The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  In a folder in Emory University’s archives, several pages of undated scrawl reveal an attempt to sort out the acrostics that Sparkes spotted in the inscriptions of the stones. It’s not clear who authored the painful effort or when, though it was likely done in the days following the publication of Sparkes’s article. “Only two letters used more than once,” reads one note. Then there is “Pearce” and “Fake” marked among the words. At the bottom of the last page are three devastating words, each given its own line. “Pearce is sad.”

  This could have been the end of the tale of the Dare Stones, a saga of discovery, credulousness, fraud, and disappointment. Sparkes demolished the authenticity of the rocks that Eberhardt and his cohorts produced, as well as Pearce’s promising career. But there was one lingering detail that nagged at the reporter. Eberhardt had been shown to be responsible for all the stones but one—the one that Hammond carried into Emory that November morning and which incited all the frenzy that followed. Its successors were frauds, but could the first have been authentic?

  After his article was published, Sparkes continued his hunt. The fatal obsession that gripped Pearce had passed to him.

  | CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Heap Plenty Wampum

  Sparkes discredited all the rocks, but his evidence against the first stone’s authenticity was circumstantial. The reporter complained that Pearce “could tell me less about Hammond than about Eleanor Dare.” But he had no better luck. He could only offer rumors by North Carolinians, who said that an unnamed tourist once tried to hawk an inscribed stone on Roanoke Island. No one, however, could provide any substantive details.

  Sparkes also tried to link Hammond with Eberhardt. He stated confidently that a mysterious “L. E. Martin,” who offered money to a friend of Eberhardt’s in exchange for a rock inscribed with the word “Yahoo,” was Hammond. But he cited no evidence for this claim, other than the implication of the two identical initials. There is no sign he interviewed the man. The best that Sparkes could do was to taint Hammond’s stone by linking it to the clear forgeries. That effort was successful. Academics and the public accepted his conclusion.

  Yet his failure to nail down Hammond’s identity and motive gnawed at him. After the article hit newsstands in April 1941, Sparkes wrote to the Emory physicist Purks that he was hot on the trail of a “Mr. X” whom he believed to be Hammond and intimated that he was close to unmasking the culprit. Purks wrote back, asking for more details, but Sparkes replied in June, “I want to keep the identity of Mr. X a secret for a little while longer because I am pursuing the investigation.” Busy during the war years, Sparkes spotted “a cigar-smoking captain” resembling Pearce in a War Department corridor in Washington, but the officer vanished without a word. The reporter, however, did not forget his quarry when peace returned, though even Pearce had moved on to self-imposed exile in Ypsilanti.

  “A delayed action fuse on what might have been a bomb a few years ago has finally functioned,” he wrote to Purks in 1946. Sparkes had finally procured a photograph of a man who made fake Indian relics in Massachusetts. He was sure it was Hammond, and he wanted everyone at Emory who had met the stone’s finder to examine the image. Purks agreed and passed it around the team to see if it matched the man who appeared at Emory nearly a decade before. Purks took a scientist’s approach to the request. He showed the picture to some of the men who had met Hammond without mentioning the stone or Sparkes, in order not to influence their response. None guessed outright. He wrote up a detailed account of the results. Some saw a similarity, while others did not; Purks could not say with certainty that the man in the image was Hammond. “No attempt was made to make contact with Dr. Pearce,” he added.

  The reporter, however, read this scholarly ambiguity as likely confirmation. He replied to Purks that while “the thing isn’t conclusive…there is a resemblance between your Hammond and this other.” Perhaps, Sparkes wrote, the man was a relative, “a dumber brother.” His obsession seemed to overwhelm his journalistic instincts. When Sparkes died in 1954, in a North Carolina hospital less than one hundred miles from where Hammond claimed to find the object, he was no closer to proving that the first stone was a forgery.

  The original Dare Stone, Hammond’s singular discovery, was eventually placed in a case in the Brenau library, more as a warning than a challenge to scholars.

  There were occasional attempts by archaeologists in the years that followed to determine its authenticity. South Carolina’s state archaeologist, Robert Stephenson, examined the rock in 1983 at the request of Brenau officials. Placing the stone under a microscope to study the inscription provided no new clues, other than underscoring the fact that it was a type of rock not found naturally around Edenton. He could offer no suggestions for chemical or physical analysis that might be useful and doesn’t mention using paleography—the study of old scripts—as a line of evidence.

  “I doubt if it will ever be possible to conclusively resolve this enigma,” he wrote to the Brenau staff. “I am, though, reasonably convinced that the whole matter was a well conceived hoax.” He based that conviction on the logical incentives for finding such a stone in 1937, ranging from promotion of the newly opened Ocean Highway that passed by Edenton to an attempt at nabbing a Hollywood movie deal. Pearce, he believed, was an innocent victim of a well-produced deception. “I myself have been taken in by hoaxes (such as a gold-bearing Spanish shipwreck that never existed) and I do not consider myself a gullible person. This can happen to any of us.” Stephenson suggested the Brenau keep the stone “as a memento of a hoax and a symbol of what might have been.” If it were authenticated, however, he added that it would immediately become “one of the major national treasures” in the Smithsonian Institution.

  Instead, the rock became a perennial subject of conspiracy and mystery, appearing in pseudodocumentaries, such as the In Search Of… series narrated by Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy. “Hoax springs eternal,” quipped one Brenau administrator in the 1970s. No scholar in his right mind would risk his reputation on the Dare Stone, which by now was academically radioactive. Fortunately, I was no scholar.

  * * *

  —

  In 2010, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington named David La Vere published a book called The Lost Rocks. It was a brief but meticulously researched history of the whole Pearce affair from start to finish. He concluded that the authenticity of the first stone had yet to be proved or disproved. “Here is something that, if it is a hoax, it is one of the best ever,” he told me when I met him in downtown Raleigh one afternoon. “Here we are still talking about a stone found in 1937, and we still can’t say if it was real or not!”

  His book attracted the attention of a young film producer named Brandon McCormick who was casting about for a fresh angle for a cable show about the Lost Colony. Because McCormick lived in Atlanta, he paid a visit to nearby Brenau. “I took at face value that it was a hoax,” he said. McCormick brought in a pair of stonemasons (one of their previous credits was Search for the Lost Giants) who showed that the Eberhardt rocks were filled with modern drill marks that proved them forged. Because Sparkes had already proved this beyond any doubt, the results made for good television but didn’t contribute any new revelations. McCormick said he could dig no deeper. “The History Channel likes its mysteries solved within an hour,” he told me with chagrin.

  After the show aired in 2015, McCormick—like Sparkes—couldn’t let go of the subject. “It’s been an obsession,” he admitted. Though he hadn’t trained as a researcher, he trolled the microfiche at Emory and was stunned by the number of American newspaper headlines just prior to World War II that covered the rocks. “I could go mad over this,” he admitted. “We love mysteries. And this is a letter from a girl to her dad—her first word is ‘Father! Come find me!’ ”

  The media attention spawned by La Vere’s book and the television program put the Dare Stone again in the limelight, prom
pting Brenau’s president, Ed Schrader, to remove it from the library to his personal office, which is protected by a better alarm system. Schrader, a geologist, also took the stone (with irony that the Pearces might not have appreciated) to a North Carolina lab in order to slice off the bottom section, below the lettering. McCormick filmed the diamond saw cutting through the stone for a second History Channel documentary, which aired in 2017. “We wanted to look at the chemistry and geomorphology,” said Schrader, a silver-haired scientist who has run the university since 2005.

  The results of the destructive test were compared with ballast stones, including one from Roanoke Island that likely came from England. The Hammond stone proved to be of a type common to central North Carolina and Virginia, as Lester had concluded in 1937, rather than a stone carried across the Atlantic in an English ship. More important, the test revealed an exposed interior as bright as the white meat of a well-done turkey breast contrasting sharply with the worn gray on the outside.

  Whenever the original inscription was made, the white letters must have stood out sharply against the dark exterior. This made just such a stone a logical choice for a Roanoke colonist but a poor one for a forger, who would have to age the markings so that they appeared as weathered as the stone’s natural surface. This can be done through chemicals, but that would have required considerable expertise.

  Brenau president Ed Schrader holds the Dare Stone during a 2016 test at UNC Asheville in which part of the rock was sliced for analysis. Brenau University

  Schrader asked an English professor named Kevin Quarmby at Oxford College of Emory University, a nearby rural feeder school for Emory (with no connection to the British school), to examine the stone’s wording. A former Shakespearean actor from England, he found it convincingly Elizabethan. “I’ve seen nothing that says it might not be 1580s,” he told me.

  Quarmby noted that the writer used a superscript e to write the word “ye,” which today would read as “the.” He said that particular lettering was used only briefly and would therefore be less likely for a hoaxer to be aware of and to imitate. He freely admitted, however, that he was no expert in Elizabethan paleography, the study of deciphering and dating writings from the second half of the sixteenth century. All the stone’s early detractors, he added, were 1930s men likely to be skeptical that a woman like Eleanor Dare could write, or even show enough initiative to record her story. But he admitted there was not enough solid evidence to confirm the stone’s authenticity. “All I can go on is my gut feeling,” said Quarmby.

  Given the charged history of the rock, gut feeling and strong opinion felt woefully inadequate. The attempts to prove or disprove the Dare Stone’s authenticity seemed more designed to keep television viewers from switching channels during commercial breaks than producing serious data. I was sure more serious analysis could be done. That should have been a clue that I was captive to the Roanoke vortex.

  * * *

  —

  On a bright November day in 2016, I paid a visit to Brenau in Gainesville, on the far fringe of Atlanta’s sprawl. Most of the rocks that once beguiled America are now stowed in the attic of a Victorian house on campus. Kathryn Amos, a university administrator, is the keeper of the objects. She met me at the door, and I followed her up three flights of stairs.

  “The article in the Saturday Evening Post was such an embarrassment that the president said it would ruin the reputation of the college, so they were hidden away,” she said as she searched for the right key on a jangling ring. “World War II was a good diversion.” She opened the door into the low gabled space.

  The floor was covered with dozens of ragged flat stones, all filled with the same strange swirly and shallow incisions. “These are fakes,” she said. I imagined Sparkes examining the same stones in 1940 with a skeptical air as Pearce hovered nervously behind him. “But it does make for an interesting story. We still don’t know how Eberhardt did it. He was a country boy who found out we had a president crazy enough to cough up a couple of hundred bucks every time he brought in a rock.”

  After the humiliating revelations, no one had the courage to lose or the heart to destroy the stones. Instead, they were hidden under the school auditorium and then in a boiler room under the amphitheater before they were brought here a decade ago. They passed into local legend. Amos said students spun tales of the ghost of Eleanor’s lost daughter Agnes, the child imagined by Eberhardt and said to haunt the campus. But save for the occasional newspaper article reviving the story, the saga of the Dare Stones was swept under Brenau’s rug.

  “When I got here twelve years ago, I thought the stones were interesting but probably a hoax,” Schrader told me. It seemed fitting that a man dedicated to rocks would be a successor to Pearce senior. “But I had a very strong feeling about the original stone.” Hammond’s rock sat on a side table in the president’s office next to a bottle of Virginia Dare Wine, with a label featuring a cheerful curly-haired blonde.

  The arrangement felt like a shrine. I slid on the white cotton gloves laid out next to the stone and picked up the rock that Pearce had first seen in the alumni office at Emory eight decades ago. The letters proved surprisingly hard to make out, even after I had looked at online images that highlighted the words. I understood why it took the Emory team so long to decipher the message.

  Later, I leafed through the 1940 Morison committee recommendations ignored by Pearce. My idea was to use the panel’s road map to match up experts who could offer their views and, if Schrader were game, allow extensive analysis using modern methods. By building up several lines of evidence distinct from one another, it might be possible to resolve the controversy of the stone’s authenticity once and for all. The Brenau president had already conducted geological research on the stone’s composition, as the committee suggested.

  Morison’s panel also told Pearce to closely examine the forms of letters on the stones. The inscription, after all, wasn’t in the form of a letter written on paper. Carving rock requires a different approach from penning parchment. The scientists urged a focus on stone graffiti from the period, such as those in the Tower of London, where prisoners carved their names, dates, prayers, and sufferings into the bare stone walls. “Close prisoner 32 weeks, 224 days, 5376 hours,” wrote a T. Salmon in 1622.

  I tracked down Matthew Champion, a medieval graffiti expert who leads the Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey in Britain and the undisputed expert in the arcane world of old English stone carving. He started the project when he visited a small church in eastern England in 2010. The churchwarden assured him there was nothing much to see. When he shone his flashlight at an angle to the stone, however, the walls came alive with shallow carvings and drawings of demons, dates, and even the outlines of hands. Champion and his colleagues have since recorded more than twenty-eight thousand inscriptions in nearly seven hundred churches, and that is only in a single English county.

  Champion’s work puts the Dare Stone in a new light. He discovered that churches were the medieval equivalent of New York subway cars and overpasses, canvases for the masses. Stone carving was as much public pastime as a specialty craft. He agreed to take a look at high-resolution images of the Hammond stone, which he had not heard about and had never seen before. I waited with a measure of dread, suspecting he would report back that it was an obvious fake and I was a foolish dupe. His reply, which came within hours, made me stand bolt upright from my chair.

  “To be honest, I find myself in slightly uncomfortable circumstances this evening,” he wrote. “When faced with such historical myths and legends as the Dare Stone my usual role is that of debunking them. However, on this occasion I am finding that rather difficult to do. Given the evidence of the inscription, within the wider context of informal sixteenth century graffiti inscriptions, I would be very reticent of simply passing this away as a forgery.” Were the inscription on an English church wall—leaving aside the contents—“I
would have no hesitation in accepting it at face value.”

  He was particularly struck by the weathered nature of the incisions that closely matched the stone. “Such surface patination takes many years to achieve naturally,” he explained. “When an inscription is first cut it would appear bright white on the stone, particularly so on this type of stone, and it takes a great deal of time for that whiteness to fade.” To back this up, he included pictures of similar stone carved in the 1980s in which the pale letters still stood out starkly from the darker stone despite more than three decades of weathering. Though chemicals could be used to mask the age, he added that these typically leave behind telltale blotches that are easy for the trained eye to spot.

  Champion then swept away an argument made in 1940 that the stone carver’s use of Roman text rather than the Gothic or black-type form of lettering signaled a fake. “The use of Roman text at this period is really very common,” he explained. “The Roman italic typeface was first used in England in 1559 and by the 1580s was the norm,” including in graffiti. He attached photographs of similar letters dating to the era.

  He also examined suspicious figures on the Dare Stone, such as what he called “a rather modern looking 5,” but offered convincing contemporary examples. “There is nothing here that strikes me as obviously anomalous in any way, shape or form, at least in regard to the style and mechanics of the inscription,” he concluded. “My only hesitation would perhaps come from the use of the abbreviation ‘VIA’ for Virginia.” Given that the term “Virginia” was only created in 1584, there were no known carvings of the word from the era to say for sure.