| Sir Francis Drake sailed into history this week in 1580, when he became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. Queen Elizabeth knighted him upon his arrival home, and, in the years that followed, when he wasn’t helping defeat the Spanish Armada, he spent his days enjoying immense prosperity: gold, silver, and other valuables he’d plundered on his voyage. He died at sea in 1596, off the coast of Panama, without a son or daughter to inherit his fortune. Drake’s seafaring adventures became legend; the whereabouts of his wealth became a myth. More than three centuries after his death, a small group of American swindlers—sometimes partners, sometimes unknowing marks themselves—convinced thousands of their compatriots that they had tracked down the missing money, and that, with a modest investment or donation, supporters could soon share in the bounty. (There were just a few minor legal matters to sort out.) As Richard Rayner wrote in The New Yorker, the truth, in its way, proved as fantastic as the lies. Scotland Yard and the U.S. Post Office got involved, and so, too, at the periphery, did one of Abraham Lincoln’s sons. Rayner, himself the son of a convicted swindler and onetime fugitive, distills the temptation at the heart of most successful cons: the Sir Francis Drake deception appeared “too good to be true but, on the other hand, possibly too good to miss.” | 
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