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If history has a margin, this is where it lives. I'm Wendell Marchant, and this is the footnote. Page ten of the Imperial Valley Press, December 22nd, 1941, two weeks after Pearl Harbor. The editorial column is about welders striking the Pacific shipyards. The next column is about a gas plant going up in Texas. Down at the bottom, a small wire item from San Francisco. Four paragraphs run as filler. The headline Drake's brass plate proved authentic again. The plate, the paper says, was set up by Sir Francis Drake at Drake's Bay in 1579 and discovered in 1936. Its authenticity, the paper says, has just been further strengthened by fragments of old Chinese porcelain, nearly 350 years old, found in an Indian shell mound on a peninsula north of the city. The man making the announcement is from the University of California. On that morning, in the middle of a world war, the Imperial Valley Press is telling its readers that Francis Drake's California is real, in brass, on the coast where he was supposed to have careened the Golden Hind. The story will hold up for another 36 years. The plate is a fake. The brass came from a hardware store. The men who made it had meant the prank to last a week, and could not, when the trap was sprung, find the courage to spring it back. To understand how a piece of stamped sheet brass came to be authenticated by professors and newspapers for forty years, you have to start with two things. The first is what Sir Francis Drake supposedly did in 1579. The second is a man named Herbert Eugene Bolton, who wanted very badly for him to have done it. Drake left England in 1577 on what was nominally a trading expedition, and was, in practice, a license to rob the Spanish Empire blind. He sailed down the Atlantic, around Cape Horn, up the Pacific coast of South America, took ship after ship at his leisure, and then, his hold full of silver and his crew nervous about retracing the route, kept going north. How far north remains charitably contested. Drake's own log was lost. The accounts published after his return are vague in the way that accounts produced under royal patronage are vague when piracy is on the receipts. What we know is that somewhere on the western coast of North America, he stopped, repaired the Golden Hind, took possession of the country for Queen Elizabeth, gave it the name Nova Albion, and left. He also, according to the report assembled afterward by his chaplain, left a plate. The chaplain's account, in language I will paraphrase rather than pretend to quote, describes a brass plate nailed to a great post, bearing the queen's name, the date of arrival, and a sixpence with her image set into a hole in the metal. Then he sailed away, and the plate, for 350 years, did the convenient thing artifacts do when no one wants to hear they are missing. It disappeared. The argument over where exactly Drake stopped became a parlor sport on the California coast through the 1800s and into the 1900s. Drake's Bay, the long shallow inlet behind Point Reyes, was the leading candidate on the strength of the description and the latitude. Other claimants up and down the coast had their partisans, but Drake's Bay had the prestige of the obvious answer, and it had Herbert Bolton. Bolton was the chair of the history department at the University of California at Berkeley. He had built almost single-handedly the scholarly field called the History of the Spanish Borderlands, the long, slow, neglected story of how Spanish California and Spanish Texas and Spanish New Mexico were actually administered. Who had walked those trails where the missions had stood? He was a serious man, a working historian who tramped through deserts to read inscriptions on his own. He had taught a generation of California's historians. He had supervised 75 doctoral dissertations. He had, in 1932, been elected president of the American Historical Association, the most senior office the discipline confers. He was 66 years old when the plate would arrive in his office. Four years past the age at which most professors of his rank had begun to think about emeritus titles, and he had not yet been handed the gift he had been waiting for. He was also, by the testimony of every student who left a memoir of him, a man in love with his subject, in a way that bordered on personal grief. He believed in Drake's bay. He had for years told his classes that someday a Berkeley student would walk up the hill with the plate of brass in his hand. He said this often enough and publicly enough that a certain group of men decided in the early 1930s that the universe would benefit if Bolton's prophecy were arranged for him. Who that group was matters. They were members of an organization called the Ancient and Honorable Order of E. Clampus Vitus. The name is mock Latin, it means nothing. The order itself meant a great deal in a specific California way. It had been a fraternal society in the Gold Rush camps, part charity, part travesty of Freemasonry, and it had been revived in the 1930s by a clutch of San Francisco historians and antiquarians, who liked to drink, liked to dress up, and liked to plant brass plaques on the side of any building that had ever housed a saloon. They called themselves the Clampers. They were not, by any reasonable definition, frauds. They paid for legitimate historical markers, they funded scholarships, they knew their California history cold. They were also, when the mood was on them, capable of the kind of joke that requires six months of preparation and a man with a metal shears. In the early thirties, a clamper named George Ezra Dane and several friends, the exact roster has been argued ever since, got it into their heads to deliver Bolton his prophecy. They cut a rectangle of sheet brass about five inches by eight. They hammered an inscription onto it in block letters, in English, the Queen's name, the date 1579, the words Nova Albion, a hole for the sickpence. They aged the plate by burning, beating, and burying it. And, in what would become the central piece of evidence against them, they painted three letters on the reverse, in fluorescent paint that they expected to glow under ultraviolet light. E. C. V. The clampers' initials, their signature, their punchline. The plate was placed somewhere on the Marin County coast near Drake's Bay in 1933. And then the joke ran into the first wall it would run into. Because no one found it. Pranks of this kind require an audience. The plate sat in the brush, and for two years nothing happened. The clampers, by all accounts, did not check on it. They had moved on to other planks of brass, on other walls of other buildings. The plate of New Albion was, for a moment, a forgotten thing. In 1936 it was found. The man who found it was a chauffeur named William Caldera, who picked it up by the side of the road on the way back from a hunting trip, brought it as far as San Francisco, decided it was a piece of trash, and threw it out the car window in a vacant lot in San Rafael. He thought about it for a moment, decided it might be worth something, went back for it. Could not find it. A year later, in 1937, a shop clerk named Beryl Shin was changing a tire near the same vacant lot on the same road. He saw a piece of metal sticking out of the dirt. He pulled it out. He took it home. He looked at the inscription, made nothing of it, and put it in the trunk of his car as a possible handy piece of sheet metal for some future repair. Then he mentioned it to a friend who said, You should take that to the man at Berkeley. What happened in Herbert Bolton's office that afternoon has been described by witnesses. But the description that is held up best is Bolton's own, written, alas, in the third person of academic prose. He saw the plate. He read the inscription. He understood, in the time it takes to read four lines, that the prophecy had been fulfilled. The undergraduate had not technically walked up the hill, but the principal held. He paid Shin $3,500 eventually, raised by subscription, for the plate. He stayed up that night writing. He announced the discovery to the California Historical Society in April of 1937. He had it examined by a metallurgist who pronounced the brass consistent with 16th century manufacture on the basis of trace elements that, at the time, were genuinely difficult to measure. He had it examined by an English historian who pronounced the language and the lettering consistent with the chaplain's account. He published. The plate was put on display at the Bancroft Library on the Berkeley campus. He took it up and down the state. He gave lectures on it at the Commonwealth Club, at the Bohemian Club, at the Native Sons of the Golden West, at the California Academy of Sciences. He sat for photographs with it for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Examiner, the Oakland Tribune. The press, which had a long affection for him, gave him the front page. Postcards were printed. Replicas were cast in bronze and presented with appropriate ceremony to Queen Elizabeth II on her visit to California decades later. And the clampers, the men who had cut and burned and buried the original, did nothing. This is the part of the story I find I keep returning to. Not the forgery. Forgeries are everywhere. Not the credulity. Credulity is everywhere too. The part I cannot get out of my head is the moment in 1937 when George Ezra Dane and his friends, reading the newspapers, understood that Bolton had taken the bait, had taken it deeper than they had ever planned, and that to confess now was to destroy a man they liked. Bolton had staked his reputation on the plate. He had spoken to legislators about the plate. He had told the native sons of the Golden West that the plate was the foundation stone of California's beginnings. They had meant to make him laugh at himself for a Tuesday afternoon. They had succeeded in attaching his life's romantic argument to a piece of brass they had bought for under a dollar at a hardware store. There is a letter, a clamper letter, much disputed in its dating, but probably from the early 40s, in which one of the conspirators puts it this way, and I will paraphrase. We set out to tease him, and we ended up putting him on a horse he could not get off. The fluorescent ECV on the back of the plate was checked at one point by a curator. Either it had faded or it was wiped, or it was simply not held under the right light. The plate stayed up. The clampers stayed quiet. Which brings us back, in a way, to the small item in the Imperial Valley Press of December 22nd, 1941. By that morning, Bolton had been defending his attribution for four years. The plate was, in the literature of California history, no longer in dispute. And here was a wire story from San Francisco saying that the plate's authenticity had been, in the paper's word, strengthened by the discovery of fragments of old Chinese porcelain in an Indian shell mound called the Astero Mound. The argument, as the paper presented it, was that the native people who had lived at the mound had been alive at the right century to have had contact with Drake's crew, and that this set of porcelain shards therefore raised, by some unstated chain of inference, the probability that the plate was genuine. It did no such thing, of course. The porcelain was probably real. It was probably old. It was probably evidence of late Ming period contact, possibly through Spanish or Portuguese trade routes with the California coast. None of which had anything to do with whether one specific piece of brass found by a shop clerk in a vacant lot had been left there by Sir Francis Drake. But the porcelain was published. The porcelain was reported. The porcelain became evidence. And a wire story went out on the United Press teleprinter on a December morning and was set in type on page 10 between an editorial about Union welders and a recipe for chicken paprika casserole. That, I think, is the texture of how a hoax becomes history. Not in one announcement, in a thousand small ones, each pointing at the previous one as proof. Bolton died in 1953, still convinced. By then the plate had been thoroughly absorbed into the California public memory. School textbooks reproduced it. Drake's Bay had a state park, with the plate's text on the visitor sign. Generations of California schoolchildren learned that the first European writing on the west coast of North America was made by an English sea captain in 1579 and could be touched in person behind glass at the Bancroft Library. In 1977, on the 400th anniversary of Drake's voyage, the Bancroft Library decided to mark the occasion by submitting the plate to a battery of modern tests. By then, the metallurgical science had improved by an order of magnitude. Helen Michelle and Frank Asaro, at what was then the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, ran the brass through neutron activation analysis. They measured trace element ratios. They compared the result against inventoried samples of Elizabethan brass and against samples of 20th century rolled stock. Helen Michelle was a chemist, not a historian. She had no horse in the race. She had been brought in because the Bancroft, on the 400th anniversary, wanted to be thorough, and because the science had moved on since the metallurgists of the 1930s had peered through optical microscopes and made their best guess. The plate was modern. It was, the chemists concluded, of 19th or 20th century manufacture. The zinc was too pure, the lead isotopes were wrong. The edges showed marks consistent with a modern mechanical shear. The hammering was, in retrospect, exactly the sort of thing one would do if one wanted, in a hurry, to make sheet stock look forged. The Bancroft announced the findings with some grace. The plate was reclassified at first as a forgery of uncertain origin. The textbooks were quietly amended. The state park sign was repainted. The plate itself was kept on display, because the story of the plate had become by then more interesting than the plate. The rest, as they say, is footnoting. In 2003, a scholar named Edward Von der Porten, working with three colleagues, published a careful reconstruction of what almost certainly happened. They named the Clampers, they named George Ezra Dane and his associates. They reproduced the chain of letters, the records of the meetings, the surviving correspondence of the men who had spent the last decades of their lives watching their joke harden into law. They were, by the time the truth was published, all of them dead. The most affecting document in the file, to my reading, is a memorandum that one of the conspirators left for his family, to be opened after his death. It has been described in print, though it remains in private hands. The man writes, in substance, that he is sorry. He says that they had not expected Bolton to take the plate as real for more than a week. He says that by the time it was clear how seriously Bolton had taken it, they could not bring themselves to humiliate the old man. He says that the longer they waited, the harder it became to speak. He says that he hopes, when the truth comes out, history will be kind to Bolton. He does not ask history to be kind to him. He does not ask history to be kind to him. I think about that clamper sometimes when I am sitting in front of these old newspapers, and a story like the December 22nd wire item slides under my eye. A man writing, in private, a confession he is too embarrassed to make in public. A historian dying four years before the chemists could have told him. A piece of brass in a glass case in a university library, looked at by schoolchildren who took it on faith because the adults around them had taken it on faith, because the professor had taken it on faith because. Because Bolton had told his classes a story for thirty years, and the universe, in the form of two men with a hammer and a half dollar's worth of metal, had answered him. The Drake plate is, on the surface, a story about scholarship being fooled. That is the story the trade press told in 1977, and it is the story most of the popular accounts have told since. It is the wrong story, or at least it is the easy one. Scholarship was not fooled. Scholarship was given exactly the thing it had asked for. A man who had built his life on the conviction that Drake's Bay was the right answer, was handed an artifact that said so, in English, in brass. The forensics of 1937 would have raised an eyebrow at the trace elements. The forensics of 1977, when they were finally invited to look, settled the matter in an afternoon. The reason the matter was not settled for 40 years is not that no one knew how to ask the questions. The reason was that no one was. Wanted the answer, including, in the end, the men who knew. The Clampers could have ended the thing at any time, in any one of those forty years, with a single letter to the San Francisco Chronicle. They did not. Their joke had grown into someone else's monument. And they discovered, as we all discover in different keys, that the only thing more uncomfortable than being caught in a lie is being the one who tells the truth that everyone has agreed to ignore. The trick is older than Drake. There is a reason the best forgeries, the Vinland map, the Piltdown Skull, the Hitler diaries, are not technical marvels. They are exactly the artifacts the people who want them have already imagined. The job of the forger, properly understood, is not to invent, it is to listen. He waits in a tavern or a faculty club or a county historical society and lets the people around him tell him what they wish they had. Then, he goes home and makes it. A small note, in closing, on the Astero Mound. The Chinese porcelain that Dr. Heiser dug up in 1941 was, as far as I can tell from the subsequent archaeology, genuine. The Coast Miwok people of the Drake's Bay Area do appear to have come into possession at some point in the late 16th or early 17th century of pieces of Ming dynasty pottery. The most likely source is the wreck of a Manila galleon, the San Augustine, which broke up off Point Reyes in 1595 and which, by all serious account, did leave debris that the local people incorporated into their household goods. The porcelain shards in the shell mound are an artifact of California history. They are not, however, an artifact of Sir Francis Drake. Dr. Heiser, to his credit, would later be one of the few California archaeologists to remain quietly skeptical of the plate. He let the porcelain stand. He did not press the connection. Whether he came to the skepticism on his own or whether someone whispered the clamper story to him at a faculty club lunch, I cannot say. 1941 was a difficult December to publish a doubt about a national symbol. He went back to the Shell Mounds. The mound and the plate in his later writing are not connected. There is, on the back of the original plate, the one still kept at Berkeley, a slight discoloration in the pattern of three letters, which under modern imaging is now visible. E. C. V. The fluorescent paint did not, after all, entirely fade. It was on the plate, faintly, the entire time. Bolton, presumably, never thought to look. The metallurgist in 1937 did not turn the plate over and ask what the smudge meant. The curators, for forty years, dusted around it. The clampers had signed their work. We could not see it because we did not look. They are the ones we have already drafted in our heads, and that someone, with kindness or with mischief, sits down at the table and hands a cross to us already finished.