Who Made Drake's Plate of Brass? Hint: It Wasn't Francis Drake‪.‬

A brass plate engraved with Francis Drake's claim to vast reaches of North America became this state's greatest historical treasure when it was found and authenticated in the late 1930s. The plate would become California's greatest hoax when it was retested forty years later. In those four decades it distorted the record of Western American exploration history and acquired a complex history of its own. That long-hidden story involves the interplay of misguided humor, wish fulfillment, fear of consequences, failure of courage, and perhaps a bit of malice, that enmeshed both hoaxers and victims. Despite the plate's more than six decades of fame and notoriety, who made the plate, why it was made, and why the hoax lasted as long as it did have never before been made public. The hoaxers hid their participation, but they left a faint trail that could still be followed when the authors and their colleagues began an intensive search in 1991. No single piece of evidence revealed more than a fraction of the whole story, but first-, second-, and even third-hand memories, most recorded twenty to forty years or more after the events they describe, combined with a spoofing letter and an enigmatic book by a roisterous fraternity, built a body of interlinking evidence that led to this reconstruction of the plate's story.