An unresolved mystery story can drive people crazy , and the luck of the first English settlers ever to instal a settlement in the New World is a puzzle that — let ’s face it — will probably never be entirely solved . But that does n’t keep multitude from trying .
In July of 1587 , a ship carrying 90 valet de chambre , 17 women and 11 small fry land onRoanoke Islandon the outer bank of modern - Clarence Shepard Day Jr. North Carolina . The 15 men who had offer to rest and moderate down the fortress at the site when it was get a line the year before were nowhere to be find , so the 118 colonists disembarked and sic about carving a colony out of the wilderness . There was much excitement when Eleanor Dare , the girl of drawing card John White , give birth to the first English sister born in the New World , and refer her Virginia .
After a metre , John White forget the settlers to return to England , telling them he ’d be back within the year with fresh supply . However , England ’s warfare with Spain slow the process considerably , and nobody was capable to check on the colonization again until 1590 . When White return , his daughter , granddaughter and everyone else was gone . They had dismantled the buildings , cut up the word " Croatoan , " the name of the friendly kin on a nearby island , into a tree , and vanished . There was no sign of the mark White told them to chip at on a tree diagram if they left under duress .
Frankly , White did n’t look very concentrated for his daughter and granddaughter before heading back to England . For centuries , the story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke seemed pretty trimmed and dried to most historians : The settlers went to live with the Croatoan tribe — whether they stayed there or not , nobody could say . The thing theycouldsay is that , despite hearsay in the afterward - established Jamestown colony of massacres and world wearing European wearing apparel deep in the wilderness , no definitive sign of any of the 118 shipwreck survivor was ever found .
That is , until about 350 years later , when , in 1937 , a produce dealer from California bring up L.E. Hammond showed up at Emory University in Atlanta witha stonehe found while hunting hickory nuts in a of late cleared North Carolina swampland , some 50 nautical mile ( 80 kilometers ) inland of Roanoke Island . It was inscribed with a subject matter he want the experts at Emory to decode . Turns out , the chip at stone told a story , allegedly written by White ’s daughter Eleanor : The colonist endured two long time of " Onlie Misarie & Warre , " after her father left for England , ending with half the settler killed in armed combat and many of the others , include Eleanor ’s married man and girl , slaughtered when a shaman of the kindred they lived with warned that the bearing of the English settler was anger the spirits . concord to the stone , only six valet de chambre and a womanhood break loose .
The stone was find to be veritable by the Emory experts — it seemed lawful , and , well still , it fill everyone ’s hungriness for gag rule around this moth-eaten older riddle . The story captured the resource of the entire country , and Emory prof Haywood J. Pearce Jr. publisheda paperdescribing the stone in the reputable Journal of Southern account in 1938 . But soon , the plausibleness of the Edward Durell Stone came into question .
" Emory became suspicious of Hammond after some professors and administrator traveled with him to Edenton , North Carolina where he found the Harlan Fiske Stone , " says John Bence , archivist at theRose Libraryat Emory University . " The hunting for the original location of the rock was futile ; this added to the growing list of details about Hammond ’s breakthrough that were hard to substantiate . Emory had someone in California look into Hammond but could n’t chance much more than an address . "
After Pearce and his Father of the Church , Haywood J. Pearce Sr . ( who possess the individual Brenau College — nowBrenau University — in Gainesville , Georgia ) , paid Hammond for the first stone and offered a $ 500 reward for any extra stones people might find , you could opine how many Dare stones came out of the carpentry . The Pearces paid a man appoint Bill Eberhardt , a endocarp cutter from Fulton County , Georgia , $ 2,000 for 42 counterfeit he lend them . These stone had Eleanor hook up with a Cherokee tribal chief , giving birth to another girl named Agnes and eventually give-up the ghost in a cave in Georgia .
In April 1941 , the Saturday Evening Post lead anexposéon the Dare Harlan F. Stone , dismissing them all as forgaries , cite anachronistic language and a consistency of spelling unheard of at the time . Pearce ’s calling suffered , and the Dare stones were stuffed in a Brenau University basement , an embarrassment to everyone postulate .
But every so often , pedantic interestturns again to the Chowan River I. F. Stone — the original Dare Lucy Stone , feel by Hammond in that North Carolina swamp . It is made of unlike rock than the others — a bright white quartzite interior and sour exterior would have made a well choice for Eleanor Dare ’s letter to her father , and in the 1930s the patina on the stone would have been hard to chemically reduplicate . In addition , it does n’t contain the anachronic oral communication of the other stones — some experts have determined the only problem might be in Eleanor Dare ’s signoff , the initial EWD , which would not have been a typical signature in the 16th century .
Many expert still brush aside the Chowan River stone as an obvious phony , but it ’s possible young technology in Elizabethan epigraphy , chemical analysis and other rock inscriptions of the time period can disgorge light on this still - unresolved closed book .
hear more about the Dare Harlan Stone in " The Lost rock : The Dare Stones and the Unsolved Mystery of Sir Walter Raleigh ’s Lost Colony " by David La Vere . HowStuffWorks picks related titles based on books we think you ’ll like . Should you select to buy one , we ’ll find a helping of the cut-rate sale .
