitious and hardworking, he had no interest whatsoever in finding loot on his own. There were others who could do that work for him—namely the colonial Spanish.
But during its voyage up around the cape and along the west coast of South and North America, The Hinde took a trouncing, so Drake hauled out onto a beach in what is now Marin County, California. Francis Pretty, a diarist on board the ship, mentions in his journal Drake leaving a “plate of brasse,” granting “her majesties and successors right and title to that kingdome.”
Drake called the land Nova Albion, or New England. The area is now called Drake’s Bay and is located just south of Pt. Reyes, one of the most majestic spots on the California coast. It is, in fact, today a national park, with Drake’s name all over a part of it.
In “Drake’s Bay," the Captain and his company cavorted with the native people they encountered. They treated Drake and his people as demi-gods, with Drake, no doubt, playing the angle up. It has even been said that he left some of his men behind to seed a colony, but that suggestion has never been proven. Even by the turn of the last century, the precise location that Drake and party hauled out has never been exacted. There is some suggestion that it was actually as far north a British Columbia. But that, too, is conjecture.
Alas, the actual brass plate mentioned in Mr. Pretty’s journal had, for centuries, never been found. It would seem that the object was lost to history, perhaps sunken in the ever-changing dunes of the estuary—or even taken up and sold for its precious metals by some native tribesman as the advent of colonial pressures split the economy and sociology of his world.
Anyone could have taken it away, and it had to be somewhere.
Centuries crept by—with storm, earthquake and migration—and along comes Herbert E. Bolton, director of the Brancroft Library, educator and historian.
Bolton chaired the history department at Berkeley for twenty-two years, and was an expert in Spanish California. He loved telling the story of the brass plate to his students. Convinced of its existence, Professor Bolton freely gave directions as to where one might encounter the plate should a picnic or hike be arranged in the area.
It was in 1936 that two members of the California Historical Society—Leon Bocqueraz and Anson Stiles Blake—found themselves in the area hunting with their chauffeur, William Caldeira. Misters Bocqueraz and Blake left their driver to chase game. While kicking around, waiting for the hunting party to return, Mr. Caldeira came upon a flat piece of metal in the chalky dirt. How he came to be at the spot he found himself at is lost to history, but the universal call of the wild is a likely conjecture.
When Bocqueraz and Stiles returned, Caldeira showed them the piece. Both members of the California Historical Society looked the artifact over and decided to throw it in the trunk. Or, in other words, both members of the California Historical Society looked the artifact over and decided to throw it in the trunk. Some weeks later, while cleaning the car, chauffeur Caldeira found the plate again and decided to throw it off to the side of the road, around San Rafael, near the one-time ferry stop, twenty miles from the original spot the plaque was located.
There it sat in the dust and weeds until it was rediscovered in 1936 by Beryle Shinn. Shinn has been described in records as a “shop clerk.” One rainy day, Mr. Shinn showed the plaque to a friend in Berkeley who had taken Bolton’s class, and together they brought the brass plaque to him. Bolton, after years of telling the story and sending enquiring minds up the coast in search of weekend treasures, must have thought that his quest for the Grail was over.
The professor and his colleagues at the California Historical Society—and, by this time, the University of California—offered twenty-five hundred dollars to Shinn to take possession of the plate. At first Shinn agreed, but first he wanted to show it to his uncle before parting with his discovery.
Mr. Shinn disappeared for four days. These four days are lost to history. What Uncle Shinn had to say or not say about the plate has never been documented.
By this time, Bolton and lot began to panic. The financial reward was increased to thirty-five hundred dollars. Oblivious to the drama he was causing, Shinn drove a hard bargain without even knowing it. But just as soon as he had disappeared, Shinn reappeared and took the plate to Bolton where it was immediately given as a donation to the Brancroft Library. The old professor then offered up his entire professional career on April 6, 1937 at the California Historical Society. Looking from the podium, he proclaimed, “One of the world's long-lost historical treasures apparently has been found! . . . The authenticity of the tablet seems to me beyond all reasonable doubt."
As Moses and Joseph Smith can tell you, tablets can make you feel a certain way.
Early on there were doubters. A spoof of the plate was produced to simply prove that a fake was possible. But Bolton wouldn’t budge. Then E Clampus Vitus published their book, “Ye Preposturous Booke of Brasse,” telling the reader what to look for that would prove the whole thing a hoax—the fact that they could spell about as well as Drake’s people should have been a clue.
ECV or the “Clampers,” as they are called, are “dedicated to the erection of historical plaques, the protection of widows and orphans, especially the widows, and having a grand time while accomplishing these purposes.” A regular part of the group’s activities was the undoing of their own members through hoaxes and ripe activity.
All of this counter-narrative did nothing to calm Bolton’s earnestness. He believed. In 1938, Robert Gordon Sproul, the president of the University of California, and one of Bolton’s friends and original supporters, began to cast doubt on the plate himself. He obtained the professional services of one Cohn Fink, a professor of Electrochemistry at Columbia University, to authenticate the plate once and for all. Fink, it seemed, had not read the ECV booklet or even knew about its existence, and went on to authenticate the piece quickly. It is “our opinions that the brass plate examined by us is the genuine Drake Plate.”
Fireworks, marching band and majorettes all filed into the room.
From that moment on, forty years of textbooks, postcards, souvenirs, ashtrays, balloons, secret decoder rings and even a ceremonial gift to Queen Elizabeth II were produced using the likeness of Drake’s Plate of Brasse.
The spelling remained the same.
The quadricentennial of Drake’s landing arrived in 1977. Aside from college Toga parties and lead-lined aqueducts, words like “quadricentennial” are one way the Romans let us know that they still have a large influence in our world. Therefore, to commemorate the four hundred years since the discovery of Drake’s Plate of Brass(e), James Hart, now the director of the Bancroft Library (Bolton died in 1953 at the age of 82), had the specimen tested at Cal Berkeley by Helen Michel and Frank Asara using neutron activation analysis. The test was but a formality and all Hart asked for was a four-page letter of authenticity that he could quote from for the speech and accompanying brochure.
Instead, when they drilled, Michel and Asara found strips of newish, uncorroded metal. And the thickness of the plate was too constant for something that was supposed to have been hammered, as it would have been by the blacksmith aboard the Golden Hinde. Then the neutron analysis revealed too much zinc in the plate (zinc hadn’t been discovered or in use at the time of Drake). Further texts were conducted until eventually Hart, who was looking for a short letter of authenticity, ended up getting a forty-five page letter of declamation.
Whoops.
Years later, after some research and piecing together of events, a press conference was held—February 13, 2003—some sixty-six years after Bolton’s declaration of authenticity. Drake’s Plate of Brass, it was divulged, was simply a practical joke organized by friends of Herbert E. Bolton.
Researchers discovered that what was supposed to be a clever trick amongst friends flew out of control by the time the plate was discovered then tossed to the side of the road in San Rafael.
As it turns out the leader of ECV, Ezra Dane, initiated the hoax to entertain Bolton. But the fine line between perpetrating a hoax and subtly calling attention to its inauthenticity—by way of basic declaration—blurred with momentum. Some people will always want to believe in faeries. Like Jack Lemmon in drag at the end of “Some Like It Hot,” no matter how many clues his character gave to Joe E. Brown as to the likelihood of his gender, Brown, like Bolton, was certain to motor sweetly into the sunset of desire.
To be accurate, the co-conspirators in the hoax were Albert Dressler, Lorenz Noll, George Clark and George Barron. Researchers figured that the plaque was created by the lot in 1933.
The instigators bought the brass from a local shipyard, banged the inscription by their own hand, even painting “ECV” on the back of the plate with paint visible only under ultraviolet rays. Soon, what was supposed to amount to the weekend stealing of the other team’s mascot, turned into sixty-odd years of reputation-breaking “history” turned upside-down and backwards in a mirror.
Nervously, Hank Peabody ran his hand over his mouth before speaking.
“It’s your basic bullshit,” he said to me, the swap meet din lurking in the background. “Like the Jackalope. Junipero Serra’s heart in the jar is borderline Drake’s Plate of Brass. How can you really believe it?”
Peabody continued. “The historical society could say that they had Junipero Serra’s heart in a jar, but how could they authenticate it? Who was there when the event occurred and could say, `Yeah, that’s really his heart. I cut it out myself.’ ”
Hank looked doubtful for the first time since we had begun our meetings. He had appeared uncertain before, unwilling to qualify subjects that were best left to narrative conjecture, but the grail of Drake’s Plate of Brass—and Bolton’s career crippling assuredness—seem to trickle up through the well of Hank Peabody’s confidence. After all, he was a man who staked his claim on the veracity of people’s doo doo, some of which hadn’t been around for a dozen centuries.
“What if you grabbed a hold of something in your career that seemed like it had traction,” he wondered aloud. “And then it proved to be untrue . . .”
He stared off into the crowd, holding the Federal Savings Bank ashtray in his hand at his side as another person called out his name.
