HISTORY OR HOAX - THE ELEANOR DARE STONE?

Dare Stone, front side,

Brenau University.

ncpedia.org, Public domain.

This is another story about a questionable historical inscription on a piece of rock, discovered under questionable circumstances and never rigorously tested for authenticity, which some people desperately want to be authentic, and others are convinced of its status as a hoax.

"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 purport to 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." (Wikipedia)

Dare Stone, back side,

Brenau University.

ncpedia.org, Public domain.

The first stone was supposedly found by one L. E. Hammond, a California tourist, in 1937. He took it to Emory University, Atlanta, where he gave it to History Professor Haywood Jefferson Pearce to examine. Pearce did not declare the stone to be authentic, but did argue that the content was not incompatible with known historical facts, and that the spelling content was not "conformed to expectations of"  Elizabethan usage. (Wikipedia)

One side of the first stone said:

"Ananias Dare &

Virginia Went Hence

Unto Heaven 1591

Anye Englishman Shew

John White Govr Via"

(Wikipedia)

And the second side had a much longer inscription about the deaths of the colony:

"On the other side it explained that all but seven of the colonists had been killed by savages, and it was signed 'EWD'." (Wikipedia) The second side also mentioned a burial of the victims on a hill marked by another inscribed stone.

Pearce was eager to find the second stone mentioned on stone #1 and put an ad in a local paper offering a reward for further stones."By 1940, forty-seven more stones allegedly had been found by a local farmer, William Eberhardt. 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." (Wikipedia)

All of the subsequently discovered stones were quickly suspected as forgeries, manufactured by Eberhardt, and in 1941 an investigative reporter from the Saturday Evening Post took up the question. It was quickly proven that these subsequent stones had been manufactured with the assistance of a hand drill not available to a lost colonist in the 1500s. Additionally, the fact that they were all discovered hundreds of miles from where the colonists would reasonably have been expected to be aroused suspicion.

"The stones were exposed as forgeries by journalist Boyden Sparkes in the Saturday Evening Post in 1941. He raised a number of questions without definitively indicating any individual as having responsibility, questions about the information given by the stones themselves, and also about the characters and background of those who purported to have found them. He also questioned the circumstances of stones having traveled 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 and exceedingly friendly naked savage who had carried a twenty-one-pound stone message across hundreds of miles of South and North Carolina." " (Wikipedia)

Sparkes noted that Emory University had washed their hands of the whole business when Hammond  had proposed charging people to see the stone, at which point Pearce took the stone himself to Brenau College (now Brenau University).  Sparkes was unable to retrace Hammond, having only a post-office box for an address, and the Pinkerton Detective Agency was also unable to locate the original discoverer. (Wikipedia)

Although I, like every American school kid, was introduced to the subject of the "Lost Colony" in grade school, my first introduction to the subject of the Eleanor Dare Stone came in the form of an episode of the television series America Unearthed, hosted by "forensic geologist" and scam artist Scott Wolter, so I assumed from the beginning that the whole thing was a hoax. And, to be honest, there are many questions and doubts about the authenticity of the first stone as well, although some people still believe it might be authentic. A 2015 documentary on the History Channel Return to Roanoke, Search For The Seven reached this conclusion, that the first stone might be a real inscription by Eleanor Dare and that further tests were called for. The History Channel documentary was certainly done better than America Unearthed and is worth watching as a reasonably conducted investigation and interesting piece of documentary, no matter what your position is on the authenticity of the Eleanor Dare Stone(s). To me the fascination of this story, and I do find it fascinating, is that people will still fall for these hoaxes.

NOTE: The images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on this report you should read the original at the site listed below.

REFERENCES:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dare_Stones