# Dossier D — The Dare Stones, with a separate verdict on the FIRST stone (the "Chowan River stone", November 1937) Downloads are in `sources/` (file names given in the reference list). **Marking conventions.** VERIFIED = I read the quoted words in the cited source (or in a reprint/OCR of it, which is then stated). UNVERIFIED = taken from a secondary summary or from memory; not read in the original. Where a quotation comes from a fan-site transcription rather than a scan (the Sparkes 1941 article and Robert White's 1991 chapter), it is marked VERIFIED-REPRINT and the caveat applies that transcription errors are possible. **Bottom line (details and the reasoning in §7):** the 47 later stones are forgeries beyond reasonable doubt (Eberhardt and associates; documented by Sparkes 1941, the Emory geologist Lester's 1939 report, the anachronistic vocabulary, and the May 1941 "We Dare Anything" episode). The first stone is a separate case: nothing physically or documentarily ties it to Eberhardt, its language is far more competent than his, and the 2016 slice shows the incised letters are darkened like the exterior rather than bright like the fresh interior. Against it stand the finder's unverifiable identity and evasive conduct, his own destruction of the groove evidence (steel brush and indelible pencil), the 1937 publicity context, the unfound "rock with names", a handful of spellings with no period precedent, the non-standard three-initial signature and the unattested abbreviation "Via", and (if the secondary reports are right — UNVERIFIED, see §3.2) Morison's own later disavowal. My estimate: roughly 75–85 % probability that the first stone is a 20th-century fabrication, which is to say that its authenticity is unlikely but not excluded; a properly controlled tool-mark and weathering study of the un-cleaned incisions Loubser identified in 2011 is the test most likely to settle it. --- ## 0. What the "Dare Stones" are Forty-eight (by Sparkes's count forty-nine, because no. 46 came in two pieces) inscribed stones delivered to Haywood J. Pearce Jr. and his father between November 1937 and January 1941, now at Brenau University, Gainesville, Georgia. Stone no. 1 (21 lb 4 oz of vein quartz, said to have been found near the Chowan River in Chowan County, NC) is the only one not connected to the Georgia stonecutter William "Bill" Eberhardt and his associates; nos. 2–48 (soapstone and other rock, found in South Carolina and Georgia in 1939–41) purport to continue Eleanor Dare's story to a death near the Chattahoochee in 1599. Sources: Sparkes 1941 (VERIFIED-REPRINT: "There are forty-eight stones, to date... found, beginning in September, 1937, in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, the latest recovered in January of this year"; and "There are really forty-nine stones, as two pieces of No. 46 were delivered separately. Seventeen months after Hammond appeared with the first, Eberhart appeared. The score thereafter: Eberhart, 42; Bruce, 2 (?); Turner, 2; Eberhart and Turner, 1; Mrs. Jett, 1."); NCpedia 2019 (VERIFIED: "a series of forty-eight rocks"; "Bill Eberhardt provided the Pearces with 42 stones, all later deemed forgeries, for which he was paid a total of about $2,000"). --- ## 1. The FIRST stone: text, physical description, condition, present location ### 1.1 Transcription — Pearce 1938 (the primary published reading) Source: Haywood J. Pearce, Jr., "New Light on the Roanoke Colony: A Preliminary Examination of a Stone Found in Chowan County, North Carolina", *Journal of Southern History* 4:2 (May 1938), 148–163; read in the Internet Archive OCR of the whole issue (`sources/pearce1938_jsh.txt`). VERIFIED (OCR; the line numbers are Pearce's, "introduced for convenience"). Note on the JSTOR stable ID: 2191862 is also cited for it; NCpedia and Wikipedia give 2192000 / doi 10.2307/2192000. JSTOR was unreachable through the proxy, so I could not confirm which is right; the DOI form is the one two independent secondary sources use. Pearce, p. 149: "On the smoother side of the stone is carved a crude Latin cross. Beneath the cross are inscribed the lines:" ``` Ananias Dare & Virginia went hence Unto Heaven 1591 ``` "Near the bottom, on the same side, are inscribed the lines:" ``` Anye Englishman shew John White Govr Via ``` Pearce: "The cross and the legend immediately below it might indicate that the stone was originally designed as a grave marker, an impression that does not comport with the bottom lines on the face of the stone, nor with the seventeen lines on the reverse side." (VERIFIED) "On the rougher side are inscribed the following seventeen lines, rendered here, so far as possible, exactly as they appear on the stone:" (VERIFIED) ``` 1 Father soone After yov 2 goe for Englande wee cam 3 hither/ onlie misarie & Warre— 4 tow yeere/ Above halfe DeaDe ere tow 5 yeere more from sickenes beine fovre & twentie/ 6 salvage with message of shipp unto us/smal 7 space of time they affrite of revenge rann 8 al awaye/wee bleeve yt nott-yov/soone after 9 ye salvages faine spirts angrie/suddiane 10 murther al save seaven/mine childe— 11 ananias to slaine wth mvch misarie—/ 12 bvrie al neere fovre myles easte this river 13 vppon smal hil/names writ al ther 14 onrocke/putt this ther alsoe/salvage 15 shew this vnto yov & hither wee 16 promise yov to give greate 17 plentie presents EWD ``` Pearce's footnote 3 on the reading (VERIFIED): "All o's and a's (with the exception of the capital A's in lines 1 and 4) are represented by the same sign—an irregular, roughly circular depression. All o's and a's, therefore (with the exception of the two capitals), are conjectural. The bars represent a conjectural division into sentences. It is believed that there is a badly defaced ampersand at the end of line 10. The Elizabethan long s, used throughout the stone, is not rendered in the text as reproduced here." And: "The smooth side of the stone presented little difficulty, being fairly legible to the naked eye. The reverse or back side, however, could only be read, and that tentatively, with the aid of binocular microscope, magnifying glass, and stereoptican slides, greatly enlarged. The stone has been under study and investigation since November 9, 1937." Two things to notice in Pearce's own rendering: (i) he prints "Unto Heaven" on the face and "unto us" in line 6 with u, but "vnto yov", "yov", "vppon", "bvrie", "mvch", "fovre", "pvtt" with v elsewhere — i.e. his transcription itself mixes the conventions; (ii) line 6 has "message" with double s, and line 9 has "suddiane" (not "suddaine"). ### 1.2 Variant readings between sources | Place | Pearce 1938 (VERIFIED OCR) | Sparkes 1941 (VERIFIED-REPRINT) | NCpedia 2019 (VERIFIED) | Wikipedia (citing La Vere 2010 p.14; VERIFIED as Wikipedia text) | Lawler/NatGeo 2018 and WaPo 2018 (VERIFIED) | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Face, line 3 | Unto Heaven 1591 | vnto heaven 1591 | Unto Heaven 1591 | VNTO HEAVEN 1591 | (NatGeo quotes only the back) / WaPo: Unto Heaven | | Back 1 | yov | yov | You | YOV | You | | Back 2 | Englande | Englande | England | ENGLANDE | England | | Back 3 | Warre— | warretow yeare (run together; "yeare") | Warre | WARRE | Warre | | Back 4 | tow yeere ... DeaDe | tow yeere moore | Tow Yeere ... Deade | TOW YEERE ... DEADE | Tow Yeere | | Back 5 | sickenes beine fovre & twentie | sickenes beine fovre & twentie | Sickenes Beine Foure & Twentie | SICKNES BEINE FOVRE & TWENTIE | — | | Back 6 | message ... unto us | mesage of shipp vnto vs | Message ... Unto Us | MESSAGE ... VNTO US | — | | Back 8 | wee bleeve yt nott-yov | wee bleeve yt nott you | Wee Bleeve it Nott You | WEE BLEEVE YT NOTT YOV | — | | Back 9 | faine spirts angrie/suddiane | faine spirts angrie/ suddiane | Faine Spirits Angrie. Suddaine | FAINE SPIRTS ANGRIE SVDDIANE | Faine Spirits Angrie Suddaine | | Back 10 | murther al save seaven/mine childe— | mvrther al save seaven/ mine childe | Murther Al Save Seaven. Mine Childe | MVRTHER AL SAVE SEAVEN MINE CHILDE | Murther Al Save Seaven Mine Childe | | Back 11 | ananias to slaine wth mvch misarie | ananias to slaine wth mvch misarie | Ananais to Slaine wth Much Misarie | ANANIAS TO SLAINE WTH MVCH MISARIE | Ananais to Slaine wth Much Misarie | | Back 12–13 | bvrie al neere fovre myles easte this river / vppon smal hil | bvrie al neere fovre myles easte this river vppon smal hil | Burie Al Neere Foure Myles Easte This River Uppon Small Hil | BVRIE ... VPPON SMAL HILL | — | | Back 14 | onrocke/putt this ther alsoe | on rocke/ pvtt this ther alsoe | On Rocke. Putt This Ther Alsoe | ON ROCKE PVTT THIS THEIR ALSOE | Writ Al There on Rocke | Reading of the variants: the popular texts (NCpedia, Lawler, WaPo, History Blog) silently modernise u/v and regularise "suddiane" to "Suddaine", "spirts" to "Spirits", "Ananias" to "Ananais" (or vice versa), "Ther" to "There/Their". The two 1938–41 readings by people who handled the stone (Pearce; Sparkes reproducing Pearce's manuscript) agree on "suddiane", "spirts", "beine", "misarie", "affrite", "bleeve", "yov", "nott". Pearce's "message"/"unto us" versus Sparkes's "mesage"/"vnto vs" in line 6 is the one substantive discrepancy between the two primary readings; since Pearce says all o's and a's are conjectural, and the letters are small and crowded on the rough face, some of these differences are differences of interpretation, not of the stone. No one has published a modern epigraphic re-transcription with photographs at letter scale; that is itself a gap. What I could see myself on the Brenau photographs reproduced by NCpedia (`sources/dare_stone1_front_ncpedia_brenau.jpg`, `..._back_...jpg`, VERIFIED by inspection): the face reads, in mixed capital and minuscule forms, "AnaniasDArE &" (the "&" is a tall, Y-like sign), "VIRGINIA WENT hEnCE", "VNTO hEAVEN 1591" (V, not U, and Arabic numerals), then lower "ANYE ENGLISHMAN ShEW", "IohN WhITE GOVR VIA" (I for J; a lowercase-form h throughout). The grooves are filled with a white substance (the flour/chalk used for photography). The back is a dense block of small mixed-case letters with "EWD" alone on the last line; at the reproduction size I could not read it letter by letter. Wikipedia's all-capitals rendering ("VNTO HEAVEN", "MVRTHER") is therefore an editorial normalisation, not what is on the stone: the stone mixes capital and small letterforms. ### 1.3 Physical description Pearce 1938, p. 148 (VERIFIED, OCR; fractions garbled in OCR and reconstructed in brackets): "The stone is rough vein quartz, stained a light rusty brown. The exact weight of the stone is 21 pounds, 4 ounces; the area of the face is 104.78 square inches; the maximum length is [13⅝] inches; the maximum width [9⅝] inches; the maximum thickness [2¼] inches. The stone has a specific gravity of 2.63, and its hardness is reckoned at 7 plus in Moh's scale." Measurements "recorded by Professor J. G. Lester of the Geology Department, and Professor J. H. Purks of the Physics Department, Emory University." (Mental Floss 2023 gives "roughly 14 inches long, 10 inches wide, and 2.5 inches thick" — consistent.) Lester's petrographic note, in Pearce's n. 2 (VERIFIED): "Megascopically, the rock is a fine to medium grained, holo-crystalline quartz of light color, which has been stained superficially to a light brown color. Microscopically, the rock shows an even texture of anhedrol quartz, which commonly exhibits undulatory extinction due to stains developed during crystallization. Limonite occurs as a stain around and between many of the anhedra. This is perhaps the cause of the light brown color of the rock's surface. The rock is a fragment of quartz which commonly occurs as veins and lenses traversing the rocks of the Appalachian plateau." And: "There are no exposures of rock of any kind in the region, nor are there any exposures of rock encountered within a distance of several miles of the spot. It is thought that the discovered rock was transported from some other place to the point of discovery." (Lester on the find-site, Pearce n. 4.) Lester on the grooves (Pearce n. 2, VERIFIED): "(1) They are definitely rounded on the lower surface with a very uniform sloping side wall. (2) The channels show gaping on both walls and bottoms. (3) Extremities of the letters are never vertical except where they are intersected by fractures. Rather they seem to be feathered out." Tool question, Pearce p. 163 (VERIFIED): "Efforts are being made to produce inscriptions on similar stone by various methods. These methods have included sandblasting, drills, and acids. None has so far been successful. Men experienced in stone-cutting who have been consulted are not unanimous, but the prevailing opinion is that the stone could have been chiseled with tools or instruments which it is reasonable to suppose were possessed by the Roanoke colonists." Sparkes 1941 (VERIFIED-REPRINT) reports the reverse: Lester "had taken Hammond's stone to a stone-carving plant at Marietta, Georgia. There older workmen said they could reproduce it with hand tools; but younger men said they would prefer the sandblasting method. Lester himself had carved an inscription on quartz, using the sandblasting method." When Sparkes read Pearce his own claim that duplication "couldn't be done", Pearce "conceded: 'Well, that part's not accurate.'" Later descriptions: NatGeo 2018 calls it "the quartzite stone" (VERIFIED) — a looser term than Lester's "vein quartz"; the 2016 slice showed a "bright white" interior (§4). The History programme of 2015 reported "no evidence of drilling in the first Dare Stone" and that it "was carved more carefully and with an iron chisel" (Colavito 2015, VERIFIED, reporting the programme). Wolter in 2013 found "the same type of quartzite in Virginia" (Colavito 2013, VERIFIED, reporting). ### 1.4 State of the letters — the contamination problem - Hammond himself: "he 'cleaned it' with a steel brush, used an indelible lead pencil to intensify the lettering. Whatever his motives, he had frustrated future efforts to determine how long the stone could have been in the swamp." (Sparkes 1941, VERIFIED-REPRINT.) - Emory used flour/chalk in the grooves for photography (NCpedia: "using flour to make the markings more visible", VERIFIED; the Brenau photo captions of the 2015 filming show flour being applied again, VERIFIED). - Loubser 2011 (Brenau Window, Spring 2011, VERIFIED): "over the years the Dare Stones' carvings have been enhanced with a chalk-like substance and graphite to make them more photogenic, then scoured, cleaned and pressure washed, which renders such precise testing in those particular spots a little iffy. But Loubser's close examination, he says, turned up 'a few incisions on the sides and within irregularities on the stone's yellow brown surfaces [that] appear to have escaped highlighting and cleaning.'" - La Vere 2010 (as quoted by Powell 2010, VERIFIED): "It still looks like a chisel did it. The problem was that it was 'corrupted' from the time it was found — gone over with a wire brush, pencils and nail. New techniques would entail destroying parts of the stone, and Brenau ... doesn't seem willing to do that." - 2016: a slice was cut from one end/bottom (§4), so the "no destructive testing" position has since been relaxed. ### 1.5 Where it is now Brenau University, Gainesville, Georgia. Brenau's own page (2015/2019 capture, VERIFIED): "This stone, regarded by most authorities as the only Dare Stone, surfaced in 1937"; contact "ewd@brenau.edu"; a viewing/photography policy exists (URL now dead; Wikipedia cites "Policy regarding the Dare Stones", 3 July 2019). Brenau Window 2007 (VERIFIED): the first stone and one other were "in the special collections section of the Trustee Library", the rest in "the basement boiler room under the stage of the university amphitheater". After the 2015 documentary President Schrader "moved the stone to his office, citing security concerns" (Wikipedia citing La Vere 2010/2nd ed., p. 254 — UNVERIFIED as to the primary source). Brenau Window 2011 (VERIFIED): the stones were "on display in Brenau's Trustee Library" when Loubser examined them. --- ## 2. The find story of the first stone, and the search for Hammond ### 2.1 As published in 1938 (Pearce) Pearce 1938, p. 150 (VERIFIED): "The stone was brought to Emory University in November, 1937, by the finder, whose name must be withheld for the present. While engaged in a motor tour in coastal North Carolina he chanced to walk some distance from the highway and stumbled upon the stone. He sought in vain for some weeks to decipher the inscription himself, and then came to Emory University to seek aid for that purpose. The finder remained seven or eight days at the University working with members of the faculty engaged in efforts to read the inscription. During this period he accompanied four of the persons co-operating in the investigation to coastal North Carolina and pointed out the approximate spot where he stumbled upon the stone. His address is now known to those who have the stone in custody." Footnote 4: "For sufficient reasons the exact location of the spot where the stone was reported found cannot now be given"; Lester: "The site as pointed out by the finder of the stone was the east bank of the Chowan River in North Carolina. At this locality the bank is a part of a drowned swamp ... The floor of the swamp is above the level of the river, which empties into the Albemarle Sound at no great distance away. The soil of the swamp is a thick black alluvium about four to five feet thick". The Emory team named by Pearce (n. 3, VERIFIED): Lester (geology), Purks (physics), T. H. English and J. M. Steedman (English), J. D. McCord (staff), Pearce (history). Emory announced the find on 14 November 1937 (Wikipedia citing La Vere, UNVERIFIED); Pearce "permitted publication of the translation, January 31, 1938" (Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT). ### 2.2 As reported in 1941 (Sparkes, from Pearce's manuscript and his own inquiries) Sparkes 1941 (all VERIFIED-REPRINT): - "In mid-September, 1937, L. E. Hammond, a small produce dealer of Alameda, California, was touring in North Carolina. He wanted hickory nuts. On a causeway by a swamp about three miles from Edenton, North Carolina, he stopped his car. This swamp, until the causeway was built shortly before, had been as inaccessible as any jungle. About a quarter of a mile in the woods, on the east bank of the Chowan, the tourist stumbled over a rock slab. ... In November, 1937, he came into Atlanta, in search of a translator. Chance brought him to Emory University." - "Two days later, with Hammond and faculty colleagues, Pearce went to North Carolina, but rains had obliterated all trace of where the stone had lain." - Emory's president: "Dr. Harvey Warren Cox, the president, said then of the stone: 'It's a fraud. Why should I let you spend the university's money just to prove it's a fraud?'" "At Emory, staff and faculty had been 'suspicious' of Hammond from the beginning." - The site visit: "university officials arranged for Legare Davis, president of the Atlanta Better Business Bureau, to go along. The university was represented by Pearce, Dean Harris Purks, Prof. James Lester, geologist, and J. C. McCord ... They traveled almost six hundred miles before they learned where Hammond was taking them. On the causeway near Edenton the man brought out a crude map scrawled on a piece of paper bag. He said it was about a quarter of a mile away. But after wandering a mile and a half in the swamp the professors lost patience. Finally Hammond saw a barge grounded on the bank of the Chowan. A sand shoal near by, he said, was where he had washed the rock." - "Hammond had said he was traveling in a car with his wife. None ever saw Hammond's car. None ever saw his wife. George Mews, treasurer of Emory, tried to shadow the man one night, but was eluded. Another university man tried to get Hammond's fingerprints on a drinking glass. He failed." - "Because of Hammond's furtiveness before he vanished, the Pinkerton agency was hired to trace his past. They were unable to find anyone who had ever known him. Later the man corresponded with Dean Purks, giving as his address P. O. Box 212, Alameda, California. Then came a proposal from Hammond to exhibit the stone at twenty-five cents a head. That was when Emory washed its hands of the affair, directing Hammond to come and get his stone. Thereafter Professor Pearce carried it to Brenau College. Months later a commercial credit agency sent a representative to see Herbert M. Dove, Oakland, California, whom Hammond finally had named to Pearce as a reference. Dove was found in a little jewelry store. He said he only knew Hammond to be married, about forty; that he had some kind of a pension; that his first name was Louis. The Pearces still knew nothing about a single day in the life of Hammond before he appeared at Emory, but they bought his stone, paying him $1000. Brenau College funds were sent to an Oakland bank. The payee on the bill of exchange was L. E. Hammond P. O. Box 212, Alameda." - Hammond's return: Turner told Sparkes that "Once a man came and offered him $30,000 to find a rock with 'Yahoo' on it. Said his name was 'L. E. Martin.' That was Hammond, finder of the first stone. He had returned to Georgia and told Pearce, 'Those [later] rocks ain't so'; offered to prove it by getting a stone bearing any word Pearce asked for. Unfortunately for Hammond, he didn't look as if he had $30,000. At the time, Pearce was with Hammond by day, with Eberhart by night, or vice versa." - The Manteo episode of summer 1937: Anthony Buttitta (the play's press agent): "That man who came there in 1937 during the first season and tried to sell a fake stone just before one turned up at Emory". Senator Bradford Fearing: an unnamed promoter of "the Coastal Highway, Maine to Miami" had years earlier "proposed a scheme for creating a bogus stone relic of the Lost Colony to get newspaper headlines ... 'We'll cut down an old oak, carve CROATOAN on it ...' He said he could get men who could prepare the inscription, carve the rock, do the whole job." That man "left Norfolk several years ago, deeply in debt. But the night Paul Green's play opened he was in the audience, boldly cranking a fullsized motion-picture camera ... About that time a stranger appeared and offered to sell a stone relic of Virginia Dare. He carried it in a suitcase. Several could identify him. Were these incidents connected with the stone of the 'tourist,' Hammond? ... When Professor Pearce mailed his article, December 13, 1940, he had been aware, certainly since October, that a stone had been offered for sale in Manteo. I got his word for it that he never personally troubled to investigate." (Fullam 2021 identifies this promoter as "'Captain' Jack DeLysle" — see §4; a search-engine snippet of an HMDB marker lists a "Jack DeLysle from Norfolk, Virginia" among the eight men who chose the Waterside Theatre site in May 1931 — UNVERIFIED, page blocked.) - Sparkes's own summary of the tests on the first stone: "It was a piece of rough veined quartz weighing twenty-one pounds four ounces. The inscriptions could reasonably have been made with tools possessed by the colonists. The language was competently declared to be Elizabethan in character, spelling and idiom. Botanists said leaf mold in the grooves had been there 'a long time.' The Smithsonian Institution said the rock showed 'no evidence of fraud.' That was all they could honestly say." (This paragraph is Sparkes condensing Pearce's manuscript.) ### 2.3 Hammond's own written description of the site (via Robert White 1991 and the Lost Colony Center) The Lost Colony Center paper (Willard/McMullan, c. 2015, VERIFIED, citing White 1991 p. 261 for the clues): "Hammond wrote that he found the stone three or four miles north of Edenton, about a half mile from the road, by a small bridge over water. He said he picked up the stone and carried it a short distance to the Chowan River to wash it. He described the place as marshy with a small island, and he could see a sunken barge nearby in the river." Their list of published clues: "1. ... approximately four miles north of Edenton, NC. 2. Hammond had just crossed a small bridge over a creek when he pulled over to gather hickory nuts and stretch his legs. 3. ... a swampy place. 4. ... walked a short distance to the river ... 5. ... he recognized a. a small sand spit where he washed the stone ... b. a sunken barge ... 6. Photographs of the location were taken, and soil boring samples were obtained. 7. Hammond was traveling on Rt. 17 when the discovery was made." They identify "the Cowpen Neck Road bridge over Rocky Hock Creek" and admit: "That he was on Highway 17 when he found the stone cannot be reconciled with the other reported evidence". ### 2.4 Contradictions in the find story (collected) | Point | Version A | Version B | Version C | |---|---|---|---| | Date of find | "mid-September, 1937" (Sparkes, from Pearce's MS) | "August 1937" (Wikipedia citing La Vere 2010 pp. 7–9) | "summer of 1937" (NCpedia; LCC paper; Mental Floss "that summer"); Brenau's own photo-caption tradition says nothing | | Distance from Roanoke Island | "about 65 miles west of Roanoke Island" (La Vere 2009 as condensed by Powell) | "about 80 miles from Roanoke Island" (Brenau Window 2007) | "about 50 miles inland from Roanoke Island, matching White's passing mention" (NatGeo 2018); "near the North Carolina–Virginia border" (NatGeo 2018) | | Distance from Edenton | "about three miles from Edenton" on a causeway (Sparkes) | "three or four miles north of Edenton, about a half mile from the road, by a small bridge" (Hammond's writing per LCC/White) | "off a then newly opened stretch of Highway 17 near Edenton" (NCpedia); Highway 17's Pembroke Creek bridge is ~2 miles from the Chowan (LCC) | | Bank of the river | "east bank of the Chowan" (Lester in Pearce 1938; Sparkes) | — | Colavito 2013/2015 places the find "near the golf course" (Scotch Hall, Bertie County, i.e. the west side) and "across the river from" the Site X area — a loose journalistic placement, not a primary datum | | Finder's occupation | "a small produce dealer of Alameda" (Sparkes/Pearce MS) | "a California grocer" (History Blog 2016) | "had some kind of a pension" (Dove to the credit agency, in Sparkes) | | Finder's name | "L. E. Hammond"; first name "Louis" (Dove) | "Louis E. Hammond" (most secondary) | "Lewis Elbert/Albert Hammond" (a 2009 blog commenter's genealogy — UNVERIFIED) ; "George Hammond", a New Mexico historian (Darby 2019/2020 — UNVERIFIED theory, rejected by Fullam 2021) | | Amount paid | $1,000 (Sparkes; Brenau Window; History Blog) | — | Brown's Guide: "$1,000 to keep their stones" (same) | | Emory's attitude | Emory "declined to purchase" (Wikipedia/La Vere) and Cox called it "a fraud" (Sparkes) | Brenau's page: "Pearce Sr. agreed, when Emory would not, to acquire the stone" | Pearce 1938 still calls it "now in the custody of Emory University" (May 1938) | ### 2.5 The search for the burial site and the "rock with names" Sparkes (VERIFIED-REPRINT): after publication, "Capt. J. P. Wiggins, a former mayor of Edenton ... remembered seeing, upon a knoll, a moss covered stone ... Professor Pearce went to Edenton on February 5, 1938, and with Wiggins searched in the swamp. The second day they found the rock. An inch deep with moss, it weighed about two hundred pounds. Moss was carefully removed but no carving was found." Excavations followed in June and August 1938 ("Negro helpers labored five days without uncovering anything significant. Old residents told the Pearces that in their youth they had seen the mast of a ship above the swamp trees") and a fifth trip in March 1939, "a further waste of time. The Pearces had spent about $500 of their own money ... Now they offered a $500 reward to anyone finding the stone and bringing authenticating evidence." Two North Carolinians (T. E. Chappell of Tyner; Tom Shallington of Tyrrell County) claimed finds that were never examined (Wikipedia citing La Vere pp. 53–59, UNVERIFIED). The "rock with names" was instead "found" by Eberhardt in South Carolina in 1939 (§3). Modern searches: Willard/McMullan's Rocky Hock Creek site (2015): "Attempts to identify 16th-century artifacts at the test site have thus far been unsuccessful. Many English artifacts have been found, but they are from a later date." (LCC paper, VERIFIED; Daily Advance 2015, VERIFIED; Colavito 2015: "they admit that the pottery wasn't old enough".) No grave, no named rock, no Elizabethan object has ever been found at any proposed find-spot. ### 2.6 Attempts to trace Hammond after 1941 - Sparkes "continued to investigate Louis E. Hammond, with little success" (Wikipedia citing Lawler 2018 pp. 251–252 and La Vere p. 174 — UNVERIFIED). - 2016: a researcher named Joe McDonald announced in the History Blog comments "a comprehensive search for heirs and relatives of Louis E. Hammond" (VERIFIED as a blog comment; no published result found). - Genealogical leads by blog commenters (both UNVERIFIED and mutually incompatible): (a) a "Lewis Albert Hammond" b. 1882 Ludington, Michigan, Army 1902–08, married in Santa Clara 1909 as "Lewis Elbert Hammond", living in Eureka CA in 1930–42, d. Memphis 1956 (NC Miscellany 2009 comment by "Bob Foster"); (b) a Louis E. Hammond b. 1890/91 Wisconsin, later of Long Beach CA (History Blog 2016 comment). Neither has been connected to Alameda P.O. Box 212 or to the Oakland jeweller Dove. - Fullam 2021 (McFarland) has a chapter "The Perpetrators: L.E. Hammond", one on "Herbert M. Dove", and "Appendix A. Correspondence and Documents Relating to L.E. Hammond" (table of contents VERIFIED on the publisher's page; content not accessible to me). - Darby 2019/2020 claims "L.E. Hammond" was in fact the historian George (P.) Hammond "who taught history in New Mexico", acting with Herbert E. Bolton and Pearce (abstract VERIFIED; the identification is UNVERIFIED and is, per Wikipedia, "discussed and dismissed" by Fullam 2021). - Emory holds a "Dare stones collection, 1937-1987" (Emory University Archives; finding aid eua0071darestones; an ArchivesSpace object is titled "Dare Stones: Correspondence, etc.") — the natural place to look for Hammond's letters and the Pinkerton/credit-agency reports; the finding aid was unreachable through the proxy (UNVERIFIED contents). --- ## 3. The later stones (1939–41), the Brenau committee of October 1940, and Sparkes's exposé ### 3.1 Sequence of "finds" (Sparkes 1941, VERIFIED-REPRINT, unless noted) - May 1939 ("seventeen months after the tourist Hammond's appearance"): "William Eberhart, a carpenter and stonemason in the Atlanta area, brought them a rock. He said he had found it about twelve miles south of Greenville, South Carolina, near the Saluda River and the town of Pelzer. He had heard they were offering money for old stones bearing inscriptions." Its date 1589 did not fit; "They told Eberhart the stone they sought was in North Carolina; his was probably a Spanish grave marker." He returned with two more dated 1589, then "A week later Eberhart was back and he had a fourth stone. On the back of this were names ... The date, 1591, was readable. The first had said seventeen persons had been massacred, their names carved on a rock. Professor Pearce counted. There were seventeen names." Text: "Heyr laeth Ananias & Virginia Father Salvage mvrther Al save seaven names written heyr mai God hab mercye Eleanor Dare 1591"; edge: "Father wee goe sw"; fifteen surnames on the back. Wikipedia (citing La Vere pp. 65–68, UNVERIFIED): the fit came after "the Pearces showed him Hammond's stone, and explained what writing they expected to find". - Thirteen South Carolina stones in all (nos. 2–14); the Pearces bought the hill for $800; the $500 reward was converted into "$100 cash and a half interest in the hill"; on 17 September 1940 "Eberhart surrendered his interest in the sixteen acres, and the Pearces gave him $1400 of Brenau College funds." - Stone 15: I. A. Turner of Atlanta, "late August, 1939", said to have been found in March 1939 in Hall County, Georgia; text includes "Wee pvtt moche clew bye wage" (Sparkes's reading) — the stone on which Sparkes found the acrostic "FAKE". - Nine Habersham County stones (16–24) from Eberhardt, August 1939, including "Father wee ben heyr 5 yeeres in primaeval splendovr Eleanor Dare 1592" and "Father day by day some amang vs endeavovr tow Reconnoittre For signe of yov". - Fulton County stones (25–31, then 32–45) in August–September 1940, most "within four miles of his bed"; no. 36 from William Bruce; no. 37 Eberhardt-and-Turner; no. 46 the Jett "mill stone" in two halves; no. 47 the cave-ledge inscription "Eleanor Dare heyr sithence 1593"; no. 48 (December 1940) "John White manye prisoner fourtie mylles nw. Griffen Jones & Agnes Dare 1603" (Wikipedia citing La Vere, UNVERIFIED for no. 48's text). - Money (Sparkes): "The revealed investment of Brenau funds in this enterprise is $1000 to Hammond; $1600 and more to Eberhart; $50 to Bruce, $25 to Turner; $800 for the hill." Pearce had first told him "about $500". NCpedia: about $2,000 to Eberhardt in all. ### 3.2 The Brenau conference, 19–20 October 1940, and the committee's statement - Attendance and outcome as Sparkes reported it (VERIFIED-REPRINT): "Last fall thirty-four scholars, headed by Dr. Samuel E. Morison, of Harvard, president of the American Antiquarian Society, journeyed to Brenau and after two days' study pronounced that 'the preponderance of evidence points to the authenticity of the stones.'" A five-man committee headed by Morison was "authorized by the thirty-four who met at Brenau to issue a statement and study further the problems posed by the stones" (Sparkes quoting an unnamed committee member: "This matter will be determined finally ... only on the basis of internal evidence, something in the inscriptions, or the stones themselves."). - The qualifications: the LCC paper (VERIFIED) says the committee "made specific requests for a number of additional studies"; Wikipedia (citing La Vere p. 118): the statement "supported the authenticity of the Dare Stones, but cautioned that the investigation was still ongoing" (UNVERIFIED as to the wording). I did not find the full text of the statement anywhere online; only the "preponderance of evidence points to the authenticity of the stones" clause is quoted (by Sparkes 1941, NatGeo 2018, Brown's Guide, History Blog). The date "October 21, 1940" for the report appears in Sparkes ("writing De Mille October 25, 1940 four days after the conference had reported"). - Morison's private letter to the Post (Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT): "I personally went to Gainesville to investigate the Eleanor Dare stones and believe them to be genuine, as did the other professors present. A geologist pronounced the inscriptions to be over 40 years old (they can't tell whether they are 41 or 401), and some of them have been knocking around farms of perfectly honest Georgians for the last fifty years, but were only produced when the story got around." And later to Sparkes: "I believe them [the stones] to be O.K. The chief obstacles are three words: trale, primeval, reconnoitre." - Morison's later disavowal, in *The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages* (1971), p. 684 (as quoted by Wikipedia; UNVERIFIED — the book is in copyright and its archive.org copies are lending-only): "The committee, as politely as possible, declared the stones to be fake, largely on the use of two words, 'trail' and 'reconnoitre' which were not in the English language for a century or more after 1590." Robert White 1991 reads the same passage the other way: "Thirty years later, Samuel Morison recalled vividly that the stones were impressive because the inscriptions and backgrounds were equally weathered." (VERIFIED-REPRINT of White's ch. 3.) Both cannot be a fair summary; the 1971 text should be read in full. - The Smithsonian: Sparkes has Pearce's manuscript saying "The Smithsonian Institution said the rock showed 'no evidence of fraud.'" The later "Smithsonian-commissioned team of historians" phrasing (Brenau Window 2007; History Blog 2016; WaPo 2018) conflates this with the 1940 conference; I found no primary evidence that the Smithsonian commissioned the Morison group. ### 3.3 What Sparkes established — separated by stone Boyden Sparkes, "Writ on Rocke: Has America's First Murder Mystery Been Solved?", *Saturday Evening Post*, 26 April 1941 (pp. 9–11, 118, 120–122; Wikipedia adds 124–126, 128). Read in the Angelfire reprint (VERIFIED-REPRINT). The archive.org scan of the issue is listed but "not available". About the later stones (Eberhardt, Turner, Bruce, Jett): 1. Provenance/association: "Eberhart acknowledged that for more than ten years he had known Turner and Bruce. They can get together any half hour." Turner "met Eberhart about 1930"; Jett was Turner's boyhood neighbour; "except for the two stones remembered by a man named Tom Jett ... no living soul is known who ever saw or heard of such stones before they were produced by Hammond, Eberhart and Turner, and Bruce." Eberhardt "always found his stones when nobody was looking"; "finally he was making all his finds within four miles of his bed!" The hill in South Carolina was a cultivated cotton patch whose family "Never saw anything like 'em." 2. Eberhardt's background: three years' schooling; hauler of stones; jail for drunken driving; the "product" he peddled in South Carolina "was actually moonshine whisky"; an Atlanta antique dealer had paid him "$271.50 for an assortment of 'Indian relics'" that "State-employed geologists ... believed ... to have been recently chiseled" and which the dealer "thinks ... were treated with a blowtorch after carving." 3. Fresh cutting: Lester's report of 26 July 1939 on Stone No. 25: the grooves of "sithence 1593" were "the freshest in the entire stone"; "The lower letters ... give the impression of having been cut within the past few days or weeks when compared with the letters on the upper part"; letters "poorly incised where a lichenous stain showed at places where grooves would have been"; "I am forced to believe less in the authenticity of this stone than in any ... It makes me believe it has been doctored". Lester: "You could scratch them with your fingernail. You could do the job, using the head of a ten penny nail as a cutting tool." Bruce's stone "was 'clean' when delivered; somebody had scraped the grooves of the inscriptions, as had been done with all the stones." 4. Vocabulary: "primeval" (OED earliest 1653), "reconnoitre" (1707), "trale" for trail (in 1590 "used to denote the scent of a quarry rather than a pathway"); confirmed by Morris Tilley (Michigan, Early Modern English Dictionary files). Tannenbaum: "Isn't it extraordinary to find 'primeval' and 'reconnoitre' when they do not appear in Shakespeare ...?" 5. Consistency of spelling across "the 712 words on the stones": "laeth" 9 times, "Eleanor" 26, "Salvage" 18, "hither" 5, "Englande" 2, etc. Tannenbaum: "No Elizabethan was ever so consistent in spelling." 6. Letterforms: Tannenbaum on "photographs of the stones": "There isn't a Gothic letter here. And this settles the whole matter! ... Every letter on these stones is a Roman letter." (Sparkes applies this to all the stones; White 1991 replies that White's 1590 narrative describes "faire Romane letters" and "fayre Capitall letters" on the Roanoke trees — VERIFIED in Pearce 1938's quotation of Hakluyt.) 7. The acrostic: on the back of Turner's Stone No. 15 Sparkes saw "Emory", "Atlanta, Ge", "shed", "Pearce", and, held sideways, "F A K E". ("Is it an acrostic? I don't know. But I am sure Eleanor Dare had nothing to do with it.") 8. The Jett stone (No. 46): identified through jail bars; the two halves "fit as neatly as a freshly broken teacup" after decades apart; the "8's" that turned out to be g's. 9. Motive/promotion: Pearce had written to Cecil B. De Mille on 25 October 1940; Brenau staged Maude Fiske LaFleur's pageant *This Heritage* in summer 1940 "rivaling the play at Roanoke"; Georgia's World's Fair exhibit showed replicas; Pearce had lectured "about fifty times". About the FIRST stone, specifically, Sparkes established only: - (i) that Hammond was untraceable (Pinkertons; no car, no wife seen; the P.O. box; Dove); (ii) that Hammond had scrubbed the grooves and pencilled the letters; (iii) that a stranger had tried to sell "a stone relic of Virginia Dare" at Manteo in summer 1937 and that a promoter had earlier proposed manufacturing exactly such a relic; (iv) that Hammond later reappeared as "L. E. Martin" trying to bribe Turner into producing a "Yahoo" stone (which cuts both ways: it shows Hammond believed the later stones were procurable to order, and it shows him behaving like a confidence man); (v) that the "couldn't be duplicated" claim was untrue (Marietta workmen; Lester's sandblasting). Sparkes explicitly notes the logical link Pearce made — the first stone's "seven of twenty-four" produced Eberhardt's seventeen names — and says "It seemed to me it should be equally true that if the first was a fraud, all were fraudulent. My hasty conclusion got me nowhere with a professor I consulted." The linguistic and geological findings (items 3–8 above) concern Eberhardt's and Turner's stones, not Hammond's; none of Tannenbaum's specific anachronisms occurs on the first stone; the spelling-consistency count is over all 712 words. Tannenbaum's "Roman letters" objection is the one criticism that applies to the first stone too (its letters are Roman/mixed-case, not secretary hand). ### 3.4 The "Pearce is a sucker" question — what the extortion stone actually said There is no "Pearce is a sucker" stone in the sources. The stone Eberhardt produced after Sparkes's article read, per NCpedia (VERIFIED): "Pearce and Dare Historical Hoaxes. We Dare Anything."; per Brown's Guide/Jim Miles quoting Pearce's 1941 press statement (VERIFIED as reported): "Pearce and Dare Historical Hoax. Our motto is—We Dare Anything."; Mental Floss 2023 (VERIFIED): "Pearce and Dare Historical Hoaxes. We Dare Anything." Sequence per Miles (from Pearce's statements to the press, VERIFIED as reported): 18 April 1941, Eberhardt reports a new carving on a rock face by the Chattahoochee that "looked phony"; Pearce returns with Georgia Tech chemist Count Gibson, who "discovered a bottle containing a purple vegetable dye in a burned out tree trunk" (Wikipedia/La Vere say sulfuric acid — the two accounts differ, UNVERIFIED which is right); 4 May, Eberhardt shows Mrs (Lucile) Pearce the "We Dare Anything" stone and "said the Saturday Evening Post would be interested in buying the stone and his story"; Pearce drafts a $200 agreement "not to divulge anything regarding the fraudulent character of stones delivered to H.J. Pearce", Eberhardt signs only a receipt-style note for "May 13"; 13 May confrontation with Gibson as witness (Wikipedia adds that Eberhardt "kept his distance while holding a rifle" — UNVERIFIED); Pearce goes to the press; the Atlanta Journal of 15 May 1941 headlines it (NCpedia) and United Press runs "'Dare Stones' Found Fakes" (Hollywood Citizen-News, 15 May 1941, per Mental Floss). Eberhardt's counter-statement: "I didn't make those stones…I found them ... after the Pearce's told me where to look and it was good money to me." Pearce in the same coverage: "When Eberhardt brought us the first one two years ago, he had no more knowledge of Elizabethan writing than the man in the moon ... I do not believe that in the interim he has learned to fake them" (Mental Floss quoting UP, VERIFIED as quoted) and "Pearce stated that five stones, unconnected to Eberhart, might be genuine, and that three of Eberhart's early discoveries could be also" (Miles, VERIFIED as reported). Pearce never renounced the first stone. ### 3.5 After 1941 to 2015 (brief) - The stones went into storage; a 1979 (NCpedia says 1979; Brenau Window says 1977) *In Search of...* episode showed them "abandoned, literally in a pile, underneath the university amphitheater" (WaPo 2018, VERIFIED); Southerland on that programme "proclaims that all but that first stone probably are fakes. In another interview 10 years later he backed off, saying he was 'perhaps a little generous' and there's a '50-50 chance' the first stone is a fake, too" (Brenau Window 2007, VERIFIED). - 1983: Robert L. Stephenson (SC Institute of Archeology and Anthropology), "Report of Observations Regarding 'The Dare Stones'", 15 April 1983 — "inconclusive ... could devise no microscopic, chemical, or physical examination that would reveal anything useful about the Hammond stone" (Wikipedia citing La Vere pp. 175–177 and Lawler pp. 253–254; UNVERIFIED, report not accessible). - 1991: Robert W. White, *A Witness for Eleanor Dare* (Lexikos, San Francisco; ISBN 0-938530-51-8; 285 pp.), argues all 48 are genuine and that "The Saturday Evening Post was acting on behalf of the Roanoke tourist attraction" (VERIFIED-REPRINT of ch. 3). Its lasting contribution for the first stone is documentary: it printed Hammond's description of the site (p. 261 per the LCC paper). - 2007–2013: Brenau Window articles; Loubser's 2011 tool-trace proposal; H2 *America Unearthed* "Mystery of Roanoke" (Jan 2013) with Scott Wolter, who "examines this first of the Dare Stones and says that the geological evidence suggests their authenticity" on the basis of weathering seen under a microscope, without local controls (Colavito 2013, VERIFIED as reported). - 2009–2010: David La Vere, "The 1937 Chowan River 'Dare Stone': A Re-evaluation", *North Carolina Historical Review* 86:3 (July 2009), 251–281 (JSTOR 23523860; not accessible to me), condensed by Powell 2009 (VERIFIED): "Scholars have dismissed the stone as a forgery, but a closer look shows it might well be what it purports to be: a last message from Eleanor Dare and the Lost Colony…. It tells a credible story that coincides with the sources left about the Lost Colony." Then *The Lost Rocks* (Dram Tree/Burnt Mill Press, 2010; 2nd ed. 2012 with Laurie Murphy per the LCC paper). La Vere to Powell in 2010 (VERIFIED): "I had an Elizabethan scholar look over the language. He went in with the idea to discredit and came away amazed how it all fit Elizabethan English. He was particularly interested in the word 'salvage' (for savage) which was used in English (from the Italian word for forest) during only a few years…. The Lost Colony fit in with that period." (The "only a few years" claim is wrong as stated: see §6 — "salvage(s)" is in Hakluyt 1589/1600, Strachey c.1612 and Smith 1608–1624.) --- ## 4. The 2015–2026 re-examination ### 4.1 Television and the language "re-reading" (2015, 2017) - History, *Roanoke: Search for the Lost Colony* (aired 26 Oct 2015; Jim and Bill Vieira, Fred Willard; Kevin A. Quarmby as language consultant). Per Colavito's review (VERIFIED as reported): scans "find evidence of drilling in the later Dare Stones, but they find no evidence of drilling in the first Dare Stone ... their analysis only confirms that the first Dare Stone was carved more carefully and with an iron chisel"; Quarmby "determines that a 'ye' with a superscript 'e' on the stone means 'the' rather than 'you' ('ye' without the superscript) and Quarmby says that only a 'magnificent' hoaxer would know the difference." Colavito's rebuttal: Lovecraft used superscript-e "ye" in 1927; late-19th/early-20th-century reprints of Elizabethan texts routinely distinguished the forms. Quarmby's own site (VERIFIED): "his surprising re-reading of the first Dare Stone, resulted in his return for a second program". Wikipedia's summary of Quarmby: language "consistent with Elizabethan era English", with "subtle nuances" suggesting "either authenticity, or an extremely clever hoax"; "by his own admission not an expert on Elizabethan paleography" (Lawler p. 255) — UNVERIFIED wording. Test-pits at the Rocky Hock Creek site found a large Native village and later English ceramics but nothing 16th-century (LCC paper; Daily Advance 2015; Colavito 2015 — all VERIFIED). - History, *Return to Roanoke: Search for the Seven* (aired 26 March 2017): filmed the UNC Asheville sampling (Brenau photo captions, VERIFIED: "Bill Miller, professor emeritus in the geology department at the University of North Carolina Asheville, gives a thumbs up before cutting a sample off the Dare Stone"; "Brenau President Ed Schrader holds the Dare Stone after a sample was cut off the bottom"). ### 4.2 Brenau under President Ed Schrader (a geologist), 2016 - WSJ, 21 Jan 2016 (Cameron McWhirter), as excerpted by Powell (VERIFIED): Schrader "has begun to assemble a team of experts in various disciplines—archaeology, geology, history and the study of Elizabethan writing—to re-examine the quartz stone. Sometime in this year or next, he wants to launch an expedition to the Chowan River near Edenton, N.C. ... 'If it is real, it is the most important pre-colonial artifact by Europeans in the Americas,' the 64-year-old says ... 'The speculation's gone on long enough.'" - The slice. NatGeo (Lawler), May 2018 (VERIFIED): "In 2016 the president of Brenau, geologist Ed Schrader, took the first stone to the University of North Carolina at Asheville for analysis. After slicing off one end of the quartzite stone, he discovered the interior was bright white, while the exterior and carvings were much darker. The original inscription would have been a stark contrast to the weathered exterior—a good choice for a Roanoke colonist but a poor one for a modern forger." Matthew Champion (Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey): a fresh cut "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." "Champion and Schrader agree that using chemicals to mask the color—particularly in the 1930s—would have been difficult." Eric Doehne (conservator): trace elements, isotopes, UV and multispectral photography "could help", "But detailed chemical analysis of the carving's crevices has yet to be done." - What was and was not claimed: (a) the interior is bright white, exterior and groove surfaces dark — VERIFIED as claimed by Lawler/Schrader; (b) that the stone "had not been a ballast stone from an English ship" and that composition points to "an area in southern Virginia" as origin — NCpedia (VERIFIED as a claim): "The stone's mineral composition has also been used to target the location where it might have originated. Investigators have hypothesized that the stone came from an area in southern Virginia"; Wikipedia (citing Lawler pp. 254–258) says the test "conclusively proved that the rock had not been a ballast stone" — UNVERIFIED and, as stated, over-strong (no analytical report has been published); (c) a search-engine summary claimed "trace elements like gold, selenium, and copper were detected" — from an unreliable aggregator, UNVERIFIED and not repeated here as fact. No laboratory report, no thin-section, no measurement of the weathering rind thickness inside versus outside the grooves has been published. The comparison actually made is qualitative (dark grooves vs bright saw-cut), made by the stone's owner, in a television context. - WaPo, July 2018 (Brockell, VERIFIED): Schrader: "If this stone is real, it's the most significant artifact in American history of early European settlement ... And if it's not, it's one of the most magnificent forgeries of all time." On the later stones: "all these additional stones that had been sitting around in the woods of North Carolina for 500 years just started showing up ... for 500 bucks a pop." "Dare was 'moderately educated,' says Schrader, and her husband was a stonemason" (Ananias Dare was a bricklayer/tiler in the London records, not a stonemason — a common slip). "Schrader said he'd like to marshal the funds for an 'exhaustive, geochemical investigation,' but first, this fall, a Brenau professor will assemble a team of outside experts to analyze the language more thoroughly." I found no published outcome of that autumn-2018 language panel, and no "2017 Brenau symposium" on the stone; the nearest things are the March 2017 television programme and the 2018 press cycle around Lawler's book. ### 4.3 Lawler, *The Secret Token* (Doubleday, 2018) and the NatGeo article — the expert opinions collected (All as reported by Lawler in NatGeo May 2018, VERIFIED, and as summarised from the book by Wikipedia/Mental Floss, UNVERIFIED where so marked.) - Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library), from high-resolution images: "There is nothing that jumps out as a forgery." "Her one doubt was the use of Eleanor Dare's three initials, EWD. This was not a standard way to sign one's name in that era." - Jean Wilson (Cambridge): "There's nothing in the inscription that couldn't be of its purported date." - Matthew Champion: the stone "is consistent with the inscriptions he studies in English churches"; Roman lettering and Arabic numerals are not anachronistic (Wikipedia citing Lawler pp. 258–259, UNVERIFIED); but he "couldn't locate another instance from the era of Virginia abbreviated as VIA" (Mental Floss 2023 quoting the book, VERIFIED as quoted). He wants "a multidisciplinary study ... chemical analysis, epigraphy, and the study of rock-cut Elizabethan inscriptions". - Diarmaid MacCulloch (Oxford): "Citing the initials, the use of Arabic numerals, and several word choices unlikely to have been in Eleanor Dare's repertoire", he dismisses the message as having "all the plausibility of Dick Van Dyke's cockney accent in Mary Poppins" (NatGeo, VERIFIED); "risible forgery" (Wikipedia citing Lawler pp. 259–261, UNVERIFIED). - Lawler's own framing (Mental Floss quoting the book, VERIFIED as quoted): "Whenever the original inscription was made, the white letters must have stood out sharply against the dark exterior"; a forger "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." And on timing: "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." ### 4.4 2019–2026 - Brenau's 2019 "Policy regarding the Dare Stones" (3 July 2019) governs viewing and reserves photography/video rights (Wikipedia; the URL is dead; UNVERIFIED wording). - 2019–2020: Melissa Darby, *Thunder Go North* (Univ. of Utah Press, 2019) and the paper "Double Deception: The 1937 Hoaxes of the Chowan River Dare Stone and the Drake Plate of Brass" (abstract VERIFIED): Herbert E. Bolton "was the ringleader of the Plate of Brass hoax, and assisted other historians, George Hammond and Haywood Pearce Jr., with the planning and implementation of the Dare Stone fraud"; "The author calls for a simple radiometric test of the Dare Stone, which will determine whether the stone originated in the Appalachian region of western North Carolina, or if it came from a younger geological source, perhaps in New Mexico where Hammond taught history, or from a geologic source in California, where Bolton presided." (Her motive claim: "the desire to uplift a White and English national identity for America".) - 2021: Brandon Fullam, *A Lost Colony Hoax: The Chowan River Dare Stone* (McFarland; 205 pp.). Publisher's claim (VERIFIED): the book "finally provides conclusive evidence that the Chowan River Dare Stone is a clever 20th century fraud" and "exposes the orchestration of the hoax and its shadowy perpetrators"; chapters (VERIFIED ToC): "7. The Physical and Orthographic Evidence", "8. The Conclusive Evidence", "10. The Perpetrators: 'Captain' Jack DeLysle", "11. ... L.E. Hammond", "12. ... Herbert M. Dove", "Appendix A. Correspondence and Documents Relating to L.E. Hammond". What the "conclusive evidence" is, I could not read (no accessible preview; no journal review found). Wikipedia states Fullam "discussed and dismissed" Darby's Bolton/George Hammond theory (UNVERIFIED). - 2023: popular re-tellings (Mental Floss, 7 Apr 2023; IFLScience, 23 May 2023) add nothing new; both repeat the 2016 slice result and the EWD problem. - 13 Nov 2025: David La Vere lectured on "The Dare Stones and Raleigh's Lost Colony" at the Kinston-Lenoir County Public Library (VERIFIED, city calendar: "What if the survivors left Roanoke Island ... and found their way to Georgia? Has the greatest mystery in American history -- the Lost Colony -- finally been solved?"). - I found no announcement of any new physical test, dating study, tool-mark study, or excavation relating to the first stone between 2019 and September 2026, and no statement by Brenau after 2019 beyond the standing page. A search-engine summary asserting "emerging initiatives began in 2025" and "Brenau ... expressed openness to collaborative reanalysis" traced to an unreliable aggregator and is not adopted. --- ## 5. The arguments, both sides ### 5.1 Critical arguments against the first stone, with attributions **(a) Language — anachronisms and oddities** 1. *Pearce's own admissions (Pearce 1938, VERIFIED).* Five forms for which he "found no precedent": misarie, beine, affrite, bleeve, spirts. "A woman's signature with three initials, in the period, presents more difficulty ... the writer has not found an instance where three occurred." His defence of the Latin cross and Arabic numerals cites Dingley's *History of Marble* — a compilation "made in the reign of Charles II" (n. 41), i.e. evidence from the 1670s–80s offered for 1591. (The numerals point itself is not controversial: Hakluyt's printed text of White has "An. 1587", and Champion in 2018 saw nothing anachronistic in numerals or Roman lettering — Wikipedia's summary of Lawler, UNVERIFIED wording.) 2. *Tannenbaum 1941 (Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT):* "There isn't a Gothic letter here ... Every letter on these stones is a Roman letter." This is the one 1941 linguistic objection that reaches the first stone (its letters are Roman capitals with some minuscule forms, see §1.2). It is a weak objection for a carved stone: John White himself reported "faire Romane letters C R O" and "fayre Capitall letters" reading CROATOAN cut by the colonists on trees (Hakluyt, VERIFIED in `hakluyt_v8.txt`), and inscriptions in stone were habitually cut in capitals. Wilson and Champion (2018) in effect reject it. 3. *Spelling consistency (Tannenbaum via Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT):* "No Elizabethan was ever so consistent in spelling." Tannenbaum's count is over the 712 words of all the stones. Within the first stone alone the sample is small, but it is also internally consistent: yov ×4, wee ×3, al ×4, salvage(s) ×3, ther ×2, smal ×2, fovre ×2, misarie ×2, yeere ×2, tow ×2 — no word is spelled two ways. Period writers commonly vary spelling even within a page; this is a mild, not a decisive, indicator. 4. *Specific forms (my corpus check, §6):* "yov" (final v) contradicts the period convention by which v is written initially and u medially/finally regardless of sound — in Arber's u/v-preserving Smith: vs 1,117, vnto 115, vp 255, vpon 528 (initial v) against haue 1,478, loue 81, giue 156, you 955, yov 0. "Mine childe": in c. 3.7 MB of period text the determiner "mine" never precedes a consonant-initial noun (Hakluyt vol. 8: "mine" + vowel/h 20, "my" + consonant 223; Smith: 16 vs 862; the apparent counter-examples are the noun "mine" or the absolute pronoun). "Via" for Virginia: Champion "couldn't locate another instance from the era" (VERIFIED as quoted by Mental Floss); as an English preposition "via" is, from memory, not recorded before the late 18th century (UNVERIFIED — OED not consulted). "EWD": Pearce 1938, Wolfe 2018 ("not a standard way to sign one's name in that era", VERIFIED) and MacCulloch 2018. "Affrite", "spirts", "beine", "bleeve", "misarie", "suddiane", "sickenes", "anye", "mesage/message with -ge": unattested in the corpora (which does not prove non-existence; EEBO was not available to me). 5. *Register (my own judgement, so marked).* The text's "Elizabethan" quality is produced almost entirely by (i) added final -e (Englande, Deade, greate, anye, awaye, alsoe, misarie), (ii) doubled final consonants (nott, putt, rann, shipp, smal/hil with single letters going the other way), and (iii) u/v and i/j swaps — the three devices a 20th-century imitator reaches for. Genuine period variation is not of this uniform kind; MacCulloch's "Dick Van Dyke" verdict is a judgement on exactly this register. Against this: several stone words are precisely the forms found in the sources (salvage, tow, cam, deade, nott, writ, alsoe, seaven, myles, murther, plentie, shew, twentie, halfe, slaine, burie, neere, soone, yeere, "goe for England", "went hence to heauen") — see §6 — which shows that whoever wrote it had read period texts closely, whether in 1591 or in 1937. 6. *Content stays inside the printed record (my own observation).* Every checkable statement on the stone — removal ~50 miles inland to the Chowan, a ship that came and went, Indian fear of revenge, priests inciting a massacre, seven survivors, burial "on a small hill" — is contained in Hakluyt (White 1587/1590), Strachey (Major ed. 1849), Smith (Arber 1884), the Gates instructions (Kingsbury 1933) and Weeks 1891, all in print before 1937; Pearce's seven "checks" (§5.2) are checks against precisely these books. Nothing on the stone is checkable against anything *outside* them (Pearce's own list of "questions not cleared up": the survivors' names, why CROATOAN was carved, "Why did not Eleanor Dare state her exact whereabouts"). A hoax is expected to stay inside the record; a genuine message would be expected, at least somewhere, to leave it. **(b) Location — "60 miles west of Roanoke Island", the Chowan** - For: Pearce 1938 checks (4)–(6): White's "prepared to remove from Roanoak 50 miles into the maine"; Lane's 1586 praise of "the Chaonists ... more faithfull in their promises"; Strachey and the Gates instructions placing survivors up the Chowan ("where the River Choanowki falleth into the sea of Rawnocke"). NatGeo 2018: "about 50 miles inland from Roanoke Island, matching White's passing mention" (VERIFIED). Modern archaeology (Site X / Site Y on Salmon Creek, Bertie County, 2012–) has since put at least some colonists on the western Albemarle, which La Vere and Schrader treat as corroboration (Powell 2016; WaPo 2018, VERIFIED). - Against: (i) the same three texts were available to, and are the obvious reading of, anyone planning a "Lost Colony" relic in 1937; a hoaxer who read Hakluyt would put the stone exactly there. (ii) Lester: "There are no exposures of rock of any kind in the region, nor ... within a distance of several miles of the spot. It is thought that the discovered rock was transported from some other place" (Pearce n. 4, VERIFIED) — the vein quartz came from the Piedmont/Appalachians, i.e. it was carried to the coastal plain by somebody. (iii) The find-spot was never established: "rains had obliterated all trace"; Hammond produced "a crude map scrawled on a piece of paper bag", said the spot was "a quarter of a mile away", and after "wandering a mile and a half in the swamp the professors lost patience" (Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT); his written description places him on Route 17, which the Lost Colony Center admits "cannot be reconciled with the other reported evidence" (VERIFIED). (iv) Nothing 16th-century has been found at any candidate spot (2015 test pits: later English ceramics only). (v) The distances quoted vary from 50 to 80 miles depending on the author (§2.4). **(c) Timing — the 350th anniversary summer** - NCpedia (VERIFIED): "in January [1937], North Carolina playwright Paul Green had been commissioned to dramatize the story"; "the state, and town of Manteo were preparing for a visit from then President Franklin Roosevelt on August 18 to mark the anniversary. On the same day, the U.S. Postal Service also released a 5-cent Virginia Dare commemorative stamp." Wikipedia (Roanoke Colony article, VERIFIED as Wikipedia text): Roosevelt "attended the play on August 18, 1937". NCpedia (VERIFIED): "Green's play opened on July 4, and Roosevelt made his historic visit a little more than a month later. And in November that year, the Chowan River Stone appeared." - The stone "surfaced" within weeks of this publicity: "mid-September, 1937" (Pearce's MS via Sparkes) or "August 1937" (La Vere per Wikipedia); it reached Emory in early November. Lawler (VERIFIED as quoted by Mental Floss): "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." - Sparkes (VERIFIED-REPRINT): in the same first season "a stranger appeared and offered to sell a stone relic of Virginia Dare. He carried it in a suitcase"; and a Coastal Highway promoter had years earlier "proposed a scheme for creating a bogus stone relic of the Lost Colony to get newspaper headlines ... He said he could get men who could prepare the inscription, carve the rock, do the whole job." Fullam 2021 names this promoter "'Captain' Jack DeLysle" and treats him as a perpetrator (ToC VERIFIED; argument not read). Whether the suitcase stone and Hammond's stone are the same object is unproven; Pearce "never personally troubled to investigate" (Sparkes). - Fair caveat: an anniversary also motivates genuine searching — Hammond said he was out gathering hickory nuts, not hunting relics, and a stone lying in a swamp is as likely to be noticed in 1937 as in any other year. Timing is suggestive, not probative. **(d) The finder's story** Sparkes 1941 (VERIFIED-REPRINT) supplies all of it: Emory staff "suspicious ... from the beginning"; President Cox: "It's a fraud"; "None ever saw Hammond's car. None ever saw his wife"; an Emory treasurer "tried to shadow the man one night, but was eluded"; a fingerprint attempt failed; the Pinkertons "were unable to find anyone who had ever known him"; his only reference, Dove, "said he only knew Hammond to be married, about forty; that he had some kind of a pension"; Hammond proposed exhibiting the stone "at twenty-five cents a head"; he sold it for $1,000 to a P.O. box; he reappeared as "L. E. Martin" offering Turner $30,000 "to find a rock with 'Yahoo' on it", and told Pearce the later "rocks ain't so" while offering "to prove it by getting a stone bearing any word Pearce asked for". He had scrubbed the grooves with a steel brush and pencilled the letters. None of this proves he carved the stone; all of it is conduct one expects from a confidence man and not from a tourist with hickory nuts. Eighty-nine years on, no researcher has produced a documented life for "L. E. Hammond" (§2.6); Fullam 2021 claims to, and his Appendix A is the place to look. **(e) Physical evidence** - Against (or, more exactly, absent): the grooves were contaminated at the outset (steel brush, indelible pencil), then repeatedly floured, chalked, "scoured, cleaned and pressure washed" (Loubser 2011, VERIFIED); Stephenson 1983 "could devise no ... examination that would reveal anything useful" (UNVERIFIED wording); the "couldn't be duplicated" claim was false — Marietta workmen "said they could reproduce it with hand tools", Lester "himself had carved an inscription on quartz, using the sandblasting method", and Pearce conceded "Well, that part's not accurate" (Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT). Sparkes's New York stonecutter on ageing: "it would be easy enough to 'age' the surface — tumble it in a barrel. Acids. Wrap the stone with wet sacking sprinkled with iron filings. Any number of ways." Note that the one mineralogical observation in Pearce's paper is a "limonite ... stain around and between many of the anhedra" — the iron-oxide staining that the wet-sacking-and-filings method would produce, and that also forms naturally; nobody has tested which. No laboratory report on the 2016 slice has been published; the interior/exterior colour comparison is qualitative and was made by the stone's owner for television (§4.2). - For: Lester's 1937–38 observations on groove profile (rounded, uniformly sloping walls, gaping, feathered ends — i.e. no fresh conchoidal fracture); botanists' "leaf mold ... 'a long time'" and the Smithsonian's "no evidence of fraud" (both as summarised by Sparkes from Pearce's MS — the reports themselves are not published); the 1940 chemical weathering test "favorable" (reported for the collection as a whole); Wolter 2013 (weathering in grooves, no controls); History 2015 ("no evidence of drilling", "iron chisel"); the 2016 slice: interior "bright white", exterior and carvings "much darker", with Champion's judgement that "it takes a great deal of time for that whiteness to fade" and that chemical masking "particularly in the 1930s — would have been difficult" (NatGeo, VERIFIED). This last is the strongest single pro-authenticity datum, and it is also the one most exposed to the contamination history (iron-stained water, pencil graphite and decades of handling all darken quartz surfaces) and to the absence of any measurement. **(f) The later fakes** - Sparkes's inference (VERIFIED-REPRINT): "if the first was a fraud, all were fraudulent" — and, conversely, the exposure of the 47 poisons the first. The Brenau committee's 1940 statement was about "the stones" collectively; the collective judgement collapsed in 1941 and took the first stone's reputation with it. - The independence argument (Southerland 1977; Brenau's page "regarded by most authorities as the only Dare Stone"; La Vere; Schrader; Lawler): different rock (vein quartz vs. soft soapstone/schist "you could scratch ... with your fingernail"), different geography (Chowan vs. Georgia/South Carolina), better cutting ("carved more carefully and with an iron chisel"), no anachronistic vocabulary (primeval, reconnoitre, trale are all on Eberhardt/Turner stones), and no proven link between Hammond and Eberhardt's circle. - What does connect them: the first stone wrote the script for the rest ("seven of twenty-four" → seventeen names; "names writ al ther on rocke" → the roster stone; "salvage shew this unto yov ... greate plentie presents" → the reward expectation), the Pearces paid for stones from 1938 on, and Hammond himself came back to Georgia as "L. E. Martin" to interact with the Georgia finders. The extortion stone of 1941 ("Pearce and Dare Historical Hoaxes. We Dare Anything.") shows that by then the Pearces were a known mark; the first stone is what made them one. ### 5.2 Arguments for authenticity, stated fairly - *Pearce 1938 (VERIFIED):* the message "checks" in seven particulars with White, Lane, Strachey and Smith (§5.1(b) and the JSH text); "the prevailing opinion is that the stone could have been chiseled with tools ... possessed by the Roanoke colonists"; the language presents no "serious difficulty", period precedents existing "for all cases except five"; Lester's groove description; the Elizabethan long s and the brevigraphs (wth, yt) are period manuscript habits. - *Morison 1940 (letters quoted by Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT):* "I personally went to Gainesville to investigate the Eleanor Dare stones and believe them to be genuine, as did the other professors present. A geologist pronounced the inscriptions to be over 40 years old (they can't tell whether they are 41 or 401)"; and the committee's "the preponderance of evidence points to the authenticity of the stones" (see §3.2 for the qualifications). - *Botany and the Smithsonian (Pearce MS via Sparkes):* leaf mould in the grooves "a long time"; "no evidence of fraud". - *Southerland 1977/1987 (Brenau Window 2007, VERIFIED):* "all but that first stone probably are fakes", later "50-50". - *Robert W. White 1991 (VERIFIED-REPRINT of ch. 3):* the Post's exposé was commercially motivated ("acting on behalf of the Roanoke tourist attraction"); Tannenbaum's Roman-letter point is answered by White's own "faire Romane letters". - *La Vere 2009/2010 (Powell, VERIFIED):* "a closer look shows it might well be what it purports to be ... It tells a credible story that coincides with the sources"; an Elizabethan scholar "came away amazed how it all fit Elizabethan English"; a small-time produce dealer is an implausible sole author of the text. - *Wolter 2013; History 2015 (Colavito, VERIFIED as reported):* weathering inside the grooves; no drilling; iron chisel. - *Schrader 2016–18 (WSJ, NatGeo, WaPo, VERIFIED):* the slice — bright white interior against dark exterior and carvings, "a good choice for a Roanoke colonist but a poor one for a modern forger"; not ship's ballast; a possible southern-Virginia source; Champion's concurrence on colour and on the difficulty of chemical masking in the 1930s. - *Epigraphers 2018 (NatGeo, VERIFIED):* Wolfe: "There is nothing that jumps out as a forgery"; Wilson: "There's nothing in the inscription that couldn't be of its purported date"; Champion: consistent with the church inscriptions he studies. Quarmby 2015: the superscript-e "ye" distinction is one "only a 'magnificent' hoaxer would know" (Colavito's reply: reprints of the 1890s–1920s routinely reproduce it). - *Structural:* the first stone is the only one with a credible geology, a coastal-plain find-site consistent with the sources, and no anachronistic word; the fakes of 1939–41 were made to *follow* it, which is what one would expect whether it was genuine or merely earlier. ### 5.3 What the two sides are really disagreeing about The pro side rests on (i) consistency with the sources, (ii) the absence of a demonstrated anachronism on this stone, and (iii) one qualitative colour observation. The con side rests on (i) the impossibility of the finder, (ii) the timing and the documented intent to fake exactly such a relic that summer, (iii) the register of the language and a handful of un-Elizabethan forms (yov, mine childe, Via, EWD), and (iv) the fact that nothing on the stone leaves the printed record. Neither side has a controlled physical test. That asymmetry matters: the pro side's evidence is of a kind a competent hoaxer would produce deliberately (consistency with Hakluyt and Strachey is the hoaxer's brief, not a by-product), whereas the con side's evidence is of a kind a genuine artefact would not produce accidentally (a genuine stone does not need an untraceable finder or a promoter proposing to fake one). --- ## 6. Word-by-word attestation check, c. 1584–1631 **Method.** Regex search over OCR text of four period sources: `Hak8` = Hakluyt, *Principal Navigations* vol. 8 (MacLehose ed., 1904; contains White's 1587 and 1590 narratives and Lane's; the editor modernises u/v), `Str` = Strachey, *Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia* (Major/Hakluyt Society ed., 1849; u/v modernised, OCR poor), `SmA` = *Capt. John Smith, Works 1608–1631* (Arber ed., 1884; original u/v preserved; includes the 1612 *Proceedings*, the 1624 *Generall Historie* and Arber's apparatus), `TR08` = *A True Relation* (1608) facsimile OCR (very poor; counted only where it helps). About 3.7 MB of text in all. Absence in these corpora is weak evidence (EEBO-TCP was not accessible to me); presence is strong evidence. Counts are whole-word, case-insensitive. Verdict key: **C** common period form; **A** attested (few hits or a near variant); **U** unattested here; **S** unattested *and* contrary to a period convention or of the modern-imitation type; **N** neutral (a manuscript habit that would not appear in print). | Stone form (Pearce) | Sense | Hak8 | Str | SmA | Verdict and note | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | salvage(s) | savage(s) | 5 — incl. White 1590 "the print of the Salvages feet" | 9 | 372 (Salvage/Saluage/Salvages) | **C.** White's own word in 1590; standard in Strachey and Smith. La Vere's "used ... during only a few years" is wrong. | | bleeve | believe | 0 (beleeve 18) | 0 (beleeve 1) | 0 (beleeue/beleeve 45) | **U.** Pearce: elision of the first e "to conform to the sound". No written precedent found. | | misarie (×2) | misery | 0 (miserie 3) | 0 | 0 (miserie 14, misery 32) | **U.** | | warre | war | 30 | 3 | 86 | **C.** | | sickenes | sickness | 0, but "sickenesse" 1 ("the sickenesse was to us unknowen"); sicknesse 10 | 0 | 0 (sicknes/sicknesse 43) | **A.** The -ene- spelling exists in Hakluyt; the stone drops the final -se. | | beine | being | 0 (being 518) | 0 (being 125) | 0 (being/beinge 791) | **U.** "beinge" is the period form; Pearce suspects a misread final g. | | message (Pearce) / mesage (Sparkes) | message | 4 / 0 | 0 | 16 / 0 | **C** for "message"; "mesage" **U**. | | awaye | away | 0 | 5 | 1 | **A.** | | faine | feign | 4 (all "fain" = gladly) | 1 | 5 — incl. *Generall Historie* 1624, Lib. 4: "they will faine a place where are many strangers" (= feign) | **A.** "faine" for *feign* is attested in Smith; "salvages faine spirts angrie" (priests pretending the spirits were angry) is a period-plausible sense and mirrors Strachey's priests. | | spirts | spirits | 0 (spirits 1) | 0 | 0 (spirits 50, spirites 1) | **U.** Pearce: "Clearly an i is omitted." | | suddiane (stone) / suddaine (popular texts) | sudden | 0 (sodainly 3) | 0 | suddaine 7 ("on the suddaine"); suddainly etc. 12 | "suddaine" **C**; "suddiane" **U** — a metathesis that the later stones copy ("svddiane sickenes", Sparkes). | | murther | murder | 2 (murthered) | 1 (murthering) | 18 | **C.** | | seaven | seven | 0 | 1 | 13 | **C.** | | myles | miles | 0 | 2 | 82 | **C.** | | alsoe | also | 0 | 0 | 2 | **A** (rare). | | plentie | plenty | 29 | 1 | 55 | **C.** | | shew | show | 43 | 8 | 58 | **C.** | | Govr | Governor | 0 (Governour 42) | 0 (Governour 5) | 0 (Gouernour 120) | **N.** A manuscript abbreviation (Gov^r/Gou^r with raised r) is ordinary in 17th-century documents; cut inline in stone it is odd but not anachronistic. Printed corpora cannot test it. | | hence | hence | 6 | 3 | 24 — incl. "Sir George Simmers went hence to heauen" (1624 verse) | **C.** "went hence unto heaven" is an epitaph formula. | | anye | any | 0 | 0 | 0 (anie 12, any common) | **U.** "anie/any" are the period forms; "anye" is of the added-e type. | | Englande | England | 0 | 0 | 1 (a Stationers' Register entry in Arber's apparatus) | **A** (rare in print; found in manuscripts). | | hither | hither | 7 | 3 | 11 | **C.** | | yov (×4) | you | 0 (you 258) | 0 (you 34) | 0 (you 955; yow 1) | **S.** Final v contradicts the convention v-initial/u-medial-final that period writers followed regardless of sound (SmA: vs 1,117, vnto 115, vp 255, vpon 528 — but haue 1,478, loue 81, giue 156, you 955, yov 0). In carved capitals V for U is normal (the face has VNTO, GOVR, VIA); Pearce prints the back-face "yov" in small letters, and the back is cut in small mixed forms. Consistent four times. | | tow (×2) | two | 1 (verb "to tow") | 1 (noun) | 7 ("a mile or tow") | **A.** | | cam | came | 0 | 2 | 9 | **A.** | | deade | dead | 0 | 0 | 5 | **A.** | | nott | not | 0 | 0 | 1 (Smith's will: "nott yett given") | **A** (rare). | | writ | written | 0 | 0 | 64 | **C.** | | al | all | 39 | 9 | 57 | **C.** | | ther | there | 3 | 5 | 114 | **C.** | | smal / hil | small / hill | 19 / 1 | 0 | 21 / 0 | **C** / **A**. | | yeere | year | 94 | 0 | 94 | **C.** | | neere | near | 129 | 19 | 196 | **C.** | | onlie | only | 0 | 0 | 10 | **A.** | | greate | great | 0 | 0 | 17 | **A** ("great" far commoner). | | childe | child | 0 | 0 | 26 | **C** (Smith). | | mine childe | my child | determiner "mine" + consonant 0 (mine + vowel/h 20; my + consonant 223) | 0 (2; 15) | 0 (16; 862) | **S.** In all corpora "mine" precedes only vowels and h; every apparent counter-example is the noun *mine* or the absolute pronoun. "Mine childe" is stage-archaic. | | rann | ran | 0 | 0 | 3 | **A.** | | putt | put | 0 | 5 | 1 | **A.** | | affrite | affright(ed) | 0 | 0 (affright 1) | 0 (affright 29, affrighted 11) | **U.** Pearce: "no precedent". | | vppon | upon | (ed. modernised) | 29 | 19 | **C.** | | bvrie | bury | 2 (burie) | 0 | 2 | **C.** | | mvch / fovre / twentie / halfe | much / four / twenty / half | (foure common) / 44 / 102 | — | — / 91 / 233 | **C.** | | slaine | slain | 25 | 0 | 114 | **C.** | | "to slaine" | (was) slain | 0 | 0 | 0 ("was slaine" 6 / 11) | **U** as a construction. | | angrie | angry | 0 | 0 | 2 ("God (being angrie with vs)") | **A.** | | "goe for Englande" | go to England | "Christopher Cooper only agreed to goe for England" (White 1587) | goe 25 | goe 228 | **C.** The phrase is White's own. | | shipp | ship | 0 | 19 | 8 | **C.** | | vnto / unto | unto | 563 | 157 | 155 | **C.** | | yt | it | 0 | 356 — Strachey's own habit ("guide yt") | 4 | **C** in manuscript; "wee bleeve yt nott yov" reads exactly like Strachey's *Historie* (1849 ed.). | | wth | with | 0 | 0 | 1 | **A/N** — standard brevigraph w^th. | | Iohn | John | 0 | 0 | 363 | **C** (I for J). | | easte | east | 0 (east 95) | 0 (23) | 0 (73) | **U** (added-e type). | | Via | Virginia (abbr.) | 0 | 1 (Latin "via ad regnum") | 1 (Mora-via) | **S.** No period instance as an abbreviation of Virginia (Champion 2018); "via" as an English preposition is later (from memory, late 18th c. — UNVERIFIED). | | EWD | signature initials | — | — | — | **S.** Pearce 1938, Wolfe 2018, MacCulloch 2018: three initials not a period signing habit. | | 1591 (Arabic) / Latin cross | — | "An. 1587" | — | "Anno Dom." 5 | **C.** Not anachronistic. | | ere / save / soone after / space of time / revenge / presents / promise | — | 1 / 24 / 5 / 1 / 5 / 34 / 27 | — | 165 / 35 / 2 / 0 / 58 / 67 / 59 | **C.** | **Summary of the 23 words in question:** common — salvage, warre, murther, seaven, myles, plentie, shew, hence, hither, message (Pearce's reading), suddaine (the popular reading; the stone has *suddiane*); attested but rarer — sickenes (via *sickenesse*), awaye, faine, alsoe, Englande; unattested — bleeve, misarie, beine, mesage, spirts, anye; neutral — Govr; contrary to convention — yov. Outside that list, "mine childe", "Via", "EWD", "affrite", "easte" and "to slaine" are the forms that most look like modern imitation, while "salvage", "goe for England", "yt", "went hence ... heaven", "faine" (= feign) and "seaven/myles/plentie/shew" are exactly what a reader of Hakluyt, Strachey and Smith would reproduce. **Linguistic verdict.** The vocabulary is period-plausible and in several places source-exact, which is consistent either with a genuine text or with an author who had read Hakluyt, Strachey and Smith with care — and those were the very books Pearce used to "check" it. The unattested forms cluster in the add-an-e / drop-a-letter type. Two usages — "yov" and "mine childe" — run against habits a 1590s writer followed without thinking and a 1930s imitator would not know; "Via" and "EWD" have no period parallel. Nothing here is a *proven* anachronism of the "primeval/reconnoitre" kind that sank the later stones; the linguistic case against the first stone is a matter of register and convention, and it is a case, not a proof. The proper test (an EEBO-TCP search for yov, "mine" + consonant, anye, misarie, affrite, spirts, beine, suddiane, Via) has never been published and should be run. --- ## 7. Timeline, claims register, and assessment ### 7.1 Timeline | Date | Event | Source / mark | |---|---|---| | 1587, Aug | White leaves the colony "prepared to remove from Roanoak 50 miles into the maine"; secret token: a cross for distress | Hakluyt (White 1590), VERIFIED | | 1590, Aug | White finds "CRO" and "CROATOAN" in "faire Romane letters"/"fayre Capitall letters", no cross; "the print of the Salvages feet" | Hakluyt, VERIFIED | | 1608–c.1612 | Smith and Strachey report Roanoke survivors; Strachey: massacre by Powhatan's priests, seven escaped up the Chowan | Pearce 1938 quoting; Strachey corpus, VERIFIED | | 1609 | Virginia Council instructs Gates to seek four survivors "where the River Choanowki falleth into the sea of Rawnocke" | Kingsbury 1933 as quoted by Pearce, VERIFIED | | 1849 / 1884 / 1891 / 1906 | Major's Strachey; Arber's Smith; Weeks, "The Lost Colony of Roanoke"; Burrage's Hakluyt selections — all the "checking" texts in print | Pearce's own citations, VERIFIED | | c. 1931 | A Coastal Highway promoter proposes to Bradford Fearing "a scheme for creating a bogus stone relic of the Lost Colony" | Sparkes ("about ten years ago"), VERIFIED-REPRINT; identification as "Captain" Jack DeLysle: Fullam 2021 ToC, VERIFIED; DeLysle on the 1931 theatre-site committee: UNVERIFIED | | 1931 | Eberhardt later claims he first saw the South Carolina soapstones this year | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT (his claim) | | 1937, Jan | Paul Green commissioned to write *The Lost Colony* | NCpedia, VERIFIED | | 1937, 4 Jul | Play opens at Manteo; the promoter is in the audience filming; "about that time" a stranger offers a Virginia Dare stone from a suitcase | NCpedia, VERIFIED; Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 1937, 18 Aug | Roosevelt at Manteo for the 350th birthday of Virginia Dare; 5-cent commemorative stamp | NCpedia, VERIFIED; Wikipedia, VERIFIED as text | | 1937, mid-Sept (or Aug) | Hammond finds the stone "about three miles from Edenton", washes it, scrubs it, pencils it | Sparkes/Pearce MS, VERIFIED-REPRINT; "August": La Vere via Wikipedia, UNVERIFIED | | 1937, by 9 Nov | Stone at Emory; "under study ... since November 9, 1937"; site visit "two days later", rain-obliterated | Pearce n. 3, VERIFIED; Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 1937–38 winter | Emory suspicious; Cox: "It's a fraud"; Pinkertons find no one who knew Hammond; Hammond proposes 25-cent exhibition; Emory tells him to take the stone; Pearce carries it to Brenau; Brenau pays $1,000 to P.O. Box 212, Alameda | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT (month of purchase not stated) | | 1938, 31 Jan | Translation published | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 1938, 5 Feb | Pearce and Capt. Wiggins search the swamp; 200-lb moss-covered stone, uninscribed | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 1938, May | Pearce, "New Light on the Roanoke Colony", *JSH* 4:2 | VERIFIED (OCR) | | 1938, Jun & Aug; 1939, Mar | Excavations near Edenton; nothing; $500 reward | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 1939, spring–summer | Eberhardt's first stones (Georgia/South Carolina); the seventeen-name roster stone | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT (see §3.1) | | 1939, 26 Jul | Lester's report: Stone 25 "doctored" | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 1939, late Aug | Turner's stone (found "in March") | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 1940, Aug–Sep | 22 stones by four people along the Chattahoochee; Jett | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 1940, 17 Sep | Eberhardt paid $1,400 of Brenau funds | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 1940, 19–20 Oct | Brenau conference (34 scholars, Morison); report 21 Oct: "preponderance of evidence points to the authenticity of the stones" | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT; NCpedia, VERIFIED | | 1940, 25 Oct | Pearce writes to Cecil B. De Mille | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 1940, 13 Dec | Pearce's manuscript to the *Post* | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 1941, Jan | Latest (48th) stone | Sparkes, VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 1941, 26 Apr | Sparkes, "Writ on Rocke", *Saturday Evening Post* | VERIFIED-REPRINT (date VERIFIED via NCpedia/Wikipedia) | | 1941, 18 Apr–15 May | Dye/acid bottle; "Pearce and Dare Historical Hoaxes. We Dare Anything."; Pearce goes to the press | Miles, NCpedia, Mental Floss, VERIFIED as reported | | 1977 or 1979 | *In Search Of...* films the stones under the amphitheatre; Southerland: all but the first probably fakes | Brenau Window 2007 / NCpedia / WaPo, VERIFIED (date conflict) | | 1983, 15 Apr | Stephenson report, inconclusive | Wikipedia via La Vere/Lawler, UNVERIFIED | | 1991 | R. W. White, *A Witness for Eleanor Dare* | VERIFIED-REPRINT (ch. 3) | | 2007 | Brenau Window, "Pet Rocks" | VERIFIED | | 2009, Jul | La Vere, *NCHR* 86:3 | Powell 2009 summary, VERIFIED; article not read | | 2010 / 2012 | La Vere, *The Lost Rocks* (2nd ed.) | existence VERIFIED via Powell/LCC; text not read | | 2011 | Loubser examines the stones; finds uncleaned incisions | Brenau Window 2011, VERIFIED | | 2013, Jan | *America Unearthed* (Wolter) | Colavito 2013, VERIFIED as reported | | 2015 | Rocky Hock Creek test pits — nothing 16th-century; History, *Roanoke: Search for the Lost Colony* (26 Oct) | LCC, Daily Advance, Colavito 2015, VERIFIED | | 2016, 21 Jan | WSJ: Schrader's re-examination plans | Powell 2016 excerpt, VERIFIED | | 2016 | Slice cut at UNC Asheville: white interior, dark exterior/carvings | NatGeo 2018, VERIFIED as claimed; no report published | | 2017, 26 Mar | History, *Return to Roanoke: Search for the Seven* | Brenau captions, VERIFIED | | 2018, May–Jun | Lawler, NatGeo article and *The Secret Token* | NatGeo VERIFIED; book pages UNVERIFIED | | 2018, Jul | Washington Post (Brockell) | VERIFIED | | 2019, 3 Jul | Brenau "Policy regarding the Dare Stones" | UNVERIFIED wording | | 2019–2020 | Darby, *Thunder Go North*; "Double Deception" | abstracts VERIFIED | | 2021, Nov | Fullam, *A Lost Colony Hoax* | ToC/blurb VERIFIED | | 2023 | Mental Floss; IFLScience | VERIFIED | | 2025, 13 Nov | La Vere lecture, Kinston | VERIFIED | | 2026, Sep | No new physical test, report or excavation found | my search, VERIFIED as absence | ### 7.2 Claims register (first stone unless stated) | # | Claim | Source | Mark | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Weight 21 lb 4 oz; 13⅝ × 9⅝ × 2¼ in; sp. gr. 2.63; hardness 7+ | Pearce 1938 p. 148 | VERIFIED (OCR; fractions reconstructed) | | 2 | Vein quartz, limonite-stained; no rock exposures within several miles of the find-spot; stone transported | Pearce nn. 2, 4 (Lester) | VERIFIED | | 3 | Grooves rounded, uniformly sloping, gaping, feathered ends | Pearce n. 2 (Lester) | VERIFIED | | 4 | Text of both faces as in §1.1 | Pearce 1938 pp. 149–150 | VERIFIED | | 5 | Pearce found no precedent for misarie, beine, affrite, bleeve, spirts, or for three initials | Pearce 1938 pp. 162–163 | VERIFIED | | 6 | "Prevailing opinion" that it could be chiselled with colonists' tools; sandblasting/drills/acids "none ... successful" | Pearce 1938 p. 163 | VERIFIED | | 7 | Marietta workmen could reproduce it; Lester sandblasted quartz; Pearce: "that part's not accurate" | Sparkes 1941 | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 8 | Found mid-Sept 1937 by L. E. Hammond, Alameda produce dealer, ~3 miles from Edenton, east bank of the Chowan | Sparkes (Pearce MS) | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 9 | Found August 1937 | Wikipedia citing La Vere 2010 | UNVERIFIED | | 10 | "About 60 miles west of Roanoke Island" | brief; La Vere "65"; Brenau "80"; NatGeo "50" | VERIFIED that sources disagree | | 11 | At Emory from 9 Nov 1937 | Pearce n. 3 | VERIFIED | | 12 | Cox: "It's a fraud"; Emory suspicious | Sparkes | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 13 | Pinkertons found no one who knew Hammond; no car or wife seen; fingerprint attempt failed | Sparkes | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 14 | Hammond scrubbed grooves with steel brush and pencilled them | Sparkes | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 15 | Hammond proposed 25-cent exhibition; Emory withdrew; Brenau paid $1,000 to P.O. Box 212 Alameda; Dove reference | Sparkes | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 16 | Hammond returned as "L. E. Martin" offering $30,000 for a "Yahoo" stone | Sparkes (Turner's testimony) | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 17 | Hammond's written site description (3–4 miles north of Edenton, small bridge, sunken barge, Rt. 17) | LCC paper citing White 1991 p. 261 | VERIFIED as quoted; original UNVERIFIED | | 18 | Hammond "traced" by later researchers (genealogies) | blog comments 2009/2016 | UNVERIFIED, mutually incompatible | | 19 | Hammond = George P. Hammond, with Bolton and Pearce | Darby 2019/2020 abstract | VERIFIED as her claim; UNVERIFIED as fact | | 20 | Fullam 2021 has "conclusive evidence" and names DeLysle, Hammond, Dove | publisher ToC/blurb | VERIFIED as claim; evidence not read | | 21 | Translation published 31 Jan 1938; Wiggins search 5 Feb 1938; digs 1938–39; $500 reward | Sparkes | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 22 | Stranger with suitcase stone at Manteo, summer 1937; promoter's bogus-relic scheme c. 1931 | Sparkes (Buttitta, Fearing) | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 23 | Green commissioned Jan 1937; play opened 4 Jul 1937; FDR visit and stamp 18 Aug 1937 | NCpedia | VERIFIED | | 24 | Botanists: leaf mould in grooves "a long time"; Smithsonian: "no evidence of fraud" | Pearce MS via Sparkes | VERIFIED-REPRINT as summary; reports not seen | | 25 | Brenau conference 19–20 Oct 1940; "preponderance of evidence points to the authenticity of the stones" | Sparkes; NCpedia | VERIFIED-REPRINT / VERIFIED | | 26 | Morison: "believe them to be genuine"; "41 or 401"; "chief obstacles ... trale, primeval, reconnoitre" | Sparkes quoting letters | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 27 | Morison later (1971) called them fakes | secondary memory | UNVERIFIED | | 28 | Tannenbaum: no Gothic letter; spelling too consistent (712 words, all stones) | Sparkes | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 29 | primeval/reconnoitre/trale anachronisms — on later stones only | Sparkes; Tilley | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 30 | Eberhardt: three years' schooling; moonshine; sold "Indian relics" thought recently chiselled | Sparkes | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 31 | Lester 26 Jul 1939: Stone 25 "doctored" | Sparkes | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 32 | Turner's Stone 15 acrostic "Emory", "Atlanta, Ge", "Pearce", "FAKE" | Sparkes | VERIFIED-REPRINT (a later stone, not the first) | | 33 | Extortion stone: "Pearce and Dare Historical Hoaxes. We Dare Anything." (wording varies) | NCpedia; Mental Floss; Miles | VERIFIED (variants) | | 34 | A "Pearce is a sucker" stone | — | UNVERIFIED — no source; not found | | 35 | Bottle of purple vegetable dye / sulfuric acid at the Chattahoochee carving | Miles vs Wikipedia-La Vere | VERIFIED conflict; UNVERIFIED which | | 36 | Pearce never renounced the first stone; thought five non-Eberhardt stones might be genuine | Miles; Mental Floss (UP 1941) | VERIFIED as reported | | 37 | Stones stored under the amphitheatre; *In Search Of* 1977/1979 | Brenau Window 2007; NCpedia; WaPo | VERIFIED (date conflict) | | 38 | Southerland: all but the first probably fakes; later "50-50" | Brenau Window 2007 | VERIFIED | | 39 | Stephenson 1983 report inconclusive | Wikipedia via La Vere/Lawler | UNVERIFIED | | 40 | White 1991 argues all 48 genuine; Post acted for the Roanoke attraction | ch. 3 reprint | VERIFIED-REPRINT | | 41 | La Vere 2009: "might well be what it purports to be" | Powell 2009 | VERIFIED as summarised | | 42 | "salvage ... used in English ... during only a few years" | La Vere via Powell 2010 | VERIFIED as quoted; claim WRONG (§6) | | 43 | Loubser 2011: some incisions escaped cleaning | Brenau Window 2011 | VERIFIED | | 44 | Wolter 2013: weathering in grooves supports authenticity | Colavito 2013 | VERIFIED as reported; no controls | | 45 | 2015: no drilling on first stone; iron chisel; Quarmby's "ye" | Colavito 2015; Quarmby site | VERIFIED as reported | | 46 | Rocky Hock Creek 2015: nothing 16th-century | LCC; Daily Advance | VERIFIED | | 47 | 2016 slice: bright white interior vs dark exterior and carvings | NatGeo 2018 | VERIFIED as claimed; no report | | 48 | Not ship's ballast; southern-Virginia source | Wikipedia (Lawler pp. 254–258); NCpedia | UNVERIFIED | | 49 | Trace elements (gold, selenium, copper) detected | search-engine aggregator | UNVERIFIED; not adopted | | 50 | A 2017 Brenau symposium on the stone | brief | UNVERIFIED; none found (the 2017 event is a TV programme) | | 51 | Wolfe, Wilson, Champion, MacCulloch, Doehne opinions | NatGeo 2018 | VERIFIED | | 52 | Champion found no period "VIA"; Lawler on white letters | Mental Floss quoting the book | VERIFIED as quoted | | 53 | Autumn-2018 Brenau language panel | WaPo 2018 | VERIFIED as planned; outcome none found | | 54 | Brenau policy 3 Jul 2019 | Wikipedia | UNVERIFIED wording | | 55 | La Vere lecture 13 Nov 2025 | Kinston calendar | VERIFIED | | 56 | Emory "Dare stones collection, 1937–1987" exists | ArchivesSpace title | VERIFIED existence; contents UNVERIFIED | | 57 | JSTOR stable ID 2191862 (brief) vs 2192000 (NCpedia/Wikipedia) | — | UNVERIFIED which | ### 7.3 Assessment of the first stone **Probability that the first (Chowan River) stone is a 20th-century fabrication: about 80 % (my range 75–85 %).** I would not go higher because no physical or linguistic anachronism has ever been demonstrated on this stone, the language is in places source-exact rather than merely plausible, and one physical observation (the 2016 colour contrast) points, weakly, the other way. I would not go lower for the reasons below. *What carries the most weight, in order:* 1. **The finder.** A man with no traceable past, no visible car or wife, a post-office box, a jeweller for a reference, who scrubbed and pencilled the inscription before showing it, who proposed to exhibit it for money, who sold it for $1,000, and who came back under a false name offering $30,000 for a stone with "Yahoo" on it. A genuine artefact can have a bad finder, but this finder behaved throughout like the author of a swindle, and no one in 89 years has produced a document that makes him a real Alameda produce dealer. 2. **The season and the plan.** The stone appeared within weeks of the 350th-anniversary play, the presidential visit and the stamp; in that same season a stranger was hawking "a stone relic of Virginia Dare" from a suitcase at Manteo; and a promoter with a documented scheme "for creating a bogus stone relic of the Lost Colony" was in the audience on opening night. A relic that a known person had proposed to fake, appearing at the moment it would be most valuable, is exactly what that plan predicts. 3. **The text stays inside the printed record.** Everything checkable on the stone is in Hakluyt, Strachey, Smith and the Gates instructions — Pearce's "seven checks" are checks against those books — and nothing checkable lies outside them. Add the register (uniform add-an-e spelling), "yov", "mine childe", "Via" and "EWD", and the message reads like a careful reader of the sources writing the letter Eleanor Dare *ought* to have written. 4. **The physical evidence is unusable rather than favourable.** The grooves were contaminated on day one and repeatedly since; the "couldn't be duplicated" claim was false; no report exists for the 2016 test; every pro-authenticity physical statement (leaf mould, "no evidence of fraud", "41 or 401", dark grooves) is qualitative and uncontrolled. The best that can be said physically is that nothing has been shown to be *wrong*. 5. **On the other side**, the strongest points are the absence of any demonstrated anachronism (a real distinction from the 47 fakes) and the colour contrast of the 2016 slice with Champion's judgement that chemical masking would have been hard in the 1930s. These are real, but the first is what a competent hoaxer produces on purpose and the second has never been measured on a surface that was not scrubbed with a steel brush, pencilled, floured and pressure-washed. *What would settle it:* - **Tool-mark and residue analysis of the uncleaned incisions** that Loubser identified in 2011: SEM imaging of groove-floor morphology (chisel percussion vs. abrasive/sandblast texture), and SEM-EDS or LA-ICP-MS for metal traces (a modern alloy signature — Cr, Ni, Mn, V — or carborundum/abrasive residue would end the question; plain iron proves little either way). - **A quantified weathering comparison**: rind thickness or surface chemistry measured on (a) an uncleaned groove floor, (b) the natural exterior, (c) the 2016 saw cut, with control fragments of vein quartz from the Chowan floodplain and from the Piedmont, so that "dark" becomes a number with an age range. This is the only test that could positively *support* authenticity. - **An EEBO-TCP corpus test** of yov, "mine" + consonant, anye, misarie, affrite, spirts, beine, suddiane, Via, and of a woman's three-initial signature, published with its method. - **Archival**: the Emory "Dare stones collection, 1937–1987" (Hammond's correspondence, the Pinkerton and credit-agency reports), Fullam's Appendix A, and California records for L. E. Hammond and Herbert M. Dove. Finding Hammond would do more than any of the above; finding that he did not exist would do almost as much. - Geochemical provenance (Darby's proposal) would tell us where the quartz came from, which matters less than it seems: a colonist and a hoaxer would both have had to carry it to the coastal plain. If forced to choose one test, the tool-mark/residue analysis of the uncleaned incisions is the one most likely to return a decisive answer, because a positive result (modern alloy or abrasive) is unanswerable, whereas every other test yields a probability. --- ## 8. References ### 8.1 Sources read and saved (header line of each saved file; all fetched 2026-09-14) - `sources/pearce1938_jsh.txt` — SOURCE: Haywood J. Pearce, Jr., 'New Light on the Roanoke Colony: A Preliminary Examination of a Stone Found in Chowan County, North Carolina', Journal of Southern History 4:2 (May 1938), pp. 148-163. JSTOR 2191862. OCR text from the Internet Archive scan of the whole issue: https://archive.org/details/journal-of-southern-history-04.2-1938 (file 'South - Serial - Journal of Southern History 04.2, 1938_djvu.txt'). Fetched 2026-09-14. CAVEAT: uncorrected OCR; fractions in the measurements are garbled (read '135% inches' as 13 5/8 in., '95g inches' as 9 5/8 in., '24 inches' as 2 1/4 in. -- to be verified against the scan). - `sources/sparkes1941_sep_writ_on_rocke_reprint.txt` — SOURCE: Boyden Sparkes, 'Writ on Rocke: Has America's First Murder Mystery Been Solved?', The Saturday Evening Post, 26 April 1941, pp. 9-11, 118, 120-122. - `sources/ncpedia_dare_stones.txt` — SOURCE: NCpedia, 'The Dare Stones' (Agan & Childs 2013, rev. 2019), https://www.ncpedia.org/dare-stones (fetched 2026-09-14 via curl; text extracted from HTML) - `sources/brenau_window_2007_pet_rocks.txt` — SOURCE: David Morrison, 'Brenau's Pet Rocks', Brenau Window (Summer 2007), online at https://window.brenau.edu/articles/dare-stones/ ; Wayback capture 2023-12-09: https://web.archive.org/web/20231209055540id_/https://window.brenau.edu/articles/dare-stones/ . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/brenau_window_2011_dare_we.txt` — SOURCE: 'Dare we? New methods could untangle Brenau's rocks riddle', Brenau Window, Spring 2011, pp. 14-15. PDF via Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20220724192743id_/https://window.brenau.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2011-spring.pdf (text extracted with PyMuPDF; ligatures 'fi'/'fl' dropped by the PDF, e.g. 'inds' = finds, 'limlams' = flimflams). Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/brenau_update_2013_america_unearthed.txt` — SOURCE: David Morrison, ''Dare Stones' Authenticity Theories Rock On', Brenau Update, 6 Feb 2013. Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20160801121042id_/http://update.brenau.edu/2013/02/06/dare-stones-authenticity-theories-rock-on/ . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/brenau_darestones_page_2019.txt` — SOURCE: Brenau University, 'The Dare Stones' (official page; Wikipedia cites it as dated 21 Oct 2015; https://www.brenau.edu/darestones/ now redirects to https://www.brenau.edu/about/history-traditions/). Wayback capture 2019-11-20: https://web.archive.org/web/20191120131812id_/https://www.brenau.edu/darestones/ . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/powell2009_ncm_lavere_and_hammond_comments.txt` — SOURCE: Lew Powell, 'Dare Stone revisited: Not a hoax after all?', North Carolina Miscellany blog, 19 Aug 2009 (condensing David La Vere, NCHR July 2009), WITH READER COMMENTS (unverified genealogical claims by a commenter signing as Bob Foster about a 'Lewis Albert Hammond'). Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20200815114420id_/https://blogs.lib.unc.edu/ncm/2009/08/19/dare-stone-revisited-not-a-hoax-after-all/ . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/powell2010_ncmiscellany_lavere.txt` — SOURCE: Lew Powell, 'Dare Stone: Does debunking need debunking?', North Carolina Miscellany blog (UNC North Carolina Collection), 20 April 2010. Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20140119102331id_/http://blogs.lib.unc.edu/ncm/index.php/2010/04/20/dare-stone-does-debunking-need-debunking/ . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/powell2016_ncm_wsj_quote.txt` — SOURCE: Lew Powell, 'Brenau threatens end to speculation about Dare Stones', North Carolina Miscellany blog, 23 Jan 2016, quoting Cameron McWhirter, 'Is This Stone Linked to the Lost Colony of Roanoke?', Wall Street Journal, 21 Jan 2016. Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20200806171058id_/https://blogs.lib.unc.edu/ncm/2016/01/23/dare-2/ . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/lawler2018_natgeo_dare_stone.txt` — SOURCE: Andrew Lawler, 'Is This Inscribed Stone a Notorious Forgery-or the Answer to America's Oldest Mystery?', National Geographic (online, May 2018; follow-up to the June 2018 magazine story). URL https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/05/lost-colony-roanoke-virginia-eleanor-dare-stone-mystery/ ; Wayback capture 2018-05-29: https://web.archive.org/web/20180529065354id_/https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/05/lost-colony-roanoke-virginia-eleanor-dare-stone-mystery/ . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/brockell2018_wapo_dare_stone.txt` — SOURCE: Gillian Brockell, 'Could a mysterious stone found near Roanoke's "Lost Colony" be real?', The Washington Post (syndicated; published around 5-7 July 2018 -- the text says 'Americans celebrated the nation's birth this week'). Syndicated copy at Tulsa World: https://tulsaworld.com/news/national/could-a-mysterious-stone-found-near-roanokes-lost-colony-be-real/article_8bfc47ff-7324-54b9-b9b0-33b56716d31e.html (text was ROT47-obfuscated in the page source and decoded here). Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/historyblog2016_dare_stone.txt` — SOURCE: 'Reviewing the Dare Stone, clue to Lost Colony of Roanoke', The History Blog, 23 Jan 2016, http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/40456 (summarises the WSJ 21 Jan 2016 article; reader comments omitted except the genealogical lead noted in the dossier). Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/white1991_witness_for_eleanor_dare_ch3_reprint.txt` — SOURCE: Robert W. White, A Witness for Eleanor Dare (San Francisco: Lexikos, 1991), Chapter 3 'What's In a Word?', AS REPRINTED on Steve Horrillo's Angelfire site (http://www.angelfire.com/ego/iammagi/dare_chap3.htm); Wayback capture 2025-05-17: https://web.archive.org/web/20250517150918id_/https://www.angelfire.com/ego/iammagi/dare_chap3.htm . Fetched 2026-09-14. CAVEAT: fan-site transcription with typos (e.g. 'Spease4' for Spenser, 'trae' for trale); the site's index page mis-names the author as 'John W. White'. - `sources/lostcolonycenter_search_for_dare_stone_location.txt` — SOURCE: Lost Colony Center for Science and Research (Fred Willard and associates; text credits Phil McMullan), 'A Search for the Original Location of the Eleanor Dare Stone' (research paper, c. 2014-2015; PDF cover mis-dates the find to 1938). Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20200919090629id_/http://lost-colony.com/As_Search_for_the_Original_Eleanor_Dare_Stone_Location.pdf . Text extracted with PyMuPDF. Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/bunch2015_dailyadvance_chowan_dare_stone_site.txt` — SOURCE: Rebecca Bunch, 'Chowan County has Lost Colony mystery connection', The Daily Advance (Elizabeth City, NC), c. late Oct 2015 (refers to the History Channel documentary 'that aired Monday night', i.e. 26 Oct 2015). https://www.dailyadvance.com/chowan/news/local/chowan-county-has-lost-colony-mystery-connection/article_d9d128d8-05a4-5c4e-8b1d-d88e72fa5897.html . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/colavito2013_review_america_unearthed_roanoke.txt` — SOURCE: Jason Colavito, 'Review of America Unearthed S01E07: "Mystery of Roanoke"' (H2, aired Jan 2013), blog post, https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-america-unearthed-s01e07-mystery-of-roanoke . Fetched 2026-09-14. (Extract: the Dare Stones portion; comments omitted.) - `sources/colavito2015_review_roanoke_search_lost_colony.txt` — SOURCE: Jason Colavito, 'Review of "Roanoke: Search for the Lost Colony"' (History Channel, aired 26 Oct 2015), blog post, https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-roanoke-search-for-the-lost-colony . Fetched 2026-09-14. (Reader comments omitted.) - `sources/quarmby_bio.txt` — SOURCE: Kevin A. Quarmby PhD, personal/academic site biography, https://www.quarmby.biz/ . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/miles_brownsguide_dare_stones_part1.txt` — SOURCE: Jim Miles, 'Weird Georgia: Dare Stones, part one: discovery', Brown's Guide to Georgia blog (April Fool's Day 'special' c. 2011-2012; popular account with some factual slips, e.g. 'Elizabeth' for Virginia Dare). Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20130528125820id_/http://www.brownsguides.com/blog/weird-georgia-dare-stones-part-one-discovery/ . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/miles_brownsguide_dare_stones_part2.txt` — SOURCE: Jim Miles, 'Weird Georgia: Dare Stones, part 2: the hoax', Brown's Guide to Georgia blog (April Fool's Day 'special' c. 2011-2012; popular account with some factual slips, e.g. 'Elizabeth' for Virginia Dare). Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20140824055643id_/http://www.brownsguides.com/blog/weird-georgia-dare-stones-part-2-the-hoax/ . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/darby_sacarch_abstract_plate_of_brass_dare_stones.txt` — SOURCE: Sacramento Archeological Society, 'Culprits behind Plate of Brass: Dare Stones' (announcement/abstract of a webinar by Melissa Darby, author of Thunder Go North, Univ. of Utah Press 2019). https://sacarcheology.org/culprits-behind-plate-of-brass-dare-stones/ . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/darby_double_deception_abstract.txt` — SOURCE: Melissa Darby, abstract of 'Double Deception: The 1937 Hoaxes of the Chowan River Dare Stone and the Drake Plate of Brass' (paper posted on Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/143027663/ ; Wayback 2025-08-05: https://web.archive.org/web/20250805124917id_/https://www.academia.edu/143027663/Double_Deception_The_1937_Hoaxes_of_the_Chowan_River_Dare_Stone_and_the_Drake_Plate_of_Brass ). Abstract only; full text not accessible. Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/gutoskey2023_mentalfloss_dare_stones.txt` — SOURCE: Ellen Gutoskey, 'The Dare Stones: The Elaborate Hoax That "Solved" the Mystery of the Lost Colony of Roanoke', Mental Floss, 7 April 2023, https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/dare-stones-roanoke-hoax . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/moul2023_iflscience_dare_stone.txt` — SOURCE: Russell Moul, 'The Dare Stone - Hoax Or Message From The "Lost" Roanoke Colony?', IFLScience, 23 May 2023, https://www.iflscience.com/the-dare-stone-hoax-or-message-from-the-lost-roanoke-colony-69058 . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/kinston2025_lavere_dare_stones_talk.txt` — SOURCE: City of Kinston, NC, calendar entry 'The Dare Stones and Raleigh's Lost Colony' (talk by Dr. David La Vere, UNC Wilmington, Kinston-Lenoir County Public Library, Thursday 13 Nov 2025), https://www.kinstonnc.gov/Calendar.aspx?EID=16114 . Fetched 2026-09-14. - `sources/dare_stone1_front_ncpedia_brenau.jpg` — Brenau University photograph of the first stone as reproduced by NCpedia ("Dare Stones", 2019), front face; the grooves are filled with flour/chalk. (file present) - `sources/dare_stone1_back_ncpedia_brenau.jpg` — Brenau University photograph of the first stone as reproduced by NCpedia ("Dare Stones", 2019), back face; the grooves are filled with flour/chalk. (file present) ### 8.2 Works cited but not read in full (with the best locator I have) - Haywood J. Pearce, Jr., "New Light on the Roanoke Colony: A Preliminary Examination of a Stone Found in Chowan County, North Carolina", *Journal of Southern History* 4:2 (May 1938), 148–163. JSTOR stable URL as given by NCpedia/Wikipedia: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2192000 (doi 10.2307/2192000); the alternative stable ID 2191862 could not be checked (JSTOR unreachable). Read in full via the Internet Archive OCR of the issue (see 8.1). - Boyden Sparkes, "Writ on Rocke: Has America's First Murder Mystery Been Solved?", *Saturday Evening Post* (26 April 1941), pp. 9–11, 118, 120–122 (vol. 213, no. 43, and pp. 124–126, 128 per Wikipedia, UNVERIFIED). Read in the Angelfire reprint via Wayback (8.1); the archive.org scan of the issue is "not available". - Samuel Eliot Morison, *The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages* (Oxford UP, 1971), p. 684 — cited by secondary sources for a later verdict; not accessible (HathiTrust 403; archive.org lending). UNVERIFIED. - Robert L. Stephenson, "Report of Observations Regarding 'The Dare Stones'", SC Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, 15 April 1983 — cited by Wikipedia via La Vere/Lawler; not seen. - Robert W. White, *A Witness for Eleanor Dare: The Final Chapter in a 400 Year Old Mystery* (San Francisco: Lexikos, 1991), ISBN 0-938530-51-8 — ch. 3 read in the fan-site reprint (8.1); p. 261 (Hammond's site description) known only through the Lost Colony Center paper. - David La Vere, "The 1937 Chowan River 'Dare Stone': A Re-evaluation", *North Carolina Historical Review* 86:3 (July 2009), 251–281, JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/23523860 — not accessible; summarised by Powell 2009 (8.1). - David La Vere, *The Lost Rocks: The Dare Stones and the Unsolved Mystery of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony* (Wilmington NC: Burnt Mill/Dram Tree, 2010; 2nd ed. 2012) — not accessible; cited through Wikipedia, Powell and the LCC paper. - Andrew Lawler, *The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke* (New York: Doubleday, 2018), ch. on the Dare Stones (pp. c. 250–261 per Wikipedia) — not accessible; his NatGeo article (May 2018) read in full (8.1); book passages quoted by Mental Floss 2023. - Andrew Lawler, "Is This Inscribed Stone a Notorious Forgery — or the Answer to America's Oldest Mystery?", *National Geographic*, May/June 2018 (8.1). - Melissa Darby, *Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake's Fair and Good Bay* (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019); and "Double Deception: The 1937 Hoaxes of the Chowan River Dare Stone and the Drake Plate of Brass" (conference paper/abstract, c. 2020) — abstracts read (8.1). - Brandon Fullam, *A Lost Colony Hoax: The Chowan River Dare Stone* (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2021), 205 pp. (publisher page read for ToC/blurb; text not accessible; ISBN not recorded). - Stephen B. Weeks, "The Lost Colony of Roanoke: Its Fate and Survival", *Papers of the American Historical Association* 5 (1891) — cited by Pearce; not consulted. - William Strachey, *The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia*, ed. R. H. Major (Hakluyt Society, 1849) — OCR used as corpus (from archive.org). - Edward Arber (ed.), *Capt. John Smith ... Works, 1608–1631* (Birmingham, 1884) — OCR used as corpus (`smith_works_arber.txt`, archive.org). - Richard Hakluyt, *The Principal Navigations*, vol. 8 (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1904) — OCR used as corpus (`hakluyt_v8.txt`, archive.org); contains White's 1587 and 1590 narratives. - Susan M. Kingsbury (ed.), *The Records of the Virginia Company of London*, vol. III (Washington, 1933), p. 17 (instructions to Gates, 1609) — as quoted by Pearce. - Emory University Archives, "Dare stones collection, 1937–1987" (finding aid id eua0071darestones; ArchivesSpace object "Dare Stones: Correspondence, etc.") — unreachable through the proxy; contents UNVERIFIED. - Wikipedia, "Dare Stones" (used only as a pointer to page numbers in La Vere and Lawler, and marked UNVERIFIED wherever it is the sole source). - Cameron McWhirter, "Is the Dare Stone a Fake?", *Wall Street Journal*, 21 January 2016 — paywalled; read in the excerpt quoted by Powell (8.1). - Gillian Brockell, "The 'Lost Colony' of Roanoke ...", *Washington Post*, July 2018 — read via the Tulsa World syndication (ROT47-obfuscated text decoded; 8.1). - History (A&E), *Roanoke: Search for the Lost Colony* (26 Oct 2015) and *Return to Roanoke: Search for the Seven* (26 Mar 2017); H2, *America Unearthed* s1 "Mystery of Roanoke" (Jan 2013) — not viewed; known through Colavito's reviews and Brenau's captions (8.1). ### 8.3 Files added for this dossier - Dossier: `notes/D_dare_stones.md` (this file). - Sources: the files listed in 8.1, in `sources/`. - Working copies of the raw downloads, the four corpus OCR files and the attestation script are not included in this folder.