study the plate and found that it contained far too much zinc and too few impurities to be Elizabethan English brass, while containing trace metals that corresponded to modern American brass. Cyril Stanley Smith of MIT examined the plate under a stereo microscope and found the edges to be consistent with modern cutting equipment. See also His Majesty, McDuck – a 1989 Walt Disney story fashioned after the plate discovery New Albion Drake Navigators Guild Oscar Hartzell – perpetrator of another hoax based on Sir Francis Drake References External links Plateofbrass.com: The Mystery of the Plate of Brass: California's Greatest Hoax and The Search for its Perpetrators Edward Von der Porten, Raymond Aker, Robert W. Allen, and James M. Spitze, "Who made Drake's plate of brass? Hint: it wasn't Francis Drake", California Monthly, March 22, 2002. Fletcher's account of Drake's landing and the real plate (While this is often misattributed to Pretty, the Hakluyt Society has studied this and determined that the Pretty attribution came much later. The original was published by Drake's nephew, also "Sir Francis Drake," using records from voyage chaplain Francis Fletcher.) University of Berkeley press release, including a Flash animation of the story Cyril Stanley Smith's 1976 Metallurgical Report on Francis Drake's Brass Plate Abstract for article "Chemical Study of the Plate of Brass," H. V. Michel and F. Asaro In-jokes History of the San Francisco Bay Area Hoaxes in the United States 1930s hoaxes Francis Drake