Dare Stones

The Dare Stones are a series of inscribed messages supposedly written by English colonists, members of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, off North Carolina. The colonists were last seen in 1587, when John White, the colony's governor, returned to England for supplies. White's return was delayed until 1590, when he found that all the settlers had gone. A single-word message indicated that they had moved to another place, but poor weather meant that White had to abandon the search. No subsequent trace of the settlers was ever found.

The stones give accounts of what happened to the colonists. They are mainly supposed to have been written by Eleanor White Dare, who was the daughter of John White and the mother of Virginia Dare, the first child of English descent to be born in North America.

The first stone

LE Hammond, a Californian tourist, claimed in 1937 to have found a stone inscribed by Eleanor Dare. He took it to Emory University, Atlanta, where it was examined by Dr Haywood Jefferson Pearce, Jr., professor of American history.^[1] It stated on one side that Eleanor's husband and daughter were dead, and asked the finder to communicate this to her father:

Ananias Dare &

Virginia Went Hence

Unto Heaven 1591

Anye Englishman Shew

John White Govr Via

On the other side it explained that all but seven of the colonists had been killed by savages, and was signed 'EWD'.^[2]

Pearce did not immediately declare the stone to be authentic, but argued that the content was not incompatible with the known historical facts, that the spelling conformed to expectations of Elizabethan orthography, and that the necessary tools for such an inscription were likely to have been in the possession of the colonists.^[3]

In 2015, a team of archaeologists, including Fred Willard, and experts in early modern (Shakespearean era) writing from Emory University determined that the first stone was authentic and distinct from the remaining stones which remained questionable.^[4]

Further stones discovered

By 1940 forty-seven more stones had been produced.^[2] They told a complicated tale of the fate of the Lost Colony. The stones were addressed to John White and called for revenge against the "savages" or told Eleanor's father the direction taken by the survivors. A stone dated 1592 indicated the survivors had reached a sanctuary in the Nacoochee Valley area and lived there in "primeval splendor." Another stone, dated 1598, indicated that Eleanor had married the "king" of the tribe, while another said she bore the chief a daughter, that the tribe was furious, and asked for White to send the infant girl to England. A stone dated 1599 announced Eleanor Dare's death and said she had left behind a daughter named Agnes.

A preliminary report by a team of Smithsonian Institution-commissioned historians, led by the historian Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard University, examined the stones and gave them a measure of authenticity.^[5]

Evidence of forgery

The stones were exposed as forgeries by the journalist Boyden Sparkes in the Saturday Evening Post in 1941.^[1] Without definitively indicating any individual as having responsibility, he raised a number of questions, both about the information given by the stones themselves, and about the characters and background of those who purported to have found them. He also questioned the circumstances of stones having travelled so far from where they were supposedly left by Eleanor Dare to the spot where they were found: Sparkes put it to Pearce that "it must have been an exceedingly friendly naked savage who had carried a twenty-one-pound stone message across hundreds of miles of South and North Carolina". Sparkes also found evidence that someone had been attempting to sell a fake stone at Manteo, near Roanoke, shortly before the first stone was produced by Hammond.

Hammond had only a post-office box for an address and could not be traced by Sparkes or even by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and Sparkes noted that Emory University washed their hands of the business when Hammond proposed charging people to see the stone - it was at this stage that Pearce took the stone himself, to Brenau College which his family ran. The finders of the subsequent stones, Mr Eberhart, Mr Turner, Mr Bruce and Mr and Mrs Jett, all had connections with one another, and the first two (one of whom was a stonemason) had been friends for many years. Turner did not admit to any forgery when pressed by Sparkes, but said, “If those stones were crooked, Pearce knows who crooked 'em.”

The stones themselves gave Sparkes clues to their forgery. One was claimed to have been kept in a tool-chest for fifteen years, yet had suffered no damage even though, when handled by the museum, it started crumbling. Pearce had apparently suppressed a report by a geologist colleague that one of the stones had an inscription “cut within the past few days or weeks”. The style of the lettering was non-Elizabethan, according to an eminent palaeographer consulted by Sparkes. Elizabethan spelling was notoriously inconsistent, yet these stones consistently used the same spellings over the supposed dozen years involved in their creation. Two words ('primeval' and 'reconnoitre') are not attested in the English language until fifty or a hundred years after these stones were supposed to have been inscribed.

Sparkes also noted that Pearce had been in contact with the film producer Cecil B. De Mille with a view to a film being made based on the story outlined in the stones.

In 2015, a team of archaeologists, including Fred Willard, and experts in early modern (Shakespearean era) writing from Emory University determined that the first stone was authentic and distinct from the remaining stones which remained questionable.

The stones today

Today, Brenau retains the Dare Stones, but displays only a few of them in the special collections section of the library. However, the university will make the entire collection available for legitimate research or reasonable media inquiry, and has cooperated on a number of television programs and research projects, including a 1977 documentary narrated by Leonard Nimoy.

The stones have few supporters of their authenticity today, though Robert W. White's 1991 book A Witness For Eleanor Dare argued that they were genuine.

Researchers, following the 2015 discoveries regarding the first stone's authenticity, used it to determine the probable location of the Indian village where the Roanoke survivors lived. Immediately across the river from where the first stone was discovered, archaeologists uncovered countless Native American artifacts mixed with numerous 16th century items.

References

External links

• The Dare Stones, 1 Through 48 (Native Heritage Project)
• In Search of...The Lost Colony of Roanoke, TV documentary (1977)
• Roanoke: Search for the Lost Colony, TV documentary (2015)