 Today we're going to have a talk from Melissa Darby, whom I'd never met before about 10 minutes ago. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and she's the county archaeologist for Clicquatec, as I said. Clicquatec County. Clicquatec County in Washington, which is up the Columbia, I guess, apiece from the confluence, you know, near Portland. She hails from Montana, though. She has a master's in anthropology from Portland State, where she also is a, let's see, visitor or a lecturer. I'm trying to remember you. I'm a visiting scholar. A visiting scholar. I help with the field. But here's the thing. She works in CRM, and for reasons that I don't know, but she'll probably tell us about, she has carried out a research project involving a topic that relates, as you'll hear, in a very direct way with our institution. She has just published this book, Thunder Go North, The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake's Fair in Good Bay, which, as you might know, of course, refers to that period of, what, a month, I guess, or so, where Drake put in to Karina's ships, because having run the gauntlet of the Spanish and the West Coast of South and Central America in 1579, he decided that, like, the best way to get home was to just keep going and sail around the whole world and get back to Albion that way. And here, I think, coming home from SFO on Bard is an adventure, right? And so that, I believe, as we'll hear, is the first documented presence of Europeans in the coast of northern California, or points further north. And as you'll hear about in the 1930s, I guess, there was a very famous series of incidents that related to Drake's presence here in California, which was a very large, of course, in the history of California, I guess, right? And so she's just published this wonderful book of which she says she has three copies here. I'd like to buy one of them myself, but she probably would apart with the others. And among other things, this is quite embarrassing for UC Berkeley, as you'll learn, and there's no way around that. So without further ado or further tipping of hands, I guess, I will turn things over to Melissa, who will tell us about this super fascinating project that she has done and completed the book about. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Thanks for that good introduction. The Golden Hind was taking on water on a summer's day in 1579. Stormy seas off the coast of America had opened her seams and widened the leak that she'd had since she was in Panama. The pump was well-plied with seawater and Francis Drake, who only became Sir Francis after the voyage, and his crew were searching the rough coast for a well-protected cove where they could heal the ship completely over to get to the leak along the Kiehl line. Complicating her predicament, the ship was loaded down with captured supplies and bouillon. In fact, she was ballasted with Peruvian silver. They had begun their journey, December 13th and 1577, when Francis Drake and his fleet of five ships left Plymouth Harbor. The crew thought they were headed to the Levant to buy a cargo of currents, but as soon as they set sail and were out of sight of land, they were informed that they were actually heading to the Great South Sea through the Strait of Magellan. This voyage became known as the famous voyage, and it was the second circumnavigation of the Earth and the first to return with its commander. However famous it was, the famous voyage has always been shrouded in mystery. Upon his return, but even before Drake could disembark the Golden Hind in Plymouth Harbor, a messenger wrote out to him and said he was in the queen's bad graces and that the Spanish ambassador was asking for restitution for his robberies. Subsequently the crew was made to swear an oath of secrecy on pain of death, not to reveal where they had traveled. Drake was disavowed, called a pirate in public, and the privy council initiated a so-called official investigation of the voyage. But this was a cover story. Drake was a hero within a week of his return. Queen Elizabeth quietly summoned him to court and said he had nothing to fear. Though she confiscated all his charts and logs, he was knighted a few months later, but sadly his records of the voyage have never resurfaced and they were believed to have been destroyed in a fire, which helps explain the confusion of where he landed in 1579. About 80 men and a pregnant black woman named Maria made landfall in this fair in Good Bay. There are two persistent questions regarding this voyage. Where on the west coast of America did he travel, how far north, and where was this quote unquote fair in Good Bay? The treasure they unloaded at this sandy shore was astonishing. One inventory of the bouillon described 650 ingots of silver weighing 23,000 pounds, 36 parcels of gold weighing over 100 pounds. There were Peruvian emeralds and pearls, some of great value. And four crates of Chinese porcelains, a quantity of fine clothing, bolts of linen, tavada, velvet silk, and one source mentioned that hundreds of those tiny pearls were used to decorate Queen Elizabeth's gown. They rested and refreshed in this fair bay for a number of weeks, though the accounts are inconsistent. One said their stay was about five weeks, but another said it was as long as 10 weeks. But once the leak was repaired and the ship floated and readied, the crew packed and stowed their ballast and prepared to embark on the first leg of the return journey, which would take them across the Pacific. But just before they sailed, Francis Drake ceremoniously erected a firm post to which he attached a metal plate as a land claim in the name of Queen Elizabeth in England. This was a symbolic act of sovereignty that was one of the rules you had to follow when you claimed land back in the day. The theory that Drake landed in California was not always accepted. In the early 20th century, new clues to Drake's whereabouts and movements in the Pacific came to light with the finding of anthropologist Zelian Nuttall. In February of 1908, she was in the Mexican archives, the old Spanish colonial archives in Mexico City, and she found a trove of documents relating to Drake's voyage and his depredations. She went to Europe and went into the archives there, and pretty soon she figured out that Drake may not have been in California at all. This was a turnabout, and California historians tried to play it down because by then Drake was a hero. But Drake had been her childhood hero as well. She was born in San Francisco in 1857 to a Hispanic mother and an Irish father. In 1864, the Nuttalls left for Europe where she attended schools in France, and Italy, Germany, and England principally because her dad thought that they should be exposed to other languages and be fluent in these countries' languages, in addition to the Spanish and English that they heard at home. They did return to San Francisco in 1876, and in 1880 she married a French ethnologist and traveled with him in the West Indies and Europe doing field work with him. Though the marriage didn't last her career as an anthropologist had begun, and at Harvard she began work at the Peabody Museum for Ethnology and Archaeology under the tutelage of Frederick Putnam and Alice Fletcher. Nuttall became a specialist in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures and conducted archaeological field work in Mexico for the Peabody where she was honorary assistant in Mexican archaeology, a post which she held for 47 years. By 1901, Phoebe Hearst, who was her former neighbor and family friend, provided financial support for Nuttall and her colleague, anthropologist Franz Boas to establish the anthropology department here at Berkeley. Nuttall and Hearst tried to convince Boas to come West and be the first professor here, but instead they settled on his star student Alfred Krober who had received Columbia's first PhD in anthropology. As she developed her thesis about Drake's movements on the coast, she traveled to Cape Slattery on the northwest coast of the state of Washington and here she met people of the Macaw tribe and she became convinced that she had found people like the ones that Drake encountered because of her cultural observations. The original accounts by Drake and his chaplain mentioned that the natives had canoes and that their houses were made of planks and that inside the house it was like being in the scuttle of a ship. It was semi-subterranean. The Miwak and Pomo build their houses generally on the grade or a little bit below and they have willow bow frames and then in the winter when it's raining they throw a seal skin on top and she didn't think this matched what Drake and his chaplain were describing for the Native Americans at the landing. And also the people, the Miwak and Pomo have two-leafed boats rather than canoes and Celia found that the northwest coast was just a better fit. She also found maps that contradicted the idea that Drake was only as far north as 42 degrees on the coast which is southern Oregon and that he landed at 38 degrees around Drake's Bay. Nuttall's monograph on the northern limits of Drake in the Pacific was never published. Every editorial board turned her down. Her work was foiled. She was marginalized. In California we have to understand that Drake's swashbuckling legend was being polished by a group called the Native Sons of the Golden West who still exist. Back then they were known as white supremacists and they were aggressive proponents of white supremacy and eugenics and Drake was their golden son, a white English hero, right? And to lose him by the efforts of a Hispanic Irish woman who was a single mother, divorced, Catholic and one who preferred the company of other equally beautiful and accomplished women. Well, that was just too much for these men. So Nuttall's work was never published and except for an outline of her thesis that I found at the bankraft, it is all now lost. So why is there so much confusion and controversy as to where Drake sailed and landed his little ship? The official account of the voyage was published by Richard Hackloot in 1589 under the authority of the Privy Council and Queen Elizabeth. It described the northernmost limit at 42 degrees and the landing at 38. Several other original sources and maps that were brought to light by Nuttall contradict these latitudes. But the California theorists put a lot of stock in the printed Hackloot accounts and this is where the confusion comes in. The contention that I present here is that the official account was designed to claim more land than England was entitled. So if Drake went up here and landed here, he could not have claimed all this land. This is the northern limits of Spanish territory. Queen Elizabeth probably looked at Drake's map and said, we need a little more, right up there. That's my contention and I'm sticking to it. The accounts, okay, now it's time. The account describes Drake fulfilling the symbolic acts of sovereignty. These include conducting a religious ceremony, marking the territory with a metal plate in this case conducting a symbolic ritual by which the ownership or sovereignty was transferred. So this is the natives crowning Drake which he misinterpreted as them giving him the territory. That's what he thought they were doing. They were just giving him a gift probably, but anyway. So let's look at some other evidence. Given the surface winds are the same now as they were then, it would have been difficult for Drake to sail his little square sailed ship close to the coast to reach a more northerly landfall. And if he was looking for the Northwest Passage, as people think, he would want to take a good northerly and swing north on the winds. If Drake was at 48 and down to 44 for the landing, as some of the sources indicate, England of course had no right to a wide swath of this land. It was a trick in order to leave no gap of unclaimed territory which checked the Spanish expansion on the coast. Magic, magic. Is there one more? There might be one more. Oh, I went back too far. Okay, so I found some proof of this idea. And as you mentioned, I am a CRM archaeologist. I'm not an expert in British Elizabethan manuscripts. In fact, I can't even read them. Most people can't. But I decided I'd go to the British Museum and look at this as an artifact. And so I found some proof for my idea that this land claim was falsified. This manuscript is in the British Library. The prevenience of it is that it was owned by a collector of manuscripts, an antiquarian who died in 1628. So this was an antique when he died. This manuscript describes Drake, a little bit of Drake's voyage, and it's an abstract taken from an original journal written by someone who had been on the voyage. Historians argue over this, and many just dismiss it, but no one to date has figured out what it is. But I believe it's a draft in progress of the Haqqlu official chapter, the official land claim chapter. It's clearly a draft in progress. There's a number of interlinear editions. Some passages are struck through. There's editorial notations in the margins, and one piece of evidence is particularly compelling and supports the idea that this manuscript is a draft of the final chapter. In the margin of the notes section at the end of the document is a sketch of a pointing hand. Right there. And it says, and the editor's instruction says, move this piece of text just below where Tom Moon takes a gold chain from a Spanish gentleman. So looking through the printed chapter right before, right after Tom Moon takes the gold, I found this little bit of text that describes a Portuguese pilot. So then the instructions were carried out, and this is proof that this is a draft in progress of Haqqlu's chapter on the formal land claim. And this couldn't be a coincidence. And two points of importance to the question are that the author related that Drake's fair and good bay was at 44 degrees and that Drake had traveled up to 48, which is on the northern coast of Washington. Discretely censored from the public, published version is the pregnancy of Maria, the black woman, who accompanied the voyage and she was eventually abandoned on an island with no water, and other sensitive information discredible to the voyage was also censored out. So I think they altered the latitudes and they took out the stuff that didn't look good. Okay. This is British historian and geographer Eva Taylor. She challenged the Drake in California Theory in a series of articles and in two books, published in the 20s and 30s. She had by chance found this document with the plans or plot of Drake's voyage. This manuscript had been overlooked, its edges are burnt, but it retains most of the detailed instructions for the voyage, which called for Drake to pass through the Strait of Magellan, find lands not in the possession of any Spanish or Portuguese and claim some land. And it's no small point that the voyage was made with Queen Elizabeth's blessing and under the guise of piracy. So Taylor also discovered a published passage from a private diary of the chaplain that was on the follow-up voyage that described a word list and also said that Drake reached 48 degrees north. So the evidence was building and so she was making a case that Drake was farther north, but like net all, she was usurped by some of the California historians. In the Maddox Diary she found several words that were from the Native Americans, that the Native Americans spoke to Drake and including the word he-o, which I talk about extensively in my book and what it probably means, and peta, which is the name of a root. Anyway, so like net all, Eva Taylor's findings were not liked by the powers that be. So just as Taylor's work was changing the paradigm and the Northwest Coast theory of Drake's landing was gaining traction, it was dramatically eclipsed when the alleged plate made by Drake for his land claim was found on the hillside above San Francisco Bay. Whoa! The Drake plate of brass was shown to Herbert Bolton, head of the history department at Berkeley and the Bancroft Research Library. He declared it almost certainly authentic and arranged for Beryl Shinn, the finder to receive a monetary reward of $3,500. And this was at the end of the Depression. This was an incredible amount of money and it caught the imagination of the excited public. They said it must be real if he gave him that much money for it. And before the plate of brass was found, student enrollment here had dropped off. The Great Depression had slowed funds for programs that Bolton had at the Bancroft Library to buy manuscripts. And the plate did not just put Bolton in the limelight and made him even more famous. He was already famous. It also attracted new students and bolstered more private support for Bolton's programs. Between 1937 and 1977, the Drake plate of brass was considered authentic. But there was no agreement among academics as to where Drake landed. This part of the debate has been California's most prolonged historical discussion and there's still no consensus on it and they fight among themselves about this. Since the 1970s, this question has been a tug of war between mostly non-academic proponents who assert their favored bae is the one. Is it San Quentin Cove, Bolinas, Drake's bae? I didn't understand how contentious this was till I got involved in it. I won't go into all that anyway. This is Robert Heiser. He's a longtime anthropology professor here. He wrote in 1974 after all his work looking for Drake. He wrote this. In 1935 or 1936, I had a course from Dr. Herbert Bolton at Berkeley during which he talked about Drake. Pointed out that no one knew where he had landed and he told us to keep our eyes open for the brass plate which he said he left thinking that some Indian might have picked it up at Drake's bae where most people at the time thought Drake landed. I suggested to Bolton that perhaps I might do some digging in the shell mounds in search for the plate. Bolton was encouraging so we did carry out a good deal of digging. Heiser and others conducted over 30 excavations between 1937 and 1974 in and around Drake's bae, San Francisco bae, Bolinas bae, the rock outcrop where the plate was found and other locations. But as he noted, quote, we found nothing that could be associated with Drake the Englishman. Sardonically he commented, as of 1974 it appears that we may never know for certainly exact place where Drake stayed in 1579. And it would be nice to be able to have it prove beyond doubt that Drake entered a particular bae because local politicians and history buffs could raise an important monument and a lot of scholars who puzzle over the question would be freed to puzzle over other questions. Gotta love Heiser. At Berkeley Bolton called his graduate students his Knights of the Round Table and George Hammond was one of his favorites. Bolton's empire however was not an idyllic camelot. Many of his colleagues disliked him. His detractors thought of him as a huckster, a glory seeker who courted publicity. Two of Bolton's former grad students who later became history professors became disillusioned with Bolton and his machinations and it got back to him that these two men hated him like a snake. And there was no love lost between Zeal and Eddall and Bolton. In 1915 she presented her research on the northern limits of Drake at the big Panama Pacific Historical Congress history conference. Bolton was one of the organizers. Her paper was met with coldness from Bolton and his colleagues and her findings were ignored. It's almost certain that Bolton himself initiated the plate of brass hoax. My conjecture is that it was to be deployed if Nuttall's monograph got published so the plate would be launched and it would confuse the issue. As exactly it did in 1937 when Taylor was promulgating her theory. There's a lot of evidence that Bolton was the hoaxer. In 1977 a new investigation into the authenticity of the plate of brass was made by William Hart. He was the director of the Bancroft Library here where the plate is kept. The publicity of the investigation prompted a woman named Dolores Scoble to come forward and she met with him twice about it and he took two depositions from her. She said that when she was 12 years old in 1917 her dad and her mom and her went to visit the historian who lived in a house in the hills above Berkeley. There was a meeting that took place and a newspaper reporter was there too. When she got there she was supposed to take care of the two kids. Her mother met with the wife and went off and had a cup of tea or something and she got bored with taking care of the kids so she went out to the garage to see what the men were doing. I would do that. And she saw them laughing over a plate. I believe 12 year old girls. You should never underestimate a 12 year old girl by the way. She saw them laughing over a plate and on the way home her mother said what it was it was a plate. It was a joke about Drake claiming land and so that stayed in her mind all these years and she came to heart to tell them about this. And if heart suspected after that or knew that the historian was Bolton, the historian on the hill and had chosen to publicly announce that oh Bolton was the hoaxer it would have been sensational because this was during the run up to the 400th anniversary of Drake's landing. There was a replica. 192 was due in San Francisco Bay shortly and they were planning a year long celebration and this was the kind of information that would have embarrassed the University of California the Bank Roth Library and California in front of a worldwide audience. I'm the bearer of bad news. So when I first began to suspect Bolton was behind the plate I began to investigate his behavior in the first newspaper archives and went through Bolton's own files at the Bank Roth where I found on several occasions he authenticated Spanish treasure maps gold mine maps. He found a manuscript that was written by Spanish explorers saying that they were surrounded by Indians and they let's go this way again. All these were bogus things, terribly bogus things and he should not have been associated and he would have known anyway. That was part of his fame that he was associated with gold mines and silver mines and treasure maps. Shame on him. That's one of the manuscripts and in fact in researching this paper I found a new false report that I hadn't found before in April of 1921 Bolton announced that he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Historians in England. There's no such organization as the Royal Society of Historians in England. There's a Royal Society and he was never part of it. Anyway, so this gives you an idea of how Bolton behaved and I'm so sorry to report that I found evidence that Bolton may have had some agency in another famous historical hoax, the darestone. Now this is Roanoke Islands on the other side of the United States. In 1937, a few months after the Drake plate was brought to Bolton, this stone was brought to a history professor at Emory University in Atlanta. The inscription on the stone was allegedly a message written by a member of the English colony of Roanoke and the stone supposedly solved the mystery of the lost colony by saying they moved inland and most of their group was killed by savages or died of disease. The Emory history professor declared it authentic, became immediately famous and the university paid money to the finder whose name was L.E. Hammond. This is the same strange M.O. employed by Bolton when the plate was found. This man who found the stone, this L.E. Hammond signed over the stone in documents witnessed by a notary who of course required a form of ID and I think the hoaxers used a notary because it lent officialness and credibility to this alleged artifact and Mr. Hammond was awarded a thousand dollars for the stone and the money was sent to the general delivery post office box in Oakland, California where he said he lived. L.E. Hammond disappeared, never to be found again, though Emory officials began to suspect the stone was a forgery and they sent out the Pinkerton detective agency to Oakland and they couldn't find any Hammond named L.E. Hammond. Late last year, right before I was to put the final touches on my book, National Geographic ran an article about this stone and the author questioned whether this was a hoax or a genuine artifact and called archaeologists into action to reanalyze this artifact. I took the challenge up because it seemed to me there were some similarities between the stone and the plate of brass and the whole scheme in general Hammond rang a bell. I compared the signatures of George Hammond Bolton's star student here and later director of the Bancroft Library to the mysterious disappearing L.E. Hammond and George and L.E. are the same person. Sorry. George Hammond posed as L.E. Hammond and altered his I.D. to pass the notary. The derestone can now be declared a hoax. How much Bolton had to do with this hoax is unknown but the money was sent to Oakland while George Hammond was a professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where he was not only chair of the history department he was dean of the grad school. Anyway, in 1946 with Bolton's blessing George Hammond was appointed director of the Bancroft Library here and moved back. After Hammond retired he continued to maintain an office as director emeritus in the library until the late 1980s. He even served as chair of the session in the conference on Sir Francis Drake in 1979 and this was when James Hart of the Bancroft Library was the chief investigator of the Play to Brass hoax and when Hart was puzzling over who concocted the hoax the office was just down the hall. Shakespearean scholars suggest that the circumnavigation by Drake and later by Cavendish were such triumphs for England that Shakespeare commemorated these voyages when he named his theater The Globe. Additionally, the narrative events at the fair and Good Bay may have provided the playwright with inspiration for the play The Tempest which began with a storm and a shipwreck and featured a native who worshipped the new arrivals as brave gods. Zeal and Nuttall and Eva Taylor trespassed on the high ground of a California myth and found that to take Drake out of California was akin... Is this not going to work? Was akin to pulling up the redwoods. The Northwest Coast theory of Drake's landing is at present unimaginable to many scholars and uncritical acceptance of the dominant paradigm of a California landing is understandably the norm but in view of the important and deeply interesting problems involved the vexed question of where Drake and company landed and repaired the Golden Hine in the summer of 1579 deserves to be fully reconsidered. So thank you very much and I can take questions and I have two books left $20 each. I recall correctly the Virginia Dairstone wound up at Brinnell College where my mom was a freshman from North Carolina in Georgia. But what do you make of the putative ceramic evidence from Drake's Bay about the two sets, one that's worn and one that's not from the Spanish wreck and the ladders from Germany? Matt Russell who is a Ph.D. student here, right? Re-analyzed all that and found that he couldn't find any he couldn't distinguish between anything that might have been from Drake's time and later and so when they wrote the National Landmark nomination for Drake's Bay they took all that evidence out and said this is not real, we can't use this as evidence. So it can't be done and you can't replicate it. You can't replicate the study that was done in 1981 by the Guild. I wonder where that line was posted There's a lot of talk about that palm tree and it was done like 30 years after Drake got back and it was an artist I forget the name of the artist, just an artist interpretation of the Heclude account because yeah I think so and even the plank house the planks made in the shape of a teepee there's been a lot of discussion about that but yeah it's in my book I did, in fact I excavated at Whale Cove where I thought he might be but there had been a tsunami that just scraped everything it's like this much duff and then bedrock so I can't say for sure where he was I wish I could My question is kind of along the same lines as Ken's and that is I wondered if you consulted if any nautical experts especially sailors with big ship experience because I would think there would really be just a limited number of places that would meet the criteria for heaving out a boat on its side and repairing right, yeah photography, et cetera yeah I did one of the people I work with is a sailor and he raced his sailboats from here to Hawaii every year on that Regatta that they do and he kind of looked at Whale Cove and the golden hind was not a huge everyone thinks it was massive but it was it was like 80 feet long and maybe 30 feet wide it's not that big and it could have gotten into the Hale and Bay or Whale Cove or any of those bays but what you really need when you're careening a ship is no breakers you can't have breakers because it would break up the ship and you need to have tackle holding the ship in two places or you need to bring it against another ship that's also careening is complicated and no one knows how to do it but I have I found a paper about it that was from Texas A&M and I kind of worked it out but he could have gone into Whale Cove with all the parameters and you know Drake was a great sailor he was a pirate and so looking at some of the places that he sailed in Central America and around Panama and all through the Caribbean those were slick little bays that he had to be very agile with and he was a pretty good sailor so it was 12 feet but he was sinking I think 13 or 14 feet yeah any other questions I've got two books what kind of discipline academic response yeah this was published by University of Utah Press and it's been reviewed in archaeology magazines Smithsonian Magazine and do non-Californians like it Oregonians like it yeah Oregonians it's got pretty good reviews but this is my first time in California with it so so can we go visit this press focus press place? yeah I saw it yesterday it's over at the bank craft it's in a glass case as you go up the stairs oh nice place to go yeah so how is it not in the bank now? they acknowledge it's a hoax but they don't I don't I haven't changed the paradigm yet do you report on the metallurgy that they did on the plate that's in my book yeah they analyzed it Hart analyzed it had it analyzed twice because there were still people who persisted in believing it was real it's kind of crazy work I'm trying to remember was it with the darestone and not the drape plate or both that people who also understand 16th and 17th century English have lived in the English and said in fact there are things that would not have been produced by that period exactly exactly there's some uses of words that were not right and Elizabethan scholars universally said no and in fact when the plate was found there was a lot of evidence sent by English scholars to Bolton saying no this can't be right and he ignored it all he just wouldn't respond to it and that was part of his MO you know what kind of scenario do you think it would have been if it had been two men promoted to the same theory? I still think there would have been a battle but I think there would have been more attention paid to the northern theory of Drake on the Oregon Washington coast Zilia was really powerful she was famous I mean newspapers reported her comings and goings and she was the first woman appointed to the National Academy of Science and she she was just stellar people respected her but still she always had money problems and she couldn't really launch a big battle a counter offensive except in writing and she just really had a hard time she had not a lot of power that way like a man would have had because she wasn't allowed to teach except in special you know she couldn't be a professor she did lectures but you know it was pretty limited what she could do okay well everybody thanks for coming