Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey.
Speaker 2: Brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Wogbomb in today's episode is another
Speaker 2: classic from our archives. In this one, we dip into
Speaker 2: the enduring mystery of the lost colony at Roanoke and
Speaker 2: the further mystery of the Dare Stones, which may be
Speaker 2: forgeries or may explain what happened, Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbomb.
Speaker 1: Here an unsolved mystery can drive people crazy and the
Speaker 1: fate of the first English settlers ever to establish a
Speaker 1: colony in the New World. Roanoke is a puzzle that
Speaker 1: will probably never be entirely solved, but it doesn't keep
Speaker 1: people from trying. In July fifteen eighty seven, a ship
Speaker 1: carrying ninety men, seventeen women, and eleven children landed on
Speaker 1: Roanoke Island on the outer banks of modern day North Carolina.
Speaker 1: A year before, when the site was discovered, fifteen men
Speaker 1: had volunteered to stay and hold down the proverbial fort,
Speaker 1: but they were nowhere to be found, so the one
Speaker 1: hundred and eighteen colonists disembarked and set about carving a
Speaker 1: colony out of the wilderness. There was much excitement when
Speaker 1: eleanor Dare, the daughter of leader John White, gave birth
Speaker 1: to the first English baby born in the New World
Speaker 1: and named her Virginia. After a time, John White left
Speaker 1: the settlers to return to England, telling them he'd be
Speaker 1: back within the year with fresh supplies. However, England's war
Speaker 1: with Spain slowed the process considerably, and nobody was able
Speaker 1: to check on the settlement again until fifteen ninety, when
Speaker 1: White returned, his daughter, granddaughter, and everyone else was gone.
Speaker 1: They had dismantled the buildings, carved the word Croatoan into
Speaker 1: a tree, the name of the friendly Native American tribe
Speaker 1: on a nearby island, and vanished. There was no sign
Speaker 1: of the cross White had told them to carve on
Speaker 1: a tree if they had left under duress. Frankly, White
Speaker 1: didn't look very hard for his daughter and granddaughter before
Speaker 1: heading back to England. For centuries, the story of the
Speaker 1: lost colony of Roanokes seemed pretty cut and dried to
Speaker 1: most historians. The settlers went to live with a Crowatoin tribe,
Speaker 1: but whether they stayed there or not, nobody could say.
Speaker 1: The thing they could say is that no definitive sign
Speaker 1: of any of the one hundred and eighteen colonists was
Speaker 1: ever found, despite rumours in the later established Jamestown colony
Speaker 1: of massacres and men wearing European clothes deep in the wilderness.
Speaker 1: No definitive sign, that is until more than three centuries later,
Speaker 1: when in nineteen thirty seven, a produce dealer from California
Speaker 1: named L. E. Hammond showed up at Emory University in
Speaker 1: Atlanta with a stone he found while hunting hickory nuts
Speaker 1: in a recently cleared North Carolina swamp some fifty miles
Speaker 1: or eighty kilometers inland of Roanoke Island. It was inscribed
Speaker 1: with a message he wanted the experts at Emory to decipher.
Speaker 1: It turns out the carved stone told a story allegedly
Speaker 1: written by White's daughter Eleanor. The colonists endured two years
Speaker 1: of only misery and war after her father left for England,
Speaker 1: ending with half the settlers killed in armed combat and
Speaker 1: many of the others, including Eleanor's husband and daughter, slaughtered.
Speaker 1: When a spiritual leader of the tribe they lived with
Speaker 1: warned that the presence of the English settlers was angering
Speaker 1: the spear. According to the stone, only six men and
Speaker 1: one woman escaped. The stone was found to be authentic
Speaker 1: by the Emery experts. At the time, it seemed legitimate,
Speaker 1: and better still, it satisfied everyone's thirst foreclosure around this
Speaker 1: dusty old riddle. The story captured the imagination of the
Speaker 1: entire country, and Emory professor Heywood J. Pierce Junior published
Speaker 1: a paper describing the stone in the Reputable Journal of
Speaker 1: Southern History in nineteen thirty eight. But soon the plausibility
Speaker 1: of the stone came into question. We spoke with John Bentz,
Speaker 1: archivist at the Rose Library at Emory University. He said
Speaker 1: Emory became suspicious of Hammond after some professors and administrators
Speaker 1: traveled with him to Edenton, North Carolina, where he found
Speaker 1: the stone. The search for the original location of the
Speaker 1: stone was fruitless. This added to the growing list of
Speaker 1: details about Hammond's discovery that were hard to corroborate. Emory
Speaker 1: had someone in California look into Hammond, but couldn't find
Speaker 1: much more than an address. After Pierce and his father,
Speaker 1: another academic, paid Hammond for the first stone and offered
Speaker 1: a five hundred dollars reward for any additional stones people
Speaker 1: might find. You can imagine how many dair stones came
Speaker 1: out of the woodwork. The Pierces paid a man named
Speaker 1: Bill Eberhardt, a stonecutter from Fulton County, Georgia, two thousand
Speaker 1: dollars for forty two forgeries he brought them. These stones
Speaker 1: had Eleanor marrying a Cherokee chief, giving birth to another
Speaker 1: daughter named Agnes, and eventually dying in a cave in Georgia.
Speaker 1: In April of nineteen forty one, the Saturday Evening Post
Speaker 1: ran an expos on the Dairstones, dismissing them all as forgeries,
Speaker 1: citing anachronistic language and a consistency of spelling that was
Speaker 1: unheard of at the time. The Pierce's career suffered, and
Speaker 1: the daarstones were stuffed in a basement at the father's university,
Speaker 1: an embarrassment to everyone involved. But every so often academic
Speaker 1: interest turns again to the Chowan riverstone, the original dairstone
Speaker 1: found by Hammond in that North Carolina swamp. It's made
Speaker 1: of different rock than the others, a bright white quartzite
Speaker 1: interior and dark exterior that would have made a good
Speaker 1: choice for Eleanor Dare's missive to her father, and in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, the patina on the stone would have
Speaker 1: been difficult to chemically replicate. In addition, it doesn't contain
Speaker 1: the anachronistic language of the other stones. Some experts have
Speaker 1: determined the only problem might be in eleanor Dare's sign
Speaker 1: off the initials E W D, which would not have
Speaker 1: been a typical signature in the sixteenth century. Many experts
Speaker 1: still dismiss the Toowan riverstone as an obvious phony, but
Speaker 1: it's possible that new research into Elizabethan epigraphy, chemical analysis,
Speaker 1: and other rock inscriptions of the time period will yet
Speaker 1: shed light on this still unsolved mystery. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: based on the article the Dare Stones Forgery or Key
Speaker 1: to the Lost Colony of Roanoke Mystery on hostiff works
Speaker 1: dot com, written by Jesslyn Shields. Brainstuff is production of
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