Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here an unsolved mystery can drive people crazy
Speaker 1: and the fate of the first English settlers ever to
Speaker 1: establish a colony in the New World. Roanoke is a
Speaker 1: puzzle that will probably never be entirely solved, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't keep people from trying. In July 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 a
Speaker 1: hundred and eighteen colonists disembarked and set about carving a
Speaker 1: colony out of the wilderness. There's much excitement when Eleanor Dare,
Speaker 1: the daughter of leader John White, gave birth to the
Speaker 1: first English baby born in the New World, and named
Speaker 1: her Virginia. After a time, John White left the settlers
Speaker 1: to return to England, telling them he'd be back within
Speaker 1: the year with fresh supplies. However, England war with Spain's
Speaker 1: load the process considerably and nobody was able to check
Speaker 1: on the settlement again until fifteen nine, when White returned
Speaker 1: his daughter, granddaughter, and everyone else was gone. They had
Speaker 1: dismantled the buildings, carved the word Croatoan into a tree,
Speaker 1: the name of the friendly Native American tribe on a
Speaker 1: nearby island, and vanished. There was no sign of the
Speaker 1: cross White had told them to carve on a tree
Speaker 1: if they had left under duress. Frankly, White didn't look
Speaker 1: very hard for his daughter and granddaughter before heading back
Speaker 1: to England. For centuries, the story of the lost Colony
Speaker 1: of Roanoke seemed pretty cut and dried to most historians.
Speaker 1: The settlers went to live with a Crowatoan tribe. Whether
Speaker 1: they stayed there or not, nobody could say. The thing
Speaker 1: they could say is that no definitive sign of any
Speaker 1: of the one and eighteen colonists was ever found, despite
Speaker 1: rumors in the later established Jamestown colony of massacres and
Speaker 1: men wearing European clothes deep in the wilderness. No definitive sign,
Speaker 1: that is until more than three centuries later, when in
Speaker 1: nine then a produced dealer from California named L. E.
Speaker 1: Hammond showed up at Emory University in Atlanta with a
Speaker 1: stone he found while hunting hickory nuts in a recently
Speaker 1: cleared North Carolina swamp some fifty miles or eight kilometers
Speaker 1: inland of Roanoke Island. It was inscribed with a message
Speaker 1: he wanted the experts at Emory to decipher. It turns
Speaker 1: out the carved stone told a story allegedly written by
Speaker 1: White's daughter Eleanor. The colonists endured two years of only
Speaker 1: misery and war after her father left for England, ending
Speaker 1: with half the settlers killed in armed combat and many
Speaker 1: of the others, including Eleanor's husband and daughter, slaughtered when
Speaker 1: a spiritual leader of the tribe they lived with warned
Speaker 1: that the presence of the English settlers was angering the spirits.
Speaker 1: According to the stone, only six men and one woman escaped.
Speaker 1: The stone was found to be authentic by the Emory
Speaker 1: experts at the time, it seemed legitimate, and better still,
Speaker 1: it satisfied everyone's thirst foreclosure around this dusty old riddle.
Speaker 1: The story captured the imagination of the entire country, and
Speaker 1: Emery Professor Heywood J. Pierce Jr. Published a paper describing
Speaker 1: the stone in the Reputable Journal of Southern History in
Speaker 1: eight but soon the plausibility of the stone came into question.
Speaker 1: We spoke with John Bentz, archivists at the Rose Library
Speaker 1: at Emory University. He said Emery became suspicious of Hammond
Speaker 1: after some professors and administrators traveled with him to Edenton,
Speaker 1: North Carolina, where he found the stone. The search for
Speaker 1: the original location of the stone was fruitless. This added
Speaker 1: to the growing list of details about Hammond's discovery that
Speaker 1: we're hard to corroborate. Emery had someone in California look
Speaker 1: into Hammond, but couldn't find much more than an address.
Speaker 1: After Pierce and his father, another academic paid Hammond for
Speaker 1: the first stone and offered a five hundred dollar reward
Speaker 1: for any additional stones people might find. You can imagine
Speaker 1: how many dare stones came out of the woodwork. The
Speaker 1: pierces paid a man named Bill Eberhart, a stone cutter
Speaker 1: from Fulton County, Georgia, two thousand dollars for forty two
Speaker 1: forgeries he brought them. These stones had Eleanor marrying a
Speaker 1: Cherokee chief, giving birth to another daughter named Agnes, and
Speaker 1: eventually dying in a cave in Georgia in April of
Speaker 1: nineteen forty one. The Saturday Evening Post ran an expos
Speaker 1: a on the Dare stones, 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 Dare stones were stuffed in a basement at the
Speaker 1: father's university, an embarrassment to everyone involved. But every so
Speaker 1: often academic interest turns again to the Chowan River Stone,
Speaker 1: the original Dare stone found by Hammond in that North
Speaker 1: Carolina swamp. It's made of different rock than the others,
Speaker 1: a bright white quartzite interior and dark exterior that would
Speaker 1: have made a good choice for Eleanor Dare's missive to
Speaker 1: her father, and in the nineteen thirties, the patina on
Speaker 1: the stone would have been difficult to chemically replicate. In addition,
Speaker 1: it doesn't contain the anachronistic language of the other stones.
Speaker 1: Some experts have determined the only problem might be in
Speaker 1: Eleanor Dare's sign off the initials E W D, which
Speaker 1: would not have been a typical signature in the sixteenth century.
Speaker 1: Many experts still dismissed the Tawan River stone as an
Speaker 1: obvious phony but it's possible that new research into Elizabethan epigraphy,
Speaker 1: chemical analysis, and other rock inscriptions of the time period
Speaker 1: will yet shed light on this still unsolved mystery. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other mysterious topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.