I’ve been under the assumption that the Dare stones were fakes, not considered by serious historians.
Recently, there was a two hour special regarding the stones. They proved that all but the first stone was carved by a drill by a charlatan looking for money and/or fame. But the first stone was shown to have been carved by a chisel, and its Elizabethan English without flaw.
The man who discovered it dropped it off at a university and left; never wanting money or fame.
Why is it believed that this first stone is a forgery?
Isn’t it generally accepted that the Roanoke colonists simply joined with some Native Americans nearby? Wasn’t there some scribbled sign stating that, a similarly named tribe, and offspring that suspiciously looked like half Native American and half European that later colonists found?
They seemed to make a good case for the first stone being authentic and all additional stones being forged. There was textual differences and workmanship differences clearly visible under magnification, even to the layman, between the first stone and all the other stones. The first stone was also provided by an unknown man who never has been identified but was clearly not the same as the man who “found” all the subsequent stones. The show left me satisfied that the first stone at least warrants further research.
The wiki says the man was identified by name and wanted to put it on paid display. Also someone had been shopping a found stone around for a few months before Hammond came forward with his.
Certainly there is reasonable speculation about this. I don’t think there is solid evidence.
Personally, I think the colony died. The Jamestown colony, only a generation later, damn near starved to death, man, woman, and child. I see no reason that the Roanoke colony didn’t have that happen, and due to the late relief, the last survivors weren’t saved as happened in Jamestown.
But, then, why carve the name of the tribe? I’d suspect that a lot of them died, sure, but I think at least some of them sought help from the tribe. Whether that worked out for them, I don’t know, but I remember an article that suggested there were some European traits found in that tribe later on, like blue eyes.
As I said, there’s reasonable speculation about this. Do we have DNA evidence that this happened? Not that I know of. Do we have archeological evidence that this happened? Not that I know of.
I can believe that most of them died but there is still some evidence that the survivors simply joined the Indians and started produced children as part of their adopted tribe. As noted, there were several cases of later colonists that encountered Indians with obvious white features and some pre-existing knowledge of English. There were even some that claimed they were the descendants of people that left the Roanoke Colony. That wasn’t unusual at all during that time. One of the biggest threats to the management of all such colonies was people simply giving up on it and going where they could live in better conditions with adequate food. Who could blame them?
One thing I have come to understand in just the last few years is that American history books are horribly distorted on this subject in particular. Most people think of the Plymouth Colony when are asked about early European immigration to the New World but that isn’t even close to being true. Jamestown was the 1st permanent English colony in the New World and the failed Roanoke Colony was even earlier than that but you have to be really careful with your qualifiers if you want to be accurate and the relative importance of some of them is dubious.
Europeans (Spanish mainly) already inhabited or explored large parts of the New World including the East Coast well before the English attempted to set up their own colonies. San Augustine, Florida was founded in 1565 and is still there. One of the biggest threats to the Jamestown Colony was not just the local natives but raids by Spanish explorers that had been moving up and down the East Coast for decades already. The Pilgrims formed the Plymouth Colony rather late in 1620 but it is greatly overemphasized for some reason.
The Roanoke Colony is interesting but not unique in the least. There were a bunch of failed early colonies even if you limit it just to English ones. The only reason that they could be attempted at all was because the Spanish explorers had already introduced diseases that wiped out possibly more than 90% of the native populations because they had little immunity to them. That freed up vast tracks of land and even whole villages that were in “move in condition”. One famous example is that the Pilgrims met Squanto shortly after they landed and he helped teach them how to survive. He also magically knew English. That was because he had already been to Europe and come back as a Spanish slave. Most of the other people in his tribe died from disease while he was away on his complimentary European vacation.
I think this subject is fascinating even at the detailed level like the Roanoke Colony but it is even more interesting when you throw out the traditional textbook narrative and look at the bigger picture of what was really going on from all sides especially the early non-British colonization that had a vastly bigger impact than the narrative typically depicted in American history textbooks.
