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Brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Volkerbaum and today's episode

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is another classic from our archives. In

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this one, we dip into the enduring

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mystery of the lost colony at Roanoke,

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and the further mystery of the

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Dare Stones, which may be forgeries

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or may explain what happened. Hey

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Brain Stuff, Lauren Volkerbaum here. An

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unsolved mystery can drive people crazy, and

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the fate of the first English settlers

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ever to establish a colony in the

2:57

New World, Roanoke, is a puzzle that

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will probably never be entirely solved, but

3:01

it doesn't keep people from trying. In

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July 1587, a ship carrying 90 men, 17

3:07

women and 11 children landed on Roanoke

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Island on the Outer Banks of modern-day

3:11

North Carolina. A year before,

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when the site was discovered, 15

3:16

men had volunteered to stay and hold down

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the proverbial fort, but they were nowhere to

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be found, so the 118 colonists disembarked and

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set about carving a colony out of the

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wilderness. There was much excitement

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when Alanore Dare, the daughter of leader John White,

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gave birth to the first English baby born in

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the New World, and named her Virginia. After

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a time, John White left the settlers to return

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to England, telling them he'd be back within the

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year with fresh supplies. However, England's

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war with Spain slowed the process considerably, and

3:43

nobody was able to check on the settlement

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again until 1590. When

3:48

White returned, his daughter, granddaughter and

3:50

everyone else was gone. They

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had dismantled the buildings, carved the word Croatoan

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into a tree, the name of the friendly

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Native American tribe on a nearby island, and

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they were all and vanished. There

4:01

was no sign of the cross White had told them to carve

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on a tree if they had left under duress. Frankly,

4:07

White didn't look very hard for his daughter

4:09

and granddaughter before heading back to England. For

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centuries, the story of the lost colony of

4:14

Roanoke seemed pretty cut and dried to most

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historians. The settlers went to live with

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the Croatoan tribe. Whether they stayed there or not,

4:20

nobody could say. The thing

4:22

they could say is that no definitive sign of any

4:24

of the 118 colonists was ever found, despite

4:29

rumors in the later established Jamestown

4:31

colony of massacres and men wearing

4:33

European clothes deep in the wilderness.

4:36

No definitive sign, that is, until

4:38

more than three centuries later, when

4:40

in 1937, a produce dealer from

4:42

California named L. E. Hammond showed

4:44

up at Emory University in Atlanta

4:46

with a stone he found while

4:48

hunting hickory nuts in a recently

4:50

cleared North Carolina swamp, some 50

4:52

miles or 80 kilometers inland of

4:54

Roanoke Island. It was inscribed

4:57

with a message he wanted the experts at Emory to

4:59

decipher. Turns out, the

5:01

carved stone told a story, allegedly written

5:03

by White's daughter, Eleanor. The

5:06

colonists endured two years of only misery

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and war after her father left for

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England, ending with half the settlers killed

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in armed combat and many of the

5:14

others, including Eleanor's husband and daughter, slaughtered

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when a spiritual leader of the tribe

5:18

they lived with warned that the presence

5:20

of the English settlers was angering the

5:22

spirits. According to the stone,

5:24

only six men and one woman escaped. The

5:28

stone was found to be authentic by

5:30

the Emory experts at the time. It

5:32

seemed legitimate, and better still, it satisfied

5:34

everyone's thirst for closure around this dusty

5:36

old riddle. The story captured

5:38

the imagination of the entire country, and Emory

5:40

professor Haywood J. Pierce, Jr. published a paper

5:42

describing the stone in the reputable Journal of

5:45

Southern History in 1938. But soon, the plausibility

5:49

of the stone came into question. We

5:52

spoke with John Bentz, archivist at the

5:54

Rose Library at Emory University. He

5:57

said, Emory became suspicious of Hammond after

5:59

some professors and administrators traveled with him

6:01

to Edenton, North Carolina, where he found

6:04

the stone. The search for

6:06

the original location of the stone was fruitless. This

6:09

added to the growing list of details about

6:11

Hammond's discovery that were hard to corroborate. Emory

6:14

had someone in California look into Hammond, but couldn't

6:16

find much more than an address. After

6:19

Pierce and his father, another academic, paid

6:21

Hammond for the first stone and offered

6:23

a $500 reward for any additional stones

6:25

people might find, you can imagine how

6:27

many dare stones came out of the

6:29

woodwork. The Pearses paid a

6:31

man named Bill Eberhart, a stonecutter from Fulton

6:33

County, Georgia, $2,000 for 42 forgeries he brought

6:35

them. These

6:39

stones had Eleanor marrying a Cherokee chief, giving

6:41

birth to another daughter named Agnes, and eventually

6:43

dying in a cave in Georgia. In

6:46

April of 1941, the Saturday Evening Post

6:48

ran an exposé on the dare stones,

6:51

dismissing them all as forgeries, citing anachronistic

6:53

language and a consistency of spelling that

6:55

was unheard of at the time. The

6:58

Pearses' career suffered and the dare stones

7:00

were stuffed in a basement at the

7:02

father's university, an embarrassment to everyone involved.

7:05

But every so often, academic interest turns

7:07

again to the Chowon River stone, the

7:09

original dare stone found by Hammond in

7:11

that North Carolina swamp. It's

7:13

made of different rock than the others, a

7:15

bright white quartzite interior and dark exterior that

7:17

would have made a good choice for Eleanor

7:19

Dare's missive to her father. And

7:22

in the 1930s, the patina on the stone would

7:24

have been difficult to chemically replicate. In

7:27

addition, it doesn't contain the anachronistic language

7:29

of the other stones. Some

7:31

experts have determined the only problem might

7:33

be an Eleanor Dare's sign-off, the initials

7:36

EWD, which would not have been a

7:38

typical signature in the 16th century. Many

7:42

experts still dismiss the Chowon River stone

7:44

as an obvious phony, but it's possible

7:47

that new research into Elizabethan epigraphy, chemical

7:49

analysis, and other rock inscriptions of the

7:51

time period will yet shed light on

7:54

this still unsolved mystery. Thanks

7:58

for watching! Today's

8:02

episode is based on the article, The

8:04

Dare Stones, forgery or key to the

8:06

lost colony of Roanoke mystery on howstoforks.com,

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written by Jesslyn Shields. Brain

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Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with

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howstoforks.com and is produced by Tyler Clay. For

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more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio

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