In “A Link with Drake”, Barrowsgate describes how (in his travels) he would often wander far off the beaten track and how, in the summer of 1911, he had come across something unusual in a clearing in woodland near Bodega in Sonoma County, California. It was a heavy brass plate at the foot of a wooden flagpole and, according to Barrowsgate, the inscription on the brass plate recorded the arrival in June 1579 of a party from one of Drake’s fleet claiming the land for Queen Elizabeth.
According to Drake’s expedition logs, on 17 June 1579, he anchored in a “convenient and fit harborough” at 38deg 30’. It is popularly believed that this is the small inlet above the Golden Gate, now known as Drake’s Bay. Others place it farther north, at Bodega Bay.
Drake’s Chaplain, Francis Fletcher kept a journal in which he recorded the setting up of a monument – “namely a plate of brass, fast nailed to a great and firm post; whereupon is engraven her grace’s name and the day and year of our arrival there”.
This is a prime example of Barrowsgate’s storytelling because it could be true, or it could be an embellishment of something that he had read about, as the discovery of such a brass plate in 1936 was widely publicised at the time, even in the UK.
Drake’s Plate of Brass was a forgery that purported to be the brass plaque that Francis Drake posted upon landing in California in 1579. It was eventually proved that the whole story was a hoax concocted by local historians, including Herbert Bolton, the Director of the Bancroft Library at the University of California. It was designed to “prove” that Drake’s landing place in 1579 was in California, rather than further north – as an alternate theory proposed.
The typescript is not dated but it is marked with Barrowsgate’s then address – Burnfield – which places it as having been typed up between 1943 and 1953. When he wrote the story, he would not have known that the whole thing was a hoax, but he might well have remembered reading the reports about its discovery in 1936. It is interesting that, in Barrowsgate’s version, the plate was located near to Bodega rather than further south near Drake’s Bay. According to this version, even in 1911 the USA government were maintaining the site as “an ancient relic”. If this were true, the discovery of a (hoax) plate in 1936 would not have been news.