Author Andreas Schroeder tells about a poor farm boy from Iowa named Oscar Hartzell who in 1913 devised a scheme for separating a good many people from their life savings. He cooked up the idea of contacting everyone in the United States with the last name of Drake. He told them he’d made an astonishing discovery: due to a bureaucratic bungle, the estate of the famous British pirate Sir Francis Drake had never been paid out to his heirs. It had just been sitting there for over 300 years, gathering interest. So by now it was worth an eye‑popping four trillion dollars--enough money to buy all of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales combined! Hartzell invited people named Drake from all over North America to invest in his campaign to take the British government to court to retrieve that mone…