Are the Dare Stones Forgeries or the Key to the Roanoke Mystery?

In the 1930s, stones surfaced that might explain what happened to the settlers of the lost colony of Roanoke. Learn their story -- plus how modern science might help determine whether they're real -- in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here an unsolved mystery can drive people crazy
and the fate of the first English settlers ever to
establish a colony in the New World. Roanoke is a
puzzle that will probably never be entirely solved, but it
doesn't keep people from trying. In July seven, a ship

(00:24):
carrying ninety men, seventeen women, and eleven children landed on
Roanoke Island on the outer banks of modern day North Carolina.
A year before, when the site was discovered, fifteen men
had volunteered to stay and hold down the proverbial fort,
but they were nowhere to be found, so the a
hundred and eighteen colonists disembarked and set about carving a
colony out of the wilderness. There's much excitement when Eleanor Dare,

(00:46):
the daughter of leader John White, gave birth to the
first English baby born in the New World, and named
her Virginia. After a time, John White left the settlers
to return to England, telling them he'd be back within
the year with fresh supplies. However, England war with Spain's
load the process considerably and nobody was able to check
on the settlement again until fifteen nine, when White returned

(01:07):
his daughter, granddaughter, and everyone else was gone. They had
dismantled the buildings, carved the word Croatoan into a tree,
the name of the friendly Native American tribe on a
nearby island, and vanished. There was no sign of the
cross White had told them to carve on a tree
if they had left under duress. Frankly, White didn't look
very hard for his daughter and granddaughter before heading back

(01:29):
to England. For centuries, the story of the lost Colony
of Roanoke seemed pretty cut and dried to most historians.
The settlers went to live with a Crowatoan tribe. Whether
they stayed there or not, nobody could say. The thing
they could say is that no definitive sign of any
of the one and eighteen colonists was ever found, despite
rumors in the later established Jamestown colony of massacres and

(01:50):
men wearing European clothes deep in the wilderness. No definitive sign,
that is until more than three centuries later, when in
nine then a produced dealer from California named L. E.
Hammond showed up at Emory University in Atlanta with a
stone he found while hunting hickory nuts in a recently
cleared North Carolina swamp some fifty miles or eight kilometers

(02:12):
inland of Roanoke Island. It was inscribed with a message
he wanted the experts at Emory to decipher. It turns
out the carved stone told a story allegedly written by
White's daughter Eleanor. The colonists endured two years of only
misery and war after her father left for England, ending
with half the settlers killed in armed combat and many

(02:32):
of the others, including Eleanor's husband and daughter, slaughtered when
a spiritual leader of the tribe they lived with warned
that the presence of the English settlers was angering the spirits.
According to the stone, only six men and one woman escaped.
The stone was found to be authentic by the Emory
experts at the time, it seemed legitimate, and better still,
it satisfied everyone's thirst foreclosure around this dusty old riddle.

(02:55):
The story captured the imagination of the entire country, and
Emery Professor Heywood J. Pierce Jr. Published a paper describing
the stone in the Reputable Journal of Southern History in
eight but soon the plausibility of the stone came into question.
We spoke with John Bentz, archivists at the Rose Library
at Emory University. He said Emery became suspicious of Hammond

(03:17):
after some professors and administrators traveled with him to Edenton,
North Carolina, where he found the stone. The search for
the original location of the stone was fruitless. This added
to the growing list of details about Hammond's discovery that
we're hard to corroborate. Emery had someone in California look
into Hammond, but couldn't find much more than an address.
After Pierce and his father, another academic paid Hammond for

(03:40):
the first stone and offered a five hundred dollar reward
for any additional stones people might find. You can imagine
how many dare stones came out of the woodwork. The
pierces paid a man named Bill Eberhart, a stone cutter
from Fulton County, Georgia, two thousand dollars for forty two
forgeries he brought them. These stones had Eleanor marrying a
Cherokee chief, giving birth to another daughter named Agnes, and

(04:01):
eventually dying in a cave in Georgia in April of
nineteen forty one. The Saturday Evening Post ran an expos
a on the Dare stones, dismissing them all as forgeries,
citing anachronistic language and a consistency of spelling that was
unheard of at the time. The Pierce's career suffered, and
the Dare stones were stuffed in a basement at the
father's university, an embarrassment to everyone involved. But every so

(04:24):
often academic interest turns again to the Chowan River Stone,
the original Dare stone found by Hammond in that North
Carolina swamp. It's made of different rock than the others,
a bright white quartzite interior and dark exterior that would
have made a good choice for Eleanor Dare's missive to
her father, and in the nineteen thirties, the patina on
the stone would have been difficult to chemically replicate. In addition,

(04:46):
it doesn't contain the anachronistic language of the other stones.
Some experts have determined the only problem might be in
Eleanor Dare's sign off the initials E W D, which
would not have been a typical signature in the sixteenth century.
Many experts still dismissed the Tawan River stone as an
obvious phony but it's possible that new research into Elizabethan epigraphy,

(05:07):
chemical analysis, and other rock inscriptions of the time period
will yet shed light on this still unsolved mystery. Today's
episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tyler Clang.
For more on this and lots of other mysterious topics,
visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.