“Yes, I got a call three days ago that they’d found a stone with writing,” Willard confirmed while the crew packed up their equipment. “You gotta remember these are novices, not professionals,” he added, without a hint of irony. “It is totally inconclusive. I’ve got the stone in my truck. You can see it for yourself.”
He rummaged around in the back of his worn blue Suburban crammed with plastic boxes and wood scraps. Finally he pulled out an irregular flat brown stone about a foot long and half as wide. “On the front side of the stone they said was the word ‘DARE.’ On the back side was carved a V and an A.” I couldn’t see any markings until Willard splashed it with water from a plastic jug. Then I could make out dark splotches on the rock. Two of the markings were somewhat V- and A-shaped but seemed more likely to be natural because they were not carved incisions. No matter what angle I looked at the other side, however, I couldn’t make out the word “DARE,” or any word at all. Willard was similarly skeptical.
Volunteers working with Fred Willard in 2016 found a stone near Edenton, North Carolina, that they speculated could mark Virginia Dare’s grave.
After the volunteers dispersed, I joined Kathryn and Fred for a meal in Edenton. I asked him why he felt so sure that the rock Hammond brought to Emory was real. “We know that the stone was found sitting on top of a major Indian site,” Willard replied. “How would the guy have known to put a forged stone there? And he put all the information on the stone about seven people being saved.” He also noted the Jamestown account mentioning seven Roanoke colonists—including a young woman—enslaved following a massacre.
Hammond could have read about the seven slaves mentioned by Machumps and recorded by Strachey. And Indian sites along rivers in eastern North Carolina are common. What he could not have known was what lay under the patch on the White map that directed archaeologists to the area just across the Chowan River. Based on what was known in the 1930s, it made little sense for a forger to pretend to find a stone at that spot. Croatoan or Roanoke would have been better choices, because they were close to the coast and accessible to White, for whom the letter was allegedly written. Yet this fact did nothing to prove the Dare Stone authentic.
When dessert came, I asked Willard why he had spent so many years searching for the Lost Colony. “People will kill to solve this!” he told me. “It’s the most exciting unsolved mystery in American history.” Then he listed those who got in his way, starting with his mentor Phelps. “I fired them all,” he declared, Apprentice-style.
Suddenly he leaned forward menacingly, his beard grazing the apple cobbler on his plate. “Look me in the eye! You know who you are looking at! Get in my way and I will fucking run over you!” He leaned back into his chair, his counterfeit fury spent and his attention now on the cobbler. “It’s about having fun,” he added mildly, “and the moment anyone causes me not to have fun, they are gone.”
Fed up with Willard’s bullying and disorganization, Corcoran severed her ties with him a few months later. He kept the stone that she and the others found. When I saw him the following spring, he took me aside to tell me about “a significant find” that might be a Lost Colony game changer. He had forgotten that he had shown me the rock already, in a considerably more skeptical mood. Willard bristled when I asked him why he changed his mind. Later I heard he was trying to sell the rights to use the stone in a cable channel special. There were also rumors among his followers of a mass grave with Indian copper. Somehow nothing solid ever came to light, but there was always just enough of a hook to keep you from changing the station at the commercial break.
Willard, however, never sold the rights to the newly found stone. In October 2017, while deer hunting on his property, he lost his balance and fell from a tree. “Hold me up,” he told Kathryn when she rushed to his aid. “Let me look at the farm.” He died in her arms, gazing over the fields. Before he passed away, the seventy-seven-year-old asked her to spread some of his ashes where Hammond claimed to have found the Dare Stone outside Edenton and at Cape Creek on Hatteras, where a quarter of a century earlier he had first noticed the Native American artifacts unearthed by Hurricane Emily.
* * *
—
“Have you ever heard of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?” a historian friend of mine asked when we were having dinner one night, referring to the 1948 John Huston film about three American gold prospectors in Mexico. “That’s what the Lost Colony is—guys looking for treasure, and when they find it, they kill each other. Nobody survives.”
I had spent much of the meal grousing about the lack of solid data and the endless theorizing. If the geologists were right, then the archaeologists on Roanoke Island had been chasing ghosts for well over a century in their search for a settlement. Meanwhile, Luccketti and his team had yet to determine if the colonists lived at the spot suggested by what lay under the patch on the White map. After years of work, he concluded Site X was “an enigma.” And while Horton told a good story of Lost Colony descendants treasuring heirlooms at Cape Creek, he had yet to do the hard-core scientific analysis necessary to support his claims. The Dare Stone remained in a kind of academic limbo, unexamined by the bevy of experts necessary to show whether it was real or fake. And Willard had never discovered the graves of Ananias and Virginia Dare that he sought with such doggedness.
“But,” I protested to my friend, “there’s no gold involved. Even the ring is brass.”
“Why do people search for Noah’s ark?” he replied. “Why do people search for Amelia Earhart? What is going to come out of it? You can’t own it. You get fifteen minutes of fame. But anybody could be that person. There is a mental illness involved with searching for something that can hardly be found. I’ve seen so many people go over the deep end. It’s a disease. That is why the Lost Colony is such a great story.”
That explained why the atmosphere among those searching for clues was so oddly charged. Willard’s dramatic outburst—“I will fucking run over you!”—seemed to sum up relations among the researchers, professional as well as amateur. Luccketti and Horton were quick to criticize each other’s research, while Noël Hume and the National Park Service had fought to a bitter standstill about the earthwork. Evans’s First Colony Foundation refused to participate in a public panel that included Horton and Prentice, and organized their own competing symposium. The Lost Colony Research Group denounced the Lost Colony Center for Science and Research. The Croatoan Archaeological Society was locked in an ongoing battle with a splinter group that threatened legal action over credit for the Cape Creek excavations. Accusations of sloppy science, bad faith, and even fraud flew. And there was no love lost between Willard and everyone else. Ewen from East Carolina University was the only archaeologist to attend his funeral.
No one seemed to want to talk to anyone beyond the confines of their group, much less collaborate. I had covered lots of archaeology digs throughout my journalistic career, including in the fractious Middle East, but had never encountered such hostility and suspicion among people essentially seeking the same thing. “You are an evil and cruel person,” read an e-mail from one to another copied to my in-box. There was some disturbing power that Roanoke seemed to hold over those who tried to solve a mystery that probably was unsolvable.
My dinner companion parted with a warning: “You better watch it yourself.”
When I got home, I looked at my stacks of books and piles of papers. I told myself that I was just a writer following a story, doing a job. True, I had trouble changing the subject from the 1580s when I was with friends and family. I would wake up in the morning puzzling over the strange smoke signals that John White saw. I was impatient with geologists like Schrader and archaeologists like Horton, pestering them with e-mails and phone calls to see if they had completed their long-promised analyses.
I had to admit then that this went beyond professional diligence and into the very obsession that I had observe
d in so many others. Maybe, I thought, I was asking the wrong questions. What made the Roanoke story so interesting, as my historian friend had said, was not necessarily what happened to the colonists but why we care so much and so deeply. How could a few long-dead Elizabethans hold me, and so many others, in such a strangely tenacious grip?
Brent Lane had said that the real story of Roanoke “had nothing to do with Virginia Dare and the poor lost white people—the lost cause of the sixteenth century and all that southern gothic shit.” I wondered if he was wrong. I recalled the label of the wine bottle in Schrader’s office shrine at Brenau, with its imagined blond-haired and blue-eyed Virginia Dare. The real power exerted by the Lost Colonists was not in archives or archaeological trenches but in the stories they spawned.
If I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where White’s settlers went after he departed in 1587, or how they ended their days, then at least I could explore how their story had morphed into a legend so enduring that it remains—even now—a reliable source for American pop culture. At the time, turning away from my quest for a solid scientific answer to the colonists’ fate felt like a diversion—or even a retreat. But tracing the rise of the subsequent Roanoke myths led me where archaeologists and historians could not: to the Lost Colony’s likeliest descendants and their extraordinary four-hundred-year journey.
I GOT LOST BUT LOOK WHAT I FOUND.
—Irving Berlin, Annie Get Your Gun
| CHAPTER TWELVE
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Dare?
She is the most famous American about whom so little is known. Her grandfather, John White, mentions her only once and then just in passing. Her sole biographical details are the dates of her birth and baptism. Like nearly a quarter of the babies of that era, she may well have perished before her third birthday, when White waded ashore after his long struggle to return to Roanoke.
Yet as I plowed through papers, books, and websites, a teenaged Virginia Dare kept turning up on old tobacco tins, in fantasy novels and horror movies, and even as the name of a San Francisco rock band (“songs for runaways, alcoholics, and deep sleepers”).
Most alarmingly, I learned that the daughter of Eleanor and Ananias Dare had become a rallying cry for white supremacists who envision her plight—an innocent blond girl surrounded by dark and dangerous savages—as analogous to the immigration crisis they believe threatens the United States today. Discovering how the babe of Roanoke became an icon of racial purity, and part of an ongoing national struggle to define what it means to be an American, seemed a good place to start my search for the source of our perennial fascination with the Lost Colony.
The first reference that I could find to Virginia Dare after White’s brief note came a full two-and-a-half centuries later. It was George Bancroft, the Harvard historian who had studied in Germany and was later hailed as the father of American history, who resurrected the child in 1834 as “the first offspring of English parents on the soil of the United States.”
Bancroft published the first volume in his seminal work at an opportune moment. The 1830s were a volatile and violent time for Americans. The nation’s founders were dead, and the 1829 to 1837 populist presidency of Andrew Jackson—nicknamed King Mob—threatened to tear the country apart. The Irish and Germans, many Catholic, flooding into the country alarmed Americans of English and Scottish origin. A massive Protestant evangelical revival was under way. Meanwhile, an 1830 act of Congress drove tens of thousands of Native Americans west of the Mississippi so that white planters and their black slaves could colonize the Deep South. Yet the rising numbers of enslaved African Americans posed their own threat; Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in Virginia, just across the border from Roanoke Island, sparked white fears of massive insurrection. In subsequent years, southern states severely curtailed the rights of blacks, whether enslaved or free.
Protestant whites descended from British settlers felt the country’s dominant heritage and their control over the nation’s direction slipping away. Eleanor’s daughter quickly became the emotional focus of the vanished settlers’ tale, the innocent infant abandoned in a dangerous land amid dark savages capable of brutal murder. Within a year after publication of Bancroft’s bestseller, she was being referred to in newspapers as “the first Anglo-American, Miss Virginia Dare.”
Dare was particularly appealing to white women. The 1830s also marked the appearance of periodicals for women and writers who could attract this growing readership. Journalist Margaret Fuller and author Harriet Beecher Stowe launched their careers in this period. Eliza Lanesford Cushing, an American born in Massachusetts, was part of this vanguard of female authors. Her mother and sister were also authors. She married a doctor and moved to Montreal in 1833. From her Canadian home she transformed the infant of Roanoke from a historical footnote into a legend, coining the term “Lost Colony” in the process.
Cushing specialized in patriotic historical romances such as Saratoga and Yorktown and published frequently in women’s magazines. The dearth of female figures in early American history, however, frustrated her. She remedied the problem in a December 1837 article published in the Ladies’ Companion called “Virginia Dare; or, The Lost Colony.” For the next century John White’s resurrected granddaughter would play the starring role in the legends of Roanoke.
Just how and why Cushing latched onto the final Roanoke voyage isn’t clear, although Bancroft’s history likely provided a spur. “This is when we start saying that the colony was lost as opposed to it simply failed,” said Tom Shields, a literature professor at East Carolina University who rediscovered the long-forgotten piece. Cushing pioneered an approach copied ever since. She drew on the historical record until the point of White’s departure and then moved into romantic fiction.
In her story, a massacre wipes out almost everyone but the vulnerable baby, who survives with the help of the loyal Manteo. She grows into a fair-haired beauty who dazzles the swarthy Indians. “The fairy-like proportions of her form, the delicate hue of her skin, the soft ringlets of her hair, and eyes of heavenly blue, were their delight and admiration.” The girl is lily-white both inside and out. “She seemed to be invested with a halo of brightness and purity, which lent a touching charm to her beauty,” Cushing writes.
As a young woman, however, she’s betrothed to a vindictive Indian with “uncontrolled passions.” Fortunately, a Spanish soldier materializes to rescue her. They end up with Manteo and his son on a ship bound for Spain. Manteo dies, but the happy couple raises his child in the shadow of the Pyrenees. Time and European civilization ensure that “every trace of his savage origin was eradicated from his character and almost from his memory.”
It is a chilling epilogue that reveals more about mid-nineteenth-century America than about sixteenth-century Roanoke. This was an era when children were often removed from their Indian parents for acculturation, a process now widely considered a form of cultural genocide, a process inflicted in this same era on the remaining Native Americans in eastern North Carolina.
Fantastic tales of Virginia Dare—and, through them, the once-obscure story of Roanoke—proliferated. In 1840, the Southern Literary Messenger, which regularly published darkly romantic stories by Edgar Allan Poe and other well-known writers, printed an article by Cornelia Tuthill, a Connecticut author who drew directly on Bancroft’s history for her version. “It is a wonder that no one has before paid a tribute to the memory of Virginia Dare,” she wrote in her letter to the editor, apparently unaware of Cushing’s earlier piece.
“Though her attire was that of an Indian princess, her skin was of dazzling whiteness.” In this 1857 woodcut from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Virginia Dare lives incongruously among Carolina Algonquians in Great Plains–style tepees.
Her story portrays Eleanor Dare as a stalwart pioneer and proto-feminist who persuades Raleigh to include women on the mission. Virginia later matures into a New World Diana, “chaste and
fair,” who wears a white doeskin off one shoulder. The beautiful young white girl, a capable huntress who holds herself aloof from the adoring Indians, became the signature theme of Virginia Dare stories in the decades that followed.
A remarkable sculptor named Maria Louisa Lander likely read some of these tales as a youth in Massachusetts in the 1840s. When not quite thirty, she moved by herself to Rome. There she met Nathaniel Hawthorne, who hailed from her hometown of Salem, site of that other shadowy piece of early American history, the 1692 witch trials. Impressed by her talent, and possibly in love with this unusual expat, the famous author commissioned Lander to sculpt his bust.
Hawthorne was taken with the attractive artist, who was “living here quite alone, in delightful freedom” with “genuine talent, and spirit and independence enough to give it fair play.” He describes her as a young woman who wore a plain pea jacket in her studio, “thousands of miles from her New England home,” and “going fearlessly about these mysterious streets, by night as well as by day; with no household ties, nor rule or law but that within her.”
No doubt drawn to the story of an independent woman living a solo existence thousands of miles from family and friends, Lander seized on Dare as the subject for a new kind of American-themed sculpture that went beyond tired Greek and Roman mythological themes. In 1858, she completed a small-scale model of a young European woman dressed as an Indian.
“We have recently seen a photograph of an exquisite statuette, executed in marble by Miss Lander at Rome,” that “represents Virginia Dare, the first offspring of English parents born on the soil of the United States,” noted the New-York Tribune. “The figure is semi-nude—the drapery, which is charmingly conceived and executed, being worn like an Indian blanket—and the ornaments are wampum beads.”
The Secret Token Page 30
