Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands

by Albert L. Hurtado

  The California Historical Society announced that Professor Bolton would give a luncheon address on April 6 titled “Newer Light on Drake and the Location of His Anchorage in California.” The title of Bolton's talk was modest enough, but the brief preview in the announcement thrilled the imagination. “Dr. Bolton will make the most astounding revelation yet made respecting Drake and California. Members who miss this meeting will have cause to regret it.”36 By this time Dane must have known about Bolton and the plate. The society was putting out a special publication about it, and Dane was chair of the publication committee. Bolton would astonish his listeners at—where else?—the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco. By the time Bolton read his paper, the title had become “Drake's Plate of Brass.”37 The draft of his essay shows that he interlineated words like, “it seems,” and “apparently.” He substituted “surmised” for “decided,” and “evidence” for “proof.” Evidently he was having second thoughts about what the plate had to say about Drake's anchorage. He crossed out the concluding sentence which predicted that a monument would be erected where Shinn had discovered the brass, and penciled in at the foot of the page, “New Data doesn't change anything.” In making these changes, Bolton was not abandoning his commitment to the plate's authenticity—this he made abundantly clear in his presentation; however, he softened the tone of certainty in his original essay and backed away from the Corte Madera discovery site.38

  Bolton likely had been warned about a new revelation concerning the plate. Within days of Bolton's announcement, William Caldeira publicly claimed that he had found the plate near Drake's Bay in late 1933, an impossibility given what is now known about it. Nevertheless, many people at the time accepted Caldeira's story at face value. In 1933 Caldeira was a chauffeur employed by Leon Bocqueraz, a member of the California Historical Society.39 Advance word of Caldeira's revelation could have come to Bolton from Chickering, who happened to live across the street from Caldeira's new employer, John Brockway Metcalf (son-in-law of Henry E. Huntington).40 Caldeira claimed that he did not recognize the plate's importance but kept it in his employer's car for a while before tossing it out near Corte Madera, not far from where Shinn found it. Chickering formally interviewed Caldeira on April 9, three days after Bolton's lecture and one week before newspapers printed the chauffeur's claim.41 If Chickering warned Bolton, it was not in time to keep Bolton from embarrassing himself in print. The original version of his essay went to press as a special commemorative issue of the Quarterly of the California Historical Society and was laid upon the tables at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel.42 It was too late to turn back; Bolton pulled some punches and prepared the audience for the possibility that Drake might not have erected the plate above Point San Quentin.

  The chauffeur's story was questionable at best. Nevertheless, Bolton and Chickering satisfied themselves that Caldeira was truthful and that his account only made the plate's authenticity more convincing. As far as they were concerned, Caldeira's story eliminated the possibility of fraud on Shinn's part—a point that Chickering was quick to emphasize with doubters.43 In this case, as in all others, Bolton and Chickering converted confounding evidence into positive proof for the plate's validity.

  In May the Ancient and Honorable Fraternal Organization, E Clampus Vitus, met in Tuolumne, California. Brother Bolton entertained the Clampers with another talk about Drake. After explaining to his fellow members that the plate had to be found to resolve the differences between variant accounts, he said, “I did so,” and then held aloft a facsimile of California's choicest archaeological treasure.44

  Bolton's replica was not the only brass plate at Tuolumne. Outside the Miwok round house (now transformed as the ECV Hall of Comparative Ovations), stood a post with an inscribed plaque that looked very much like a newer, less weathered version of the one that Bolton had authenticated. This one, however, was signed by Miwok chief William Fuller and had been made by Berkeley geologist and paleontologist (and Clamper) V. L. VanderHoof. The text said that Drake had “seduced” the ancient chief and therefore revoked the grant of 1579 “ON GROUNDS OF DECEIT, FRAUD, AND FAILURE TO occupy SAID DOMAIN.”45 In the place of a sixpence the maker had mounted an Indian head nickel on the plate.

  Shortly after the Tuolumne meeting the Clampers published Ye Preposterous Booke of Brasse, which was amusing, ironic, sarcastic, and full of hints about the true nature of the plate. Charles Camp, a well-known California historian and Clamper, wrote the parts of the Booke that dealt with the fake plate. Camp was not a part of the original conspiracy, but he was evidently in the know by the time of the Tuolumne meeting. According to Camp's parody a Clamper expert had made various tests of the plate, including “ultra-violet fluorescence and infra-red illumination” that would show “three letters…E.C.V.” The test also revealed that the plate appeared to have been beaten “with the round end of a machinists hammer.” The absence of weathering was merely testimony “to the mildness of the California climate.” Camp concluded that the plate proved that Parson Fletcher, who accompanied Drake in 1579, was an Elizabethan Clamper. Therefore, the ECV should reclaim the artifact “as the rightful property of our ancient Order.”46 The Clampers’ reputation for poking fun at one and all should make any reader wary of taking the Booke at face value. Yet its description of specific testing, mention of the florescent ECV brand, and the declaration of ownership along with the new, similar plate at Tuolumne should have raised an alarm in Bolton's mind. Yet, if he realized the implications of the Tuolumne meeting and the Booke of Brasse, he did not act on them.

  Doubters began to cause trouble. During a visit to UCLA, President Sproul dined with several prominent people in Pasadena. They told him that “a reputable historical magazine” would soon carry a “'blistering’ attack on the genuineness of the Drake Plate,” evidently referring to Reginald Berti Haselden's soon-to-be-published article.47 Captain Haselden, as he was called, was a specialist in Elizabethan literature on the staff of the Huntington Library. Sproul also reported that the respected historian Henry Raup Wagner, who had published a book about Drake's voyage to California, had given speeches “ridiculing” the plate because the spelling was “not Elizabethan and…the brass…not the kind that was being made in…Drake's time.” The renowned astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble told Sproul that the plate should be chemically analyzed “in order to be prepared for the onslaught.” On purely historical matters, Hubble believed that Bolton could “hold his own” against the plate's critics, “a conclusion with which I find myself in complete agreement,” Sproul added.48

  Bolton was now in a tight spot. On his word bankers, lawyers, corporation presidents, distinguished alumni, the California Historical Society, a university regent, and the University of California had committed their money and prestige to the plate. If the plate proved to be a fake, more than a historian's reputation was at stake, as President Sproul made plain to Professor Bolton. Accordingly, Bolton told the president that he had already taken steps to involve three Berkeley scientists in the question. “Every new Fact noted or discovered regarding the Plate,” Bolton told the president, “strengthens our belief in its genuineness.” Bolton's bluff assertions notwithstanding, the president continued to hear that the university had been hoaxed and was “just a little nervous about the situation.”49

  In those days, when a university president became a little nervous, the faculty became anxious, and Bolton no doubt understood that he was expected to save the university from embarrassment. The Huntington's Captain Haselden spurred Sproul's case of the jitters with a relentless attack on the plate. The captain was not a man to be taken lightly. He oversaw a staff of women who stood for inspection at their desks every morning.50 Haselden was interested in the problems associated with authenticating manuscripts. He took special pride in exposing frauds. In 1935 he published Scientific Aids for the Study of Manuscripts, in which he used three examples of forgeries that he had discovered in the Huntington Library collections. Haselden adamantly recommended the us
e of the latest scientific tools, some of his own invention, to examine manuscripts, “whether stone, wood, wax, papyrus, vellum,…paper”—or brass, one would suppose. He considered ultraviolet lamps and fluorescence particularly useful tools.51 In a perfect world, Bolton would have collaborated with Haselden to determine the plate's authenticity or, at the very least, would have used Captain Haselden's methods to reveal the telltale initials of the Clampers on the plate's reverse. But alas, Bolton relied only on the published texts and his own hopeful intuition.

  Bolton's optimism was not enough to satisfy Captain Haselden, who was convinced that the plate was a hoax that should be exposed as a fraud. Just as quickly as Bolton had concluded that the plate was genuine, Haselden knew in his bones that the thing was a fake. If the amount of Drake correspondence in the captain's files is any indication, the Drake controversy must have consumed much of his time.52 He wrote to experts at Oxford university and the British Museum, both of whom summarily rejected the plate's legitimacy.53 Armed with the British Museum's opinion, Haselden sent copious advice to Bolton concerning what ought to be done to test the plate. Bolton responded that he would consider “worthwhile” suggestions but public discussions were “pointless” until there was a “clear understanding of problems.”54 Haselden believed that his understanding of the key problem was perfectly clear. He thought that Bolton had authenticated a fraud and that a proper investigation would reveal it. Now it was obvious that Bolton did not intend to cooperate in exposing a hoax that made him look foolish.

  In September 1937 Haselden's article “Is the Drake Plate of Brass Genuine?” moved the controversy along. Haselden questioned the relic's authenticity on the grounds of form and orthography and insisted that scientific tests of the metal must be done. He also questioned the veracity of the chauffeur's tale. “Until further evidence is forthcoming,” Haselden concluded, “judgment on the authenticity or otherwise of this discovery must be suspended.”55 The same issue of the California Historical Society Quarterly that printed Haselden's essay carried “Some Notes with Regard to Drake's Plate of Brass,” by Allen L. Chickering. While professing not to be an expert, Chickering produced many examples of variant spellings from Drake's day that seemed to refute the arguments of the Elizabethan expert Haselden. He also vouchsafed the character of the “manly and straightforward” Shinn, who “neither made the plate nor was a party to any hoax in connection with it.”56 The chauffeur Caldeira made his statement “only in the interest of truth, for he had no possibility of financial gain from it.” (It is worth noting, however, that Caldeira wanted some money for finding the plate and got “a little reward from the…California Historical Society,” according to his former employer Bocqueraz.)57

  To build his case against the plate (and Bolton's rash judgment), Haselden corresponded with Earle Caley, a metallurgical chemist with the Frick Laboratory at Princeton university who had published work on ancient bronzes.58 Caley gave Haselden advice about the scientific investigation of purportedly ancient relics that the captain forwarded to President Sproul. Haselden also forwarded an unpublished essay that he had submitted to the California Historical Society Quarterly that criticized the plate on stylistic, linguistic, and orthographic grounds. “I feel very strongly that this matter should be cleared up,” he declared. Haselden feared “the enormous amount of harm to scholarship” that a forgery could do. The plate, he suspected, had been “made as an amusing and ingenious joke, which got completely out of hand (no doubt much to the surprise of the perpetrators thereof).”59

  Sproul passed Haselden's letter along to Bolton, who defended the plate on every count. In Bolton's mind, the plate's very unusualness argued for its authenticity. Every error and oddity meant that it was genuine. As far as Bolton was concerned, only the problem of dating the metal remained to be addressed, and he was “earnestly trying” to find some qualified person to do it. “The sponsors [of the plate] have never declared the plate to be genuine,” he wrote. “They have expressed their belief in its authenticity, but always with an if.”60

  The “if,” however, was often covered with Bolton's dense overburden of superlatives extolling the importance of the plate and its discovery, while minimizing or entirely ignoring evidence that called it into question. Bolton and Chickering had begun this approach even before the plate's discovery was officially announced, when they were trying to raise money, and it was plainly evident in Bolton's California Historical Society address. On that occasion, Bolton noted the discrepancies about the plate in the two published accounts of Drake's voyage—Richard Hakluyt's and Parson Fletcher's in The World Encompassed. Bolton declared that there was only one way to determine which account was correct, and that was to find the plate. Then, he said to the crowd: “Here it is! Recovered at last after a lapse of 357 years! Behold, Drake's plate—the plate of brasse! California's choicest archaeological treasure!” He continued, in more measured prose, that “the plate, assuming its authenticity, completely vindicates Parson Fletcher.”61 Thus Bolton's occasional qualifiers got lost in thickets of grand pronouncements about his wonderful discovery. Equally important, Bolton used the plate to validate the contestable account of Parson Fletcher instead of the other way around.

  The arrangement for scientific tests of the brass remained an unresolved and nettlesome problem until late in 1937. Chickering was at first opposed to tests that would physically damage the plate, and was particularly wary after Berkeley scientists told him that there was no point in having it analyzed.62 It was difficult to argue against making a scientific study, but chemical and physical tests were a high-risk venture. If tests did not show that the brass was from Drake's time, Haselden, Wagner, and other critics would have a field day. If it was old brass, the plate's authenticity still was not proven, as a clever forger might have used old metal for his fake. Even so, Sproul thought tests would help to put the university “in a much better position before the scholarly world,” and Chickering came around to this view as well.63 So it became necessary to find a scientist who had experience with antique metals. Bolton consulted with Berkeley chemist Joel Hildebrand and two other university scientists. While these professors generally agreed that the plate was authentic, Chickering complained that they had not been cooperative. In October Sproul officially asked Hildebrand and a philologist to aid Bolton. They, of course, “generously agreed” to help, as the president put it. “Obviously,” Sproul explained to Bolton, “neither of them will do much, because they do not desire, in the slightest degree, to take matters out of your hands.”64 It was apparent, however, that Sproul thought Bolton needed help.

  After accepting the president's courteous invitation to assist Bolton, Hildebrand took a leading role in identifying Colin Fink of Columbia University to examine the plate. So, early in 1938, Bolton shipped the brass to Columbia and waited for results. He could not have been happy about sending the plate for scientific study, especially if he took seriously either the Clampers’ warnings or Haselden's sharp criticisms. Indeed, he may well have feared the worst.

  Professor Fink had a few questions about the plate even before it arrived. He was curious about its patina because he was certain that he could tell if the coating was very old or recent.65 The patina presented a problem, because the front of the plate appeared to be a burnished golden color. Chickering confessed that his son had asked the Wells Fargo bank for advice about making reproductions of the plate. Bank employees had sent him and the plate to the Western Newspaper union in San Francisco, where the good guild members had cleaned the plate with kerosene. They were about to scrub it with lye when Chickering Junior weakened and retrieved the plate.66 After Captain Haselden learned about the cleaning, he gleefully wrote to Caley. Sit down and prepare for a “horrible shock,” Haselden warned the scientist. “The brass plate has been so carefully and thoroughly cleaned that you can shave in its reflection. It glitters! I will not harrow your feelings with any more details.”67

  Once Fink had the plate, new questions arose. “Fran
kly,” he wrote, “I know of no brass plate which we could set up on the Pacific Coast and expect to find in such good condition after 350 years.” Fink also wondered why there was no corrosion in the hole that supposedly had held a sixpence. There should have been evidence of some electrolytic reaction between the silver and the brass, but there was none, and curiously, a sixteenth-century sixpence still fit perfectly in the hole. Fink assured Bolton that he had raised these questions “to fortify ourselves against any attack” and to assemble “all the proof possible supporting the contention that the plate is genuine.” Bolton easily provided answers for Fink. The Indians did it. They might have taken the plate from its post and knocked the sixpence out of the hole. The plate was exposed when Caldeira and Shinn found it, but perhaps it had not always been so.68

  While raising some questions about the plate, Fink also made clear that he believed it was his job to defend its genuineness, even before he had completed scientific tests. As Bolton told Chickering, “Professor Fink…has just about arrived at the place which we had reached several months ago.” Already Chickering had learned that Fink was “impressed with the sanctity of the plate.”69 So it seems that the plate itself convinced Doctor Fink of its antiquity and authenticity, just as it had first seduced Bolton. After Fink's work was completed, Chickering lunched with him in New York. Fink remained “deeply interested in the Drake plaque,” Chickering explained. “He was so impressed with the importance of his job and the secrecy which he believed that it involved, that he did not even show it to his wife. In fact he showed it to no one except President Butler of Columbia, and to him only just before it was sent back.” These revelations confirmed Chickering's “very high opinion of him as a man and a scholar.”70