In late summer time of 1937, a person named Louis E. Hammond emerged from the tupelo gums and cypresses of the North Carolina wilderness with a 21-pound piece of quartz, onto which had been inscribed a virtually indecipherable, enigmatic message. The Californian had been touring via on trip when he’d stopped at Edenton, on the northern shore of Albemarle Sound, close to the mouth of the Chowan River. It was within the forest alongside the Chowan’s banks, he would later clarify, that he’d discovered the unusual rock, which he took to Emory College that fall. A bunch of researchers at Emory, together with historian Haywood Pearce, Jr., set to deciphering it, and shortly realized that this stone would possibly maintain a clue to one of many nice unsolved mysteries of American historical past.
Greater than three centuries earlier, Sir Walter Raleigh had tried to discovered a colony off the North Carolina coast, within the swamplands cradled by the Outer Banks. A colony beneath the command of Ralph Lane was based on Roanoke Island in 1585, however they instantly bumped into hassle, missing provides and clashing with the largely Algonquin-speaking Indigenous neighborhood. When a resupply ship did not arrive on time, the colonists fled again to England; the ship, arriving a while later to a abandoned colony, left behind a garrison of 15 troopers to defend the territory, after which returned house.
These males had been by no means heard from once more, however Raleigh, undeterred, launched a second try, this time beneath the command of John White. Touchdown on Roanoke in 1587, White based the “Cittie of Raleigh,” which might hopefully safe Raleigh’s colonial declare within the New World. White returned to England shortly thereafter, abandoning simply over 100 colonists (the precise quantity varies, however they included White’s pregnant daughter, Eleanor White Dare), promising to return again with provides in a 12 months. However his return was thwarted by the outbreak of the Anglo-Spanish Warfare, when each seaworthy British vessel was mustered into an enormous fleet to face the Spanish Armada. White and Raleigh finally couldn’t get a ship again to North Carolina till 1590.
When White lastly arrived, he discovered the colony abandoned. The one signal left behind was one phrase carved right into a wood palisade: CROATOAN.
White assumed this meant the colonists had moved to close by Croatoan Island, and got down to discover them there, however tough climate prohibited a touchdown, and after the ship misplaced its anchor, White was left with no alternative however to return to England. The destiny of the Misplaced Colony, because it got here to be identified, had been a thriller ever since.
However now, a stone scratched with an enigmatic message, discovered some 60 miles inland from Roanoke, appeared to have some solutions.
We usually view historical past as a steady, linear narrative: One factor follows one other, trigger results in impact, and the selections of the previous pile up throughout us, influencing our selections within the current and the probabilities of the long run. However unsolved mysteries disturb this order. With no sense of what occurred, we’re at a loss to grasp how these mysterious occasions might (or might not) have decided the occasions that adopted. The thriller exists exterior of our cause-and-effect narratives, unable to elucidate something that may have adopted it. Nevertheless it doesn’t disappear completely: Like a ghost, it lingers, nonetheless by some means current however persistently ambiguous.
The story of the Misplaced Colony lingers, exactly as a result of it’s a thriller, and, in all chance, will at all times be one. Every little thing about it augurs tragedy, however what sort of tragedy stays undefined. Even worse nonetheless, the absence right here represents failure: a failure of a colonial enterprise, a failure of Europeans’ supposed technological and ethical superiority over Indigenous individuals, a failure of the indomitable will of humanity to outlive and thrive. Throughout a span of centuries, the stays of an inexplicable defeat leer at us, calling out from the realm of the unknown.
Most eerie of all, maybe, is that one phrase—CROATOAN. The truth that historians overwhelmingly agree that it was probably a be aware left behind for rescuers, indicating the place the colony had departed to, has not stopped writers and filmmakers from conjuring ghost tales and hauntings based mostly on that solitary, enigmatic phrase—from Harlan Ellison and Stephen King to American Horror Story: Roanoke (and the far much less beloved Syfy unique film Wraiths of Roanoke).
Nevertheless it’s not simply fiction writers; the Misplaced Colony’s unresolved nature has lengthy made it a chief goal for the imaginings of North America’s previous. Writers have used fiction and historical past to hypothesize the destiny of the Misplaced Colony—and their numerous makes an attempt to elucidate what occurred invariably reveal an incredible deal about their very own attitudes towards the world on the time. Nearly from the start, writers tried to rationalize occasions in a method that made them really feel higher about themselves. John Marston and George Chapman’s 1605 play, Eastward Hoe, encompasses a character who claims that the remnants of the Misplaced Colony ended up intermarrying with the Algonquin inhabitants, who had been “so in love with ’hem, that each one treasure they’ve they lay at their ft.”
100 years later, nevertheless, the surveyor and naturalist John Lawson (who’d himself explored the Carolinas) was writing of the “Treachery of the Natives,” and the way we “might fairly suppose that the English had been pressured to cohabit with them…and that within the means of Time, they conform’d themselves to the Manners of their Indian Relations. And thus we see how apt Humane Nature is to degenerate.” Each variations hypothesize intermarriage as the last word reply to the thriller, however with broadly divergent interpretations of such an end result: Both the white settlers, with their overwhelming magnificence and purity, so over-awed the Algonquin that this race mingling have to be seen as a victory for Europeans, or they did so solely beneath risk, their pure white blood being corrupted by “savages.”
Whereas British authors within the seventeenth and 18th centuries had their concepts in regards to the Misplaced Colony, it wasn’t till George Bancroft’s 1834 Historical past of the USA that the parable and significance of Roanoke was absolutely established for the USA itself. Bancroft’s historical past of the nation begins not in 1776, however with its earliest colonial previous, dwelling on these preliminary makes an attempt of the Europeans to ascertain a foothold right here. Bancroft was the primary to name consideration particularly to Eleanor White Dare’s daughter, Virginia, and the significance of the kid’s place as “the primary offspring of English dad and mom on the soil of the USA.” Not “the New World” or “North America,” however “the soil of the USA,” a delicate however essential flip of phrase that hints at each the nation to return and that new nation’s innate connection to Europe.
Bancroft wrote his historical past throughout Andrew Jackson’s presidency, when repeated banking crises and a slew of home upheavals—together with an inflow of non-British, Catholic immigrants, uprisings from enslaved Individuals (together with Nat Turner’s revolt), and Jackson’s weakening of the federal authorities’s energy—all appeared, at instances, like they may swamp the American challenge altogether. Seizing on the nation’s earliest colonial previous, and particularly the story of Virginia Dare, was an try to floor the nation in a transcendental story of resolve and divine favor. For Bancroft, no matter might have occurred to her (he didn’t speculate) was much less essential than the actual fact of her existence, because the promise of what was to return. As he makes clear in his introduction, he believed that the early colonial interval “accommodates the germ of our establishments” and particularly that the “maturity of the nation is however a continuation of its youth.” Moreover, he argues that “the fortunes of a nation are usually not beneath the management of blind future,” however observe “a favoring Windfall.”
He was not simply chronicling historical past; as historian Robert H. Canary has identified, Bancroft was writing a story premised on the assumption that “historical past was the progressive unfolding of the divine will: the numerous occasions previously had been these which pointed to the long run, and his object was to assemble a story motion main to the current.” It labored; Bancroft’s narrative of American historical past, born of early colonial battle that exposed each the innate heroism and morality of European settlers and their divine mission, influenced a lot of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century American historiography—in addition to how individuals got here to make sense of the Misplaced Colony. In Cornelia L. Tuthill’s fictional story “Virginia Dare; Or, the Colony of Roanoke,” revealed in 1840, Virginia Dare converts the Indigenous populations she encounters to Christianity, changing into one thing of a folks saint, “remembered among the many tribe—who preserved the historical past of her eventful life, because the ‘White Angel of Mercy.’”
As Robert D. Arner would clarify in his 1985 evaluation of the assorted Misplaced Colony narratives, Tuthill “stumbled intuitively upon the actual cause for telling the story within the first place—our profound incapability to imagine that over 100 civilized, Christianized Englishmen may probably have been worn out by illiterate pagans.” The Misplaced Colony has at all times threatened to be a narrative not simply of particular person tragedy, however of the peril and folly of colonialism altogether. By turning Virginia Dare right into a legendary determine, what Arner identifies as each an “American Artemis, the virgin huntress Diana” in addition to a hybrid mix of “Protestant Madonna and Virgin,” the story of Roanoke is much less tragedy than divine prophecy of the success of colonialism and the ability of its martyrs.
The historical past of the historical past of the Misplaced Colony turns into, in Arner’s phrases, “the method by which the thoughts transforms unacceptable info into not less than minimally acceptable fictions,” a course of that may occur solely as a result of there may be an absence within the historic document, an absolute vacancy of identified indisputable fact that we will plug up with longing and self-soothing fantasy. It’s why, for instance, the story of the Misplaced Colony grew to become a strong narrative within the Reconstruction South, the place defeated white segregationists clung to a different story of white individuals “unjustly” defeated by non-white forces.
By the daybreak of the Twentieth century, when the nation was as soon as once more adjusting to giant waves of non-white, non-Protestant immigrants, racists and segregationists turned to Virginia Dare and tried to console themselves with fictive explanations of what occurred. The Reverend Joseph Blount Cheshire, at an anniversary handle given at Roanoke in 1910, proclaimed that the Misplaced Colony had not assimilated, nor had been there descendants to be sought “within the mongrel remnants, half Indian, half white, and half negro, of a decaying tribe of American savages.” Fairly, he argued, they suffered “a nobler destiny”: martyrdom, abandoning solely “their religious descendants and kindred” in “worthy and patriotic son and daughter of Carolina, Virginia, and the USA.” This racist celebration of Dare has continued to this present day. One of many extra distinguished white nationalist web sites is known as VDARE, based in 1999, and bigots appear to show to her story every time they really feel threatened by social change. Which is the great factor about mysteries: They are often eerie as a result of they continue to be inexplicable, however they can be soothing as a result of you possibly can dream up no matter clarification you want.
Louis Hammond’s discovery in 1937 provided an finish to all of this—an answer, lastly, to what had occurred to the Misplaced Colony, and a historic document that will both affirm or refute all of our metaphysical imaginings. The Dare Stone (because it got here to be referred to as) was a bit of quartz, its exterior weathered however its core nonetheless vivid white, such that slicing into it created a sturdy and visual script. On one aspect was a cross, surrounded by the phrases
Ananias Dare and Virginia Went Therefore Unto Heaven 1591
Any Englishman present John White Governor Virginia
On the opposite face, an extended message signed “EWD” gave the impression to be from Eleanor Dare herself. It was addressed to her father, and defined how, as quickly as he left, distress and warfare befell the colony; a misunderstanding of some type appeared to have terrified the native Indigenous inhabitants, who returned apparently believing the colonists had been “offended spirits,” and slaughtered all however a number of. Among the many lifeless had been Eleanor’s husband, Ananias, and her daughter, Virginia. They had been buried, the stone defined, 4 miles east of the river, on a small hill, their graves marked with stones.
The Dare Stone provided each a collection of solutions, and but posed extra questions. What had occurred to Eleanor and the remaining survivors after she’d carved this be aware? And the place had been the opposite stones, that supposedly marked the graves of the lifeless?
Hammond needed Emory College to purchase the stone from him, however the college declined to buy it; as a substitute, one in every of their professors who’d been tasked to investigate it, historian Haywood Pearce, Jr., purchased it alongside together with his father, who was president of close by Brenau Faculty. Pearce, Jr., offered his findings in The Journal of Southern Historical past in 1938, detailing the forensic proof that prompt the stone was real and what its story would possibly imply for historians making an attempt to grasp the Misplaced Colony. Moreover, each Pearces started making common journeys to Edenton to scour the close by forest for extra clues, and in February 1939 they introduced a reward of $500 (over $11,000 in 2025) to anybody who may flip up one other stone.
For locals, novice historians, and treasure-seekers alike, the invention of the stone, and the promise of others, modified the panorama across the Carolina wetlands. All of the sudden each wilderness house was resonate, each inert rock or little bit of panorama may—maybe!—maintain a clue, a bit of the story. Pleasure-seekers and treasure-hunters fanned out throughout the forests and swamps. If the story of the Misplaced Colony created a wierd absence within the historic document, the promise of extra stones made the North Carolina panorama come alive with a renewed vitality.
The Pearces wouldn’t have to attend lengthy; that June, a person named Invoice Eberhardt appeared, claiming to have discovered a second stone. This stone was completely different: The script and spelling didn’t match the primary Dare Stone, and its location, in Greenville County, South Carolina, was removed from the place anybody had supposed the survivors might need traveled to. However Pearce took it as real, and shortly Eberhardt appeared with extra stones, finally greater than three dozen. Like a serialized drama, Eberhardt’s stones doled out essential plot factors one after the other, telling a narrative of how the colonists had migrated farther south, ultimately dying out within the wilds of Georgia.
The thriller of this new group of stones was much less about what had occurred to the Misplaced Colony, and extra about how a good historian like Pearce was taken in by such an apparent con. Eberhardt, it could later be revealed, had an extended historical past of counterfeiting Native American relics on the market, and his supposed Dare Stones had been rapidly unveiled to be patent—and never very convincing—fakes. When Pearce despatched the Saturday Night Put up a characteristic in regards to the stones, the journal employed journalist Boyden Sparkes to fact-check the piece and look into the stones’ provenance; based mostly on what he discovered, the Put up ended up hiring Sparkes to put in writing a really completely different piece altogether, disclaiming your entire lot of rocks (even Hammond’s unique discover) as forgeries.
At present, your entire assortment is housed at Brenau Faculty in Gainesville, Georgia, the place the stones are nonetheless accessible to researchers, though they clearly determine the Eberhardt stones as fakes and forged doubt on Hammond’s (their web site notes that “there isn’t a conclusive scientific proof that the chiseled textual content is genuine and never an elaborate forgery”). However there are some who imagine that the unique Dare Stone could also be professional: The language aligns with Elizabethan English (in a method Eberhardt’s patently didn’t), and its narrative matches what little we now do know in regards to the colony, together with data that will not have been out there to students in 1938, not to mention an novice forger (certainly, most makes an attempt to discredit rely primarily on Hammond’s personal motivations fairly than the properties of the stone itself). And so it has change into a thriller unto itself. Fairly than resolve the thriller of the Misplaced Colony, the unique Dare Stone—like that eerily carved phrase CROATOAN—has solely deepened it, and at this level your perception of its provenance, maybe, says extra about you than it does in regards to the stone or the lacking Roanoke colonists.
Which is to say, as we peer deeper into historical past, typically in lieu of readability what we discover is much more ambiguity. Typically, after all, the work of historical past and archaeology produce new and startling solutions that assist additional fill in gaps within the historic document. However on occasion, makes an attempt to unravel mysteries solely beget additional mysteries.
