The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  Here, in the professors’ hands, was an artifact that might do just what the president had wished three months earlier. The professors retreated with Hammond and the stone into the alumni office, which quickly filled with the curious. Lester and his colleagues then took the finder and the stone to the relative privacy of the biophysics lab in the basement to decipher the inscription. Lester and J. Harris Purks, the physics professor, took the lead.

  The news traveled fast across campus, and a young history professor named Haywood Jefferson Pearce Jr. rushed to the lab to assist in the translation. At five feet six inches, Pearce resembled a scholarly Charlie Chaplin with his small frame, thick hair, and small mustache. He had served during World War I and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. Pearce had recently published a well-received biography on a Confederate general and was one of the university’s rising stars. Lester and the others welcomed him, given his extensive knowledge of southern history.

  The team continued to work until nearly eleven that night, with only brief breaks for lunch and dinner, and secured the rock overnight within a physics apparatus case. The next morning another dozen professors appeared, hoping for a chance at seeing the stone and assisting in its analysis. “On account of the crowd and confusion, very little progress was made on the inscription,” a summary of events in the Emory archives notes. One can imagine the polite jostling as each tried to get a closer glimpse of the lettering and offer advice on its decipherment.

  Hammond explained to the academics that soon after finding the stone, he had gone over the inscription with an indelible pencil, a steel brush, and a nail in his unsuccessful attempts to read the hard-to-see words. It was soon clear to everyone in the biophysics lab that the stone contained a heartrending message: a grieving daughter abandoned in the New World writing to the father who had tried and failed to find her.

  By Tuesday afternoon, the professors agreed that the next step was to visit the site where Hammond said he found the rock. Securing additional archaeological evidence was a key to authenticating the inscription. The decision was also a way to cool the charged atmosphere on campus.

  That day, L. E. Hammond of Alameda, California, signed an agreement with Emory giving him one dollar in exchange for the university’s assuming temporary custody of the stone. It was to be kept locked in the treasurer’s vault at night. The contract gave Emory “exclusive rights to conduct research studies in the history and origin of said stone” and to publish the results.

  Haywood Pearce, center, examines the Dare Stone shortly after Louis Hammond brought it to Emory University in 1937. James Lester is on the left with Ben Gibson, a Georgia Tech geologist, on the right. Brenau University

  Early on Wednesday morning, Lester, Purks, and Pearce, along with two others, set off from Atlanta with Hammond as their guide. Hammond described himself as a former produce dealer from California and said that he and his wife were touring the country. He told the professors that he had found the stone that summer, the very season that the Lost Colony drama began fifty miles to the east and drew nationwide publicity. None of the Emory staff recorded whether Hammond said he went to the play or knew about the president’s visit to celebrate Virginia Dare’s birthday, though it was national news at the time.

  Hammond said that he and his wife were riding on the newly opened Ocean Highway linking Virginia with Florida and stopped just shy of the bridge crossing the Chowan River to pick up hickory nuts. The bridge passed just west of North Carolina’s old colonial capital of Edenton, a sleepy town that looks over the waters where the Chowan and Roanoke empty to form the head of the wide Albemarle Sound. Fifty miles to the east is Roanoke Island and, just beyond, the Atlantic Ocean.

  Hammond had only a rough drawing he had made on a paper bag to serve as a map. He told the Emory professors that he had noticed a rock with odd markings while walking in the woods. Then he dragged it to a nearby sand spit on the river to wash off the dirt. He remembered that just offshore he had noticed a sunken barge. He later put the stone in the trunk of his car and while passing through Atlanta in November thought to seek professional help.

  When the team arrived in Edenton, Hammond had trouble pinpointing the place where he first saw the rock. They wandered in the swamp until he pointed out “the approximate spot where he stumbled upon the stone,” Pearce wrote later, though—like many involved with the Lost Colony before and since—the historian kept the precise location secret. Lester noted that the spongy land was slowly being submerged by rising water and that there was no native rock in the vicinity.

  The men also found a sandy shoal that Hammond recognized as the place where he cleaned the rock. They noted the presence of the sunken barge offshore. No other stones or any other artifacts were found. After two nights, twelve hundred miles, and one tire puncture, the men were back at Emory.

  The team resumed the transcription of the rock the next day, Friday, and worked through the weekend. By late Sunday night, the decipherment was complete. The result stunned the Georgia professors.

  * * *

  —

  Ananias Dare & Virginia Went Hence unto Heaven 1591” and “Anye Englishman Shew John White Govr Via” was written on one side. There was also a cross, reminiscent of the agreement White said he made with the colonists on his 1587 departure: “I willed them, that if they should happen to be distressed in any of those places, that then they should carve over the letters or name, a cross in this form,” indicating on the page a Greek cross. The inscription intimated that Eleanor Dare’s husband and her young child died not long after White’s August 1590 rescue mission.

  How they died and what Eleanor suffered were the subjects of side two. “Father Soone After You Goe for England Wee Cam Hither,” the tale begins, placing Eleanor herself as the storyteller, speaking directly to the governor from a refuge somewhere off Roanoke Island. The colonists suffered two years of “Onlie Misarie & Warre” that led to the death of more than half the settlers.

  At some point, an Indian appeared with news that a ship had arrived off the coast, but he told her that the Native Americans had fled because they feared the arriving Europeans would exact revenge, though for what reason is not stated. Because the ship quickly departed—presumably a reference to White’s aborted 1590 search effort—the stone records that the surviving colonists assumed the governor was not aboard the vessel.

  Tragedy struck soon after, according to the inscription, when Indian shamans warned that the spirits were angry and all the remaining English, save seven, were abruptly killed. Apparently, the appearance of White spooked the Native Americans. Among the dead were “Mine Childe” and “Ananias to Slaine wth Much Misarie.” The dead were buried four miles east of “This River,” with their names “Writ Al There on Rocke.”

  The inscription states “Put This Ther Also,” a confusing phrase given that the message mentions that an Indian would take the stone to White—presumably, then, to Roanoke or Croatoan on the coast—in exchange for “Plentie Presents.” The story ends with the writer’s initials—“EWD”—obviously for Eleanor White Dare.

  The day after the work deciphering the wording on the stone was complete, Hammond signed a new contract, this one with four Emory professors, including Lester and Pearce. The unusual agreement created a partnership that gave Hammond title to the stone, which they all agreed “seems to be of historical and monetary value.” If he sold it, the four academics—who would continue to study the rock on campus—would split 10 percent of the profits. But the Emory men also had the chance to meet any competitive bid.

  After putting his name to the document, which was notarized that Monday, Hammond left Atlanta, leaving only a post office box in California as contact information. At that point, Hammond had only received a single dollar. None of the Emory men ever saw him again, nor could a series of investigators track him down. Hammond disappeared as thoroughly as the Lost Colonists.

 
Fearful that the news of the stone’s sensational message would leak before they were prepared to face the press, the Emory team apparently resorted to secret code in communicating with one another. A November 19 Western Union telegram sent from Edenton by Jeff Davis McCord, one of the Emory men who accompanied Hammond on the trip north the previous week, to a colleague back in Atlanta was written in Latin. It says, cryptically, “carrying shields cannot make them reveal their secrets.”

  A week later, North Carolina’s leading newspaper, Raleigh’s News and Observer, got wind of the discovery and headlined its article “Grave of Virginia Dare Believed Found in the State.” The garbled story quoted Pearce—whose name was misspelled—confirming discovery of the tombstone and breathlessly added that he was seeking evidence of “an ancient and highly cultured, but long ago extinct civilization,” rivaling that of the Aztecs and Incas, that flourished in northeastern North Carolina.

  The team was forced to respond. “The report that any member of the Emory University faculty has found the grave of Virginia Dare is false,” a hurriedly drafted statement read. “A stone bearing an inscription relating to the Dare family has been placed in our custody for investigation.” A university team was still deciphering the message, “but until certain questions have been cleared up it obviously would be unwise for their translation to be made public.” Emory, however, refused to deny or confirm the inscription’s authenticity. The news went out on the Associated Press wire and was reprinted across the country.

  The professors had in their possession an artifact like no other found in colonial America and one that put them under an intense media spotlight in what Lester recalled as “the hysterical days of November.” Academics and the public alike were riveted by each new report on the find. The inscription’s discovery on the heels of the Virginia Dare celebration ensured the message would receive maximum publicity and those involved in its analysis could reap national renown. For a small university in a southern city of fewer than 300,000 people, the Dare Stone was big news.

  Before releasing any more information, the Emory team embarked on an innovative effort to study several separate aspects of the stone to determine if it was indeed carved in 1591. Lester determined the stone was vein quartz, common to central and western North Carolina. Using similar rock, the professors tried without success to replicate the look of the letters using acid. They consulted stonemasons, but without finding consensus on whether the letters were chiseled by hand or made using contemporary machinery such as a sandblaster. Others examined the wording to determine if it was indeed Elizabethan usage. Pearce, meanwhile, considered whether the tale told by the stone was plausible.

  After weeks of effort, they found nothing to persuade them that the inscription was a modern forgery. On January 30, 1938, nearly three months after Hammond appeared at Emory and six months after he claimed to find the stone, Eleanor Dare’s awful story was made public. Newspaper readers couldn’t get enough of the tragic tale—a mother lost in the wilderness among Indians, her husband and baby brutally murdered, a doomed plea to her distant father.

  In May, Pearce published a scholarly article in the Journal of Southern History called “New Light on the Roanoke Colony” that summed up the work of the Emory group. He found only minor instances in word usage that might be unusual in Elizabethan times and concluded that a mallet and chisel were likely the instruments used to carve the message and that “such tools must have been available to the Roanoke colonists.” Pearce all but pronounced the stone to be genuine. He also declined to name Hammond, at the finder’s request.

  The three-day November excursion to Edenton, while fruitless, had convinced the Emory team that Hammond was a man of “persistence and fidelity,” with a character “beyond the reach of the most perfect actor,” as Lester told faculty members in April 1938. “If he is a crook or confidence man, he has no business carrying a piece of stone around showing it to college men. He should be selling gold bricks to the hard-boiled bankers of America.” The geologist said Hammond made no slipups on the long car trip. “Every one with whom he came into contact was favorably impressed with his simplicity and his naturalness. Frankly, I believe that man was what he said he was.”

  Lester added that Purks “had in his possession a statement from him, which he asked be kept confidential, that clarifies many of the minor points of obscurity surrounding him.” That document has not been found. But Lester added, “Conversation and correspondence with Mr. Hammond indicate that he is utterly incapable of writing such a message.” A forger, he added, would have to master history, Elizabethan language, cartography, geology, and stone carving to pull off such a convincing fake.

  University administrators, however, were suspicious. Days after Hammond left Atlanta, Emory contracted with Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency to investigate his background. Although he clearly stated that he lived in Alameda, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the detectives inexplicably looked for him among produce dealers in Pasadena, far to the south. Not surprisingly, they failed to find him. A December contract with the Retail Credit Company led to a search of Alameda police records, banks, and post office employees. That effort uncovered no sign of an L. E. or Louis Hammond in the area. The one contact that Hammond had provided was a Mr. Dove, a thirty-eight-year-old small-time jeweler in east Oakland. Dove had done occasional business with Hammond, the investigators reported, but recalled only that he was “a regular fellow” with a pension and a wife. He didn’t even know Hammond’s address.

  Herbert Milton Dove—also spelled Done in some records—is listed in the U.S. Census and in military files as a jeweler who lived with his father and later served in World War II. By contrast, there is no record of a Louis or L. E. Hammond in the immediate area. It is one thing to lose a colony in the sixteenth century, but it seemed another matter entirely to lose a twentieth-century Californian who claimed a pension and a wife.

  Nonetheless, Purks and Lester said they corresponded with Hammond via his post office box or a general delivery address—a not uncommon method in those days when millions were moving around in search of jobs. There is, however, no record that any investigator staked out the box or extracted the home address of the box owner, and no letters written by Hammond have shown up in Emory’s archives.

  While the professors involved in the study of the stone remained convinced that Hammond was on the up-and-up, the doubts of university administrators grew. Three days after the university went public with the inscription, a senior university administrator named R. C. Mizell warned in a letter that “the rock is probably a fraud” and that “by giving publicity, Emory is allowing itself to be used to further a fraud.” He suggested that the university wash its hands of the object by giving it to a historical society.

  This was, after all, a golden age for clever crooks and confidence men. Forgery thrived during the Great Depression, when honest work was hard to find. Fake Indian relics were sold across the country. In New York, Edward Mueller passed off counterfeited dollar bills for years. In the Netherlands, a Dutch painter fooled art historians with forged paintings that he said were unknown Vermeer originals.

  Most famously, a clerk found a brass plate in California in 1936 that recorded the landing of Sir Francis Drake north of San Francisco on his round-the-world voyage, seven years before he arrived at Roanoke with supplies for Ralph Lane and his men. A famous historian at the University of California at Berkeley declared the plate authentic and displayed it proudly at the campus library, but debate about its legitimacy continued to rage among scholars.

  “The Dare Stone has much more in its favor so far as authenticity goes than the Drake brass plate,” Lester insisted in his April address to the faculty. But he added that the inscription’s age could only be proven by archaeological finds corroborating the claims made by the message—namely the graves of Ananias and Virginia Dare. “Only upon these findings will the truth of the inscription be established
.”

  Emory’s president sided with Mizell, and the university administrators pressed its faculty to divest itself of the questionable artifact. On March 18, the Emory team warned in a memo to Pearce that Hammond likely would demand the stone back within a month and urged cooperation with North Carolina archaeologists who were demanding to see the rock. That a Georgia university was keeping a tight hold on an artifact that might be central to their history irked Carolinians. Pearce balked.

  His refusal to share the rock with North Carolina academics only increased suspicions among them about the inscription’s authenticity. The press attention threatened a public relations disaster for their state. First, it was embarrassing that an object of such potential importance to North Carolina was in the possession of Georgians. Second, the message of the rock clashed with the air of mystery around the colony’s fate created by the outdoor drama that had just opened on Roanoke Island. The play and the new state park were key to the economic success of the poverty-stricken coast. The Dare Stone threatened to unravel this carefully constructed plan built on state and federal funds.

  Losing support from Emory, Pearce turned the academic quest into a family affair. The young historian’s enthusiasm spread to his father, Haywood Pearce Sr., the president of a small women’s college outside Atlanta called Brenau. His progressive stepmother, Lucile, known for driving her own car long before it was considered proper for a southern lady to do so, was also drawn into the effort. The cry of an early pioneer woman, deprived of a child and husband who died in agony, appalled and fascinated the three Pearces.