Drake in North America

[rynner2]

Drake's Brass Plaque - A Hoax!

This story interests me because of a family connection (which I have mentioned elsewhere on this MB):

It turns out that one of the West's enduring mysteries -- a tale of 16th century explorers and a perplexing brass plaque -- was a 1930s prank sprung on a university professor by a group of friends.

Tests in the late 1970s proved that the small brass plate with old English inscriptions was not in fact the one left by Sir Francis Drake when he sheltered just north of San Francisco in 1579.

One puzzle remained: just which 20th century pranksters planted the instant-antique in rural Marin County, and then stood aside as Professor Herbert Bolton rushed to tell the world of what he hailed as "one of the world's long-lost treasures."

After 11 years of investigation, a team of Drake enthusiasts says it has unraveled the mystery.

The answer, to be published Tuesday in California History magazine, implicates five of Bolton's acquaintances in a plot spearheaded by a friend, a fellow member of a society of irreverent intellectuals known to mix drinks with their history.

"There's no evidence that they intended to create a hoax that would last," said Ed Von der Porten, the article's lead author. "The evidence is clear that they intended it as a private joke."

What they got was a practical joke that fast lost its humor.

It apparently began with the desire to believe in something too good to be true.

Historical records showed that the English explorer and privateer left a brass plate on the California coast, about 30 miles north of San Francisco near Point Reyes.

For years, Bolton beseeched his students: if you ever hear such a plaque exists, find it, bring it to me.

It was the perfect Achilles heel for five plotters intent on hoodwinking the eminent scholar.

Von der Porten, a maritime historian and president of the Drake Navigators Guild, won't reveal all the details -- he and his fellow researchers plan to tell all Tuesday. On Saturday, he offered this brief explanation:

San Francisco lawyer G. Ezra Dane knew Bolton was fascinated with the brass plate, and he and four co-conspirators decided to simplify Bolton's search -- and get a laugh to boot -- by manufacturing it and having someone "discover" it.

"It's pretty obvious to us that they intended it to stay within their control," Von der Porten said. "Spring the surprise on him, and, 'Ho ho ho, we'll all have a drink over it.'"

That never happened.

Sometime after the pranksters planted the plate in Marin County in the 1930s, a chauffeur waiting for his quail-hunting boss picked it up. Weeks later he tossed it into a meadow near San Quentin State Prison, east across the coastal mountains from Drake's landfall.

There, in 1936, a shop clerk got a flat tire and, as he waited for assistance, hiked around for a good view -- only to find the discarded plate.

Bolton's quest was well enough known that the clerk's friend told him to take it to the professor, who quickly accepted it as genuine.

Problem was, the plotters didn't know until too late that Bolton, a distinguished historian at the University of California's flagship Berkeley campus, had the plate.

By April 1937, he was announcing the find in print and at a meeting of the California Historical Society.

The plotters made veiled attempts to warn Bolton, and even produced a second fake plate. But Bolton dismissed all attempts to rectify the wrong as good-natured jabs from friends.

"At that point, of course, it was too awkward to confess," Von der Porten said. "They were in a position that you don't envy."

All the men are now dead. Save a few scattered hints pieced together by the researchers, they took their conspiracy to the grave.

Bolton, who died in 1953, never learned about the hoax.

It wasn't until 1977, when the 400th anniversary of Drake's landing renewed interest in the artifact, that test after metallurgical test showed the brass was rolled and engraved in the 20th century.

"Every one of us is vulnerable to something like this," Kevin Starr, the state librarian, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "Professor Bolton believed it because he wanted to believe. But it does not detract from his work."

There was recently a TV documentary about the search for an airliner that crash-landed in the Sahara 50 years ago. It turned out that most of the fuselage had been taken for scrap by local tribes just a few years earlier. Perhaps something similar happened to Drake's original plaque, or it was otherwise recycled by Indian tribes.

 

[rynner2]

...the missing six months in Sir Francis Drake's great voyage around the world for Queen Elizabeth I from 1577 to 1580. What was the great explorer-pirate-plunderer doing? Where was he between the time he left the Pacific coast of Mexico in 1579 and arrived in the Philippines half a year later?

No one knows, so unverifiable possibilities spring readily to mind. One of the more ingenious and agreeable of these is put forward in "The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake" by Samuel Bawlf. A British Columbian, geographer and sailor, Bawlf argues that in that uncharted time Drake went to the northwest coast of America; that is, to what is now British Columbia.

Bawlf's argument, much simplified, is as follows: Protestant Elizabeth and her new secretary of state, Francis Walsingham, wanted to mount a more aggressive stance toward Catholic Spain than had Walsingham's predecessor. They were especially intent on gaining a foothold in the New World, which Spain, to its great enrichment, dominated. Drake was commissioned to search for the supposed Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific and to plant a colony.

To avoid arousing the suspicions of King Philip II of Spain, no word of this project was to leak out. After Drake returned to England in triumph in 1580, no account of his voyage was published, and the very maps he used, Bawlf asserts, were altered upon publication to mislead all readers, especially the king of Spain. Thus, Bawlf says, Walsingham and the queen asserted this 16th century version of the doctrine of "national security." At the time, world exploration and national security were vitally connected in the minds of Europe's expansionist rulers.

The great goal of Drake's expedition was to find the "Strait of Anian" — the supposed Pacific entrance to the presumed Northwest Passage. By imputing to later writings (notably Richard Hakluyt's "Principal Navigations") discoveries and observations that were made by Drake and passed covertly along, Bawlf concludes that Drake found bays and passages off the mainland of British Columbia that led him to believe that he had indeed found the fabled gulf.

Indeed, Bawlf thinks that Drake sailed as far north as 57 degrees latitude — to Alaska. Much of this rests on the evidence of early maps that, despite the censorship, show the northwest inclination of North America. One of these maps, Bawlf writes, "bore a closer resemblance to the actual trend of the coastline than any that would be produced for two centuries thereafter."

Bawlf's reading of the sketchy evidence is intense and complex. Only Drake scholars will be able to weigh justly Bawlf's claims.

The general reader, however, can be bemused by the intricate detective work this British Columbian has undertaken.

Bawlf concludes: "Beyond any question, Sir Francis Drake's secret voyage to the northwest coast of America must be regarded as one of the greatest in the history of global exploration." It certainly will be, if other historians generally come to accept Bawlf's conclusions. If not, his will have been at least a brave attempt at historical reconstruction.

Source

 

[rynner2]

The NY Times has a 2 page review of Bawlf's book. Page 2 adds more detail to the story:

Mr. Bawlf says that although Drake had been forbidden to reveal the secrets of his voyage, he was unable to contain himself and commissioned a series of private maps about his discoveries, leaking information about them to his private mapmaker, Jodocus Hondius, and to the Flemish geographer Abraham Ortelius, the inventor of the atlas.

"The details in the maps are cryptographs," Mr. Bawlf said, "designed to conceal the true extent of his explorations." Drake's maps show a chain of four islands stretching 500 miles along the coast of what would be California, islands that do not exist. But when Mr. Bawlf shifted the location of the islands 10 degrees, or 600 miles, north, they resembled islands, including Vancouver, of the coastal archipelago from southern Alaska to British Columbia.

There is an inland passage that resembles what is today called the Inside Passage of British Columbia, but it is 600 miles south of its actual location, as if it were on the coast of California. Mr. Bawlf says he discovered that Drake leaked to Ortelius a host of details of his voyage through those waters. He argues that Drake must have sailed there to give such detail.

The maps, Mr. Bawlf says, bear a closer resemblance to the actual trend of the British Columbian coastline than any that would be produced for two centuries.

Mr. Bawlf says that Drake also leaked to Ortelius information about "rivers of the straits," which are identified on one of Ortelius's maps as matching the three principal rivers, the Stikine, Skeena and Fraser, that actually flow into the Inside Passage from the mainland of Canada and southern Alaska.

Only fragmentary accounts of Drake's voyage remain. But Drake's narrative of the journey, which was suppressed and not published until 1628, after his death, says that he and his men sailed north in the Pacific until they were turned back by a "frozen zone." The narrative says that the crew encountered natives who came "shivering to us in their warm furs, crowding together, body to body, to receive heat one of another."

"In the middest of their summer the snow hardly departeth even from their very doors," Drake said.

Mr. Bawlf said of the descriptions: "This is not Northern California. It's southern Alaska."

Other snippets that Mr. Bawlf uses to support his thesis include the testimony of Drake's cousin, John, who had been on the voyage with him and was captured by the Spanish in 1583. Under interrogation by the Inquisition, John said the crew had sailed north to latitude 48 and discovered "five or six islands of good land," "the largest and best" of them Nova Albion.

Mr. Bawlf's assertions have the support of several other scholars in the field, including Grant Keddie, curator of archaeology at the Royal British Columbia Museum. Mr. Keddie points out that after Drake's voyage, maps appeared containing enormous detail of what seem to be the islands, bays and rivers of the northern Pacific Coast.

"Where is all that coming from?" Mr. Keddie said in an interview. "Bawlf clearly demonstrates the connection between the mapmakers and the people associated with the Drake voyages."

Another supporter, Richard Ruggles, retired professor of geography at Queens University in Ontario, in an interview called Mr. Bawlf's book "a beautifully done piece of work."

"I do think he has hit on something most unusual," Mr. Ruggles said.

But Mr. Bawlf's findings have already resulted in a tug of war among researchers, one of whom, Oliver Seeler of California, has set up a Web site, http://www.mcn.org/2/oseeler/bc.htm, called "The Turbid Theories of Samuel Bawlf" and tried to refute them one by one. Mr. Seeler says that much of what Mr. Bawlf presents as fact is merely supposition, like the description of the weight of Drake's treasure. He also says that Drake's accounts of natives he met correspond to the Pomos of the California coast and that the weather Drake describes resembles that of the area.

Dee Longenbaugh, an independent historian of Alaska, who owns the Observatory, a bookstore in Juneau specializing in old books and maps about Alaska, agrees that Mr. Bawlf's thesis is "faulty." One reason, she said in an interview, "is that there are no legends among the Indians at all of southeast Alaska about anyone visiting before the first Europeans, meaning the Spanish, and followed quickly by the other Europeans."

Ms. Longenbaugh also disputes that Drake could have made the journey in the brief time Bawlf says it took him.

Mr. Bawlf said he first began wondering about the early explorers in 1978 when, as a provincial minister, he helped plan the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Captain Cook's landing on Vancouver Island. He wondered if Cook really was the first European person. He began to focus on Drake, he said, a glamorous figure, both courageous and brutal — he executed his friend Thomas Doughty on the journey when he challenged his authority.

What was the motive for Drake's devious cryptographs? Mr. Bawlf pointed to the narrative that Drake submitted to Elizabeth but that was later suppressed. "Many untruths have been published, and the certain truth concealed," Drake wrote. Now he wanted to write a true account, "that posterity be not deprived of such help as may happily be gained hereby."

It was simple pride that motivated him, Mr. Bawlf said.

"Drake wanted a record of his discoveries," he said. "He had done something extraordinary, and he wanted posterity to know it."