A 1938 book that attempts to verify and trumpet an artifact found in 1936 as "Drake's plate of brasse," a brass plate he put up to claim California for England as New Albion. In 1937, famed historian Herbert E. Bolton announced that Sir Francis Drake's plate of brass from 1579 had been found. Still, some people did not believe that this artifact was real. So, one year later, a scientific analysis of the plate. And thus this publication. Spoiler: Bolton got taken by a prank that got out of hand. Read up on Wikipedia for the whole shebang, but it was proved a modern forgery in 1977, though the info was out before that and most scholars did not accept Bolton's contentions even before that. It's a forgery. Though this analysis calls it authentic, they are reaching. There was evidence it was a modern forgery, they just didn't take it. From p. 10:

"An interesting detail which we observed in the lettering was the 'parallel lines,' a series of fine, parallel grooves located near many of the letters. (Figs. 6, 7 and 8.) In most cases these lines were parallel to the letter grooves. Sometimes the lines were so close to each other that two or three of them could be counted in the width of one millimeter. The closeness of these lines to each other and their strict parallelism indicate that they could not have been made by hand one by one. If they had been made with a hand chisel (which is most probable), a special holder for the chisel fastened to a bench might have been used. It seems most plausible that these lines represent a series of marks in the brass surface left by the cutting edge of the tool in its gradual approach to the final position at which the tool edge was driven into the metal. Such parallel marks can be made today with a modern pneumatic tool but not readily with a hand chisel. We were not able to duplicate such parallel lines on a piece of modern brass using a hand chisel and we found no explanation for these parallel lines in an old treatise on methods of engraving as practiced in Drake's time."

Oops. An interesting bit of ephemera from 1938. ( )