The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  While Champion couldn’t vouch for the stone’s content, he was skeptical that a 1930s forger would have had the savvy to age the letters artificially and also be expert in late-sixteenth-century English inscriptions. “From my study of the graffiti and documents of the period I see no glaring problems with what is on the stone.”

  With that surprising judgment in hand, I turned back to the Morison panel and its next recommendation. The academics had called for specialists in the use of specific words and phrases used on the stone.

  “There is nothing that jumps out as a forgery,” said Heather Wolfe at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., one of the world’s leading research institutions on Shakespeare and his times, after examining high-resolution images of the Brenau stone. Her one doubt regarded the use of the three initials—“EWD”—because this was not a standard way to sign one’s name in that era. When I checked with another Elizabethan literature scholar, Jean Wilson of Cambridge University, she found the phrase “greate plentie presents” peculiar but added “there’s nothing in the inscription that couldn’t be of its purported date.”

  I had fully expected these skeptical scholars, with no previous knowledge of the stone’s history, to make short work of Hammond’s rock and its melodramatic story. Instead, as my excitement grew, they seemed to line up in favor of its authenticity. Then I contacted the Reverend Professor Diarmaid N. J. MacCulloch, a knighted Oxford don and Church of England deacon. MacCulloch’s PhD was in Tudor history, and he also holds an advanced degree in theology. When not writing award-winning books on the Reformation, this polymath is a television personality who presents series such as How God Made the English and Sex and the Church. He quickly extinguished my excitement with one droll and devastating sentence.

  “It has all the plausibility of Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney accent in Mary Poppins,” he responded after viewing the stone’s images. “You can rest assured that it is a risible forgery,” he added. “Even before I got to the second side with its cod-Elizabethan language, the nature of the orthography and the phrase ‘went hence unto heaven’ gave it away. In more than half a century of looking at Elizabethan tombstones, I have never seen a similar phrase. It sounds like something a Victorian stained-glass window might contain.”

  MacCulloch proceeded to swat down Quarmby’s superscript theory involving the word “ye.” Then he noted the lack of contraction marks commonly used at the time. The carver’s decision to spell out Arabic numbers rather than use the more common Roman numerals was laughable. “Why write ‘seaven’ when you could write ‘vii’?” he asked. He dismissed “misarie” as “an odd spelling even by Tudor standards.” The initials that bothered the Folger’s Wolfe left him incredulous. And the carver’s use of the name “Ananias” was absurd, he added. “You simply wouldn’t call your husband by his Christian name in any circumstances; you’d call him husband or, in this case, my husband.”

  As for Eleanor’s plea that her father give the Indian messenger “greate plentie presents,” the phrase to him seemed right out of a bad Western. “Just in case some Native American can read Tudor English, and then they will get Heap Plenty Wampum.” MacCulloch’s derision left me deflated. I had a sinking feeling that this was yet another instance of a Lost Colony clue that was an illusion.

  Wolfe at the Folger, however, quickly parried the Oxford don’s criticisms. She found a reference to “went unto heaven” dating to 1616 as well as an Oxford English Dictionary mention of “misarie.” The American scholar explained that numbers in that day were written out or expressed in Roman or Arabic numbers. And, she added, “some people used contraction marks; others didn’t.” She didn’t take MacCulloch’s view that Eleanor Dare’s Tonto-esque use of the phrase about presents was necessarily anachronistic.

  Nor did she share MacCulloch’s scorn about the unlikelihood of Eleanor’s naming Ananias. “Yes, an Elizabethan woman would refer to her husband by his Christian name in a situation like this,” she said. The only point on which Wolfe and MacCulloch agreed was that the use of three initials—“EWD”—was odd. Most people of the day would have used only the initials for their first and last names. Given that Dare might have wanted to underscore her maiden name in a letter to her father, however, that hardly seemed strong enough evidence to render the stone a forgery on its own.

  MacCulloch dismissed Wolfe’s response. It provided “far too many benefits to far too many doubts.” The stone was, he declared with no caveat, “a fake.” When I pressed him again, I received this curt reply that brooked no follow-up: “Enough already.”

  * * *

  —

  Who was right? Unsure what to make of this academic deadlock, I went back to Champion, the graffiti expert, for his opinion. “The authenticity of this stone can never be fully and finally established without further corroborative evidence,” he responded. “They really have to address the matter as a serious archaeological project,” said Champion. “This would be a major, and controversial, reassessment of the stone, which would rewrite early colonial history, so any argument needs to be as fully watertight as possible.”

  That means a high-tech study of its patina to go along with geological, graffiti, and linguistic lines of evidence. Eric Doehne, a geologist and art conservator in Los Angeles, wrote a book on stone conservation and analyzed the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Sistine Chapel. Though he had not heard of the Dare Stone, his family visited the Outer Banks when he was a child, and he dimly remembered seeing the outdoor drama. “There are geochemical methods to look for trace elements and isotopes that could support one or the other interpretation,” he told me. “Ultraviolet or multispectral photography can be useful in guiding where to sample.”

  But when I called Schrader at Brenau to see if he wanted to pursue a multidisciplinary approach with these experts to resolve the matter once and for all, his response was lukewarm. His spokesperson later told me, “Our plan is to move forward as quickly as is prudent.” A year passed, and a friend of the president’s explained to me that Schrader feared losing control of what could become a major historical breakthrough. I thought of Pearce’s possessiveness that kept him from collaborating with others as the Morison panel urged.

  The rock’s engaging mystery had put Brenau on the map, first as a triumph, then as humiliation. The stones had been discredited once. If the one with a shred of potential legitimacy were proved unequivocally a fake, then the college might have to endure a national spotlight of ignominy all over again. And if it proved the real thing, then Schrader might be compelled to remove it from its shrine in his office and hand it over to a major museum.

  Even the most thorough research results, however, may not convince longtime skeptics like Evans from the First Colony Foundation. White’s final visit to Roanoke was long thought to have taken place in 1591 rather than 1590. A legal suit related to the mission surfaced in a British archive after World War II confirming that the governor arrived on Roanoke Island in August 1590. The stone’s message, however, cites a 1591 date. “You don’t need a scientific test,” said Evans. “This was a 911 call to John White to come quick, but the date is wrong. It’s a hoax.”

  There was, however, one Morison recommendation that didn’t require in-depth analysis of the stone. “The search for graves, skeletal remains, and other possible relics should be resumed as soon and pursued as thoroughly as possible,” the report stated. By then, the Pearces had already sought in vain the second stone mentioned in the Hammond inscription, the rock said to mark the murdered colonists’ resting place, including that of Virginia and Ananias Dare.

  In the aftermath of Sparkes’s article and Pearce’s ruined career, professional archaeologists steered well clear of the publicly discredited rock. For three-quarters of a century, no one bothered to follow up the Pearces’ excavations around Edenton.

  But I knew someone who cared even less about scholarly respectability than I did. He was the hu
man equivalent of the Dare Stone, a divisive figure whose name was a kind of trigger word for many of those involved in Roanoke studies. (The historian in Manteo refused to let me use her name in this book if it contained his.) Fred Willard, the same man who badgered Phelps into digging at Cape Creek, was firmly convinced that he could find the second stone and solve the mystery that had daunted so many credentialed scholars for so long. When he invited me on one of his expeditions, I happily agreed.

  * * *

  —

  Willard has been the Zelig of Lost Colony television, invariably popping up on the perennial cable shows that promise to resolve America’s oldest cold case in an hour, including commercials. He lures producers into mosquito-ridden swamps with promises of old buried coffins and carved stones that never quite pan out. They love him anyway, because ratings show that viewers love him too. He never earned an advanced degree, and his title is often given as “maverick archaeologist.”

  When I finally met him one cold winter morning in a Manteo diner, he was not hard to spot among the crowded booths. His bald pate, scraggly beard, and piercing eyes gave him the look of a vengeful marsh prophet. “We think the main colony went inland to harvest sassafras,” he told me as he finished his eggs. Their vanishing act was, he is convinced, an elaborate ruse to protect Raleigh’s valuable monopoly from competitors. I found it hard to imagine more than a hundred people and scores of sailors working on dozens of ships agreeing to a vast conspiracy of silence. For more than a decade, however, Willard and a band of followers tramped through the dense wetlands west of Roanoke Island, seeking in vain the physical evidence necessary to back up the novel, if unlikely, theory.

  The 2012 discovery of what lay under the patch on the White map and the revival of Dare Stone publicity at almost exactly the same time drew Willard out of the swamps. It’s an odd fact that Hammond said he found his stone near the mouth of the Chowan River, just a few miles from where, eight decades later, Luccketti and the First Colony Foundation began to dig at Site X. Willard quickly picked up on this apparent coincidence.

  Parsing old maps, photographs, and Pearce’s accounts, Willard believes he has pinpointed the site of the Dare Stone discovery. I followed his battered blue Suburban as we drove out of Manteo, across the Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge, and onto the narrow road that straddles two drainage canals filled with dark water and bordered by shadowy marsh. On the way we stopped at his headquarters, the Lost Colony Center for Science and Research, a ramshackle house that smelled alarmingly of mold from a recent flood, to pore over satellite photographs as if we were preparing a military campaign. Willard was even wearing camouflage. Finally we continued our drive west and halted at a parking lot next to an abandoned marina just upstream from where the Chowan River meets the Albemarle Sound, just outside Edenton. The place had a desolate air; a sunken boat was still tied to the rotting pilings. Just beyond, through the trees, where a small creek meets the Chowan, Willard says Hammond picked up the famous rock.

  With his wife, Kathryn, we walked gingerly through cold mud toward the water. The two met in an archaeology course at East Carolina. Though she’s half his age, they shared a common fascination with the Roanoke story. A self-described autistic, Kathryn also is a peanut heiress. “When my father passed away, and I came into my inheritance, I didn’t know what the heck to do with my money,” she said as we trudged through the mud. “Then I met Fred.”

  The muck eventually grew too deep, and the January sun was already dropping swiftly behind the trees, so we retreated.

  The following summer, Willard made a more concerted effort to investigate the area, hiring an archaeology team to excavate as the History Channel filmed. Though they found extensive Indian pottery, their holes filled up too quickly with water for the search to bear much fruit. Undeterred, Willard then turned his attention to the stone marker referred to in the Hammond rock. The inscription states that those colonists killed during the massacre, including Virginia Dare and her father, Ananias, were buried on a hill four miles east of the river, their names “Writ Al There on Rocke.”

  On a cool and clear fall day, I came along on one of his frequent weekend expeditions seeking the missing tombstones. Willard’s screen fame attracts a loyal cadre of volunteers for weekend assaults on America’s oldest mystery. The current target was a farm on a low hill four miles from the Hammond site on the Chowan. Our convoy of three vehicles bumped across the furrows and halted at the pine trees lining the bottom of the sloping field. The team immediately divvied up a bulky screened box as well as a GPS device, shovels, and a metal detector and moved quietly into the forest’s deep shadows in single file.

  Leading the way was a freelance astronomy teacher and guitarist with a droopy mustache named Frank Jones who wore a camouflage cap with matching high boots. I envied his waterproof trousers made of some high-tech wicking material, as well as the plastic straw along his neck that was connected to a concealed water supply. Behind him was a lean and taciturn farmer in thick work gloves named Gaston Pinner and a certified clinical aromatherapy practitioner named Wendy Corcoran, in a red sweater with long gray hair. A middle-aged stocky man named George, wearing bulky metal-detecting headphones, vanished into the woods before I could get his last name. Bringing up the rear were Kathryn, sucking sullenly on a giant candy cane, and a limping Fred Willard. “I’m sore,” he explained, pointing to his right shoulder. “I shot a 180-pound deer yesterday and had to haul it out. I can barely walk today.”

  I asked him why, if the inscription said the second stone was east, we were four miles to the north of the river. He brushed off this directional discrepancy with a swipe of his thick hand. “After thirty years of research, I think they moved northeast,” Willard said, adding that the colonists would have followed the meandering creek as they moved inland.

  “Indian sites are always along the water,” he explained. “If murder took place, then it would have been a raid at an Indian village.” The burials, he said, would be on a hill above a Native American settlement. “I know we’re attempting to find the proverbial needle in the haystack,” he said, wheezing and pausing to grab a tree for support. “But I have four farmers under contract with about five hundred to eight hundred acres in that four-mile zone. We’ve eliminated two and we have two to go.” The permissions allowed him to dig.

  The 1586 account by Lane suggested that this inland region, with its richer soil and more plentiful wildlife, was a more prosperous and populous area than the fringes of the coast such as Roanoke or Croatoan. This prosperity, however, drew Iroquois or Susquehanna raiders from the west and north. “We think these Indians came down for a raid and got very, very lucky and captured twenty-four English,” he said, referring to the stone’s assertion that two dozen settlers died in the two years following White’s 1587 departure. “They ritualistically tortured and murdered all of them until the chief stepped in.” The Indian leader, he said, allowed seven to live, including Eleanor Dare.

  Clay Swindell, the archaeologist at the Museum of the Albemarle who has worked at Site X, said that a combination of raids and European disease left this area largely depopulated by the time the second wave of English settlers arrived in the second half of the seventeenth century. The Iroquoian speakers called Tuscarora—Mangoaks in Carolina Algonquian—dominated the area by then. But he added that there is no evidence to back up Willard’s specific claim that colonists were kidnapped.

  Soon the gentle slope disappeared into a full cypress swamp. A small finger of land extended into green-tinged goo, amid the flared trunks of ghostly-looking trees. Even though it was late fall, mosquitoes lazily circled. “Set it up here!” Willard barked. Without further instruction, the obedient crew placed the screen on top of short wooden posts. Frank dug a hole nearby, tossing thick masses of earth into the box. The clumpy soil smelled musty. Pinner and Corcoran took turns shaking the sifter for a minute or so before feeling with their hands through the clay for signs o
f broken pots or other artifacts.

  Willard carefully eyed their progress as he leaned on a cane, occasionally reaching in to spread the damp dirt. “Nothing,” he said after a few minutes with a note of disgust. He abruptly directed the team to move in a straight line back up the hill. The volunteers reassembled the screen box and dug a fresh hole. “What I want to be is systematic!” declared Willard. George, the man with the metal detector, wandered back holding an iron spike and an old bottle of the fortified flavored wine called Mad Dog 20/20. He gave Willard the spike. “That’s from logging machinery,” Willard said, handing it back to George, who promptly vanished again.

  Willard brusquely ordered the crew to move back up the slope to dig another test trench. After half a dozen holes that revealed no artifacts, he abruptly called it a day, saying the next time they would dig at another farm. The eager volunteers were crestfallen. On the way back up the slope to the trucks, Corcoran quietly expressed her dismay. A gregarious woman, she had helped organize a charity event for the dig at the local country club, with backing from the owner of a McDonald’s, while devoting countless weekends to working under Willard’s supervision.

  “I got tick bites, poison ivy, and I killed a snake in the process,” she told me. She was happy with the work but frustrated by Willard’s tendency to bounce from one place to another without finishing an investigation. Her disappointment with leaving this particular site was based on a recent find that she and other volunteers had made the week before, when they met on their own initiative to poke around the farm. “We’ve already found stones here,” she said as we emerged from the woods. She pointed at a large old pin oak at the top of the rise, where the team found a pile of rocks hidden in the tall grass. One appeared to have letters. They called Willard, insisting that he come right away.