272. Solving The Mystery of America's Lost Colony

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0:29Hello and welcome to this episode of Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durrenpoor. And we're all in sort of back of the bus mode because we've got one of our naughty guests back on. Maybe our naughtiest. I mean, honestly, I could not love this man more. Mark Horton, archaeologist extraordinaire, who you might remember last time was on, talking about Darien, the attempt of the Scots to found their own empire. And can I just say, you got me into all sorts of trouble because you made me laugh so much. I had a heaving post bag from people off the north. Why are you finding this so bloody funny?

1:06It's a great tragedy. What's wrong with you? But you said it funny. It's not Mark for you said it funny, but it was a very funny and very marvellous episode. Remind them, Anita, what it was that was funny. Oh, well, I mean, the thing was, it was Mark gave this list of reasons why this colonisation attempt may not have been successful. And among them were the fact that they took leather cannons. I mean, already I know a military person, but I don't see how that was a good idea. And they took to trade with the natives bonnets and Bibles as if they were going to get anything for that stuff. So the whole thing, it was just not great.

1:45Big potential market for bonnets even today in Panama. I mean, honestly, it was a planning snafu, as we say in the trade, which Mark told really well. Anyway, welcome, Mark. I love that episode. Oh, thank you. All right, we are here to talk about a very different subject, one that we have covered on this podcast before, but Mark is going to have a whole new perspective on this and it comes straight from the dirt of truth and reality. So Willie, do you want to give people an idea of what it is we're talking about? I'd love to open this because weirdly enough, what Mark has dug the same sort of time as he was digging it, I have one of the opening scenes of my book, The Anarchy, about the subject we're about to talk about, which is the first English attempts to found a colony in North America.

2:37And this is a period which immediately predates the founding of the East India Company. The East India Company, which as we know, went on to be the largest commercial organization in history, controlled half the world's trade, started off as this very unpromising idea of basically trying to keep up with the Dutch who'd already found a route to the spice trade. And looking back, all Victorian historians looked on this decade when Raleigh is going off to found settlements in North America and other Protestant plantations are being founded in Ireland, which is what we did with Jane Orlmire in our Irish series earlier in the year.

3:14And when the British ultimately start their progress towards India, all the Victorians depict as this sort of inevitable progress to world domination. In reality, it was a period of enormous setbacks and half the the attempts that the British were making to break into what was then a world dominated by the Portuguese and the Spanish, were often extremely unsuccessful. There was a search for the Northwest Passage to the Spice Islands that ended disastrously, not in the Moluccas, but instead on the edge of the Arctic Circle with all these galleons stuck fast in pack ice with their battered hulls punctured by icebergs and pike-wielding crews mauled by polar bears.

3:54And that's the immediate background to this attempt by Sir Walter Raleigh to outsmart the French and the Spanish and to go to the north of where they were and to found a colony in south of Chesapeake Bay in an area which, of course, he named Virginia after the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. of both. And the story that's normally told is that the colony survived barely a year, was abandoned in June 1586 after the relief fleet arrived to find the settlement deserted. And a shipload of eager new colonists jumped ashore to find both the stockade and the houses within completely dismantled and nothing to indicate the fate of the settlers except a single skeleton and the name of Croatoans carved in capital letters on a tree.

4:42And there was simply no sign of the 90 men, 17 women, and 11 children whom Raleigh had left there only two years earlier. It was as if the settlers had vanished into thin air. Now, that is the background against which we're going to be talking about Mark's new discoveries, which completely rewrite that story, which is all very exciting. And it's an empire scoop. Yes, it's a scoop, but also the story. When you say the story, the story was big at the time, and then it kind of fades a little bit into the background. But then it becomes a huge Victorian issue because of this man called George Bancroft, who publishes A History of the United States.

5:19This is an absolute study in, one might say, racism, because it has every racist trope in it, that there are savages who massacred these people and took them away. And it pays specific interest in this little girl called Virginia Dare, a little white child who's apparently taken off by the savages and raised among savagery. And it really caught the public imagination. And Mark, it kind of coloured archaeological research as well, didn't it? Absolutely. I mean, you would have thought this founding story about America, historians and archaeologists would actually go to Croatuan Island, the initials on the tree, and actually go and look for them, blindingly obvious.

6:04They obfuscated it a bit by saying, well, the Croatan would try. But John White, who'd done the map, actually put Croatan on his map. So we know exactly where the island is. It's Hatteras Island. So why did it take, as it were, till the 21st century for an archaeologist to go and look for where they might have actually ended up? So just to clarify, the idea preferred by the racists, as you put it, is that the savages wiped out these poor, innocent settlers fresh from England. But your theory is that they actually just went somewhere else and no one's looked for them. That's right. I mean, you've got to realise the racist view is all connected with manifest destiny.

6:45And the notion the white man has the right to colonise and settle the continent of North America. And it's an inconvenient truth that there are already people living there. And what's even more inconvenient is the notion that Virginia Dare, who is actually held up as the great icon of Manifest Destiny, and she's often shown as this sort of wonderful girl in flowing robes and so forth, this white icon, could actually have sex with a Native American. And her descendants would be Native Americans. That was just too much for these racist historians. So let's just lay out the story and flesh it out a little bit more.

7:31You mentioned John White. Just tell us exactly who John White was, who marked the place on the map. So John White was an artist in Queen Elizabeth's court and also probably a contemporary of Nicholas Hilliard and a miniaturist. And this is not irrelevant as the story emerges. So John White went out in the major military expedition, this is the 1585, as the expedition's artist. And he did a series of unbelievable pictures, exquisite pictures that really set the scene of how you should represent Native Americans for the next 200, 300 years. The folios are in the British Museum, some of the finest, the most important things in the British Museum, actually.

8:15And then when it then came to set up a settler colony, the one that was rescued by Francis Drake in 1585, the settler colony went out in 1586 with women and children, including his own daughter, Eleanor Dare, who was married to Anacesus Dare, who was one of the colonists. So John White went back as the governor of this third colony, the settler's colony. And while he was there, his daughter gave birth to Virginia, named Virginia, obviously after the Virgin Queen. And unfortunately, we don't quite know the circumstances. John White's own account, so they ran out of food. So he then returned back to England to get more food for the colony.

9:04But unfortunately, he came back in 1588, 1587, 1588, when the Armada was being planned and it was not possible, as it were, for ships to leave England. So he didn't get back till 1590. And then he found the colony abandoned with this CRO on a tree and Crotone written on the palisade of the abandoned fort. Unfortunately, he couldn't get back. He knew they were in Crotone Island. He'd mapped it earlier. But he was on a pirate ship, basically, who wanted to go pirating. And we should explain that at this point, the British are making a lot of their money on what we would call piracy, which they called licensed privateering.

9:48And the British crown would give out a license to a bunch of pirates who, in the name of the Virgin Queen, would go and raid horrible Catholic ships, as the Protestant English saw it. And we're going to hear more of this when we have an episode on Panama. But huge amounts of cash get taken from Spanish and Portuguese vessels at this period, particularly silver from the Panama mines, and diverted to Charing Cross and Whitehall. That's right. So the captain of the ship wouldn't let him go and find his daughter on the island of Croatoan, but he then went for pirating unsuccessfully. And so we know about all this because John White then retired to Ireland and wrote a lengthy letter to Richard Hacklett, who was the main documenter of these Elizabethan voyages at the time.

10:36He's the one witness of the founding of the East India Company in 1599, which is the same sort of period. So he just wrote this letter, which was then quietly forgotten about. John White included a critical detail. He said that this was a pre-assigned secret token. and if they put a cross underneath the letters, then they'd left in distress. If there was no cross, then they'd gone to this place voluntarily and there was no cross. And Mark, I mean, how did you get onto this? Because it's all very well to say there was this letter which was forgotten about. Is this your archival research or did someone point you towards it and suggest you do the dig?

11:13What's the backstory to your involvement in this extraordinary tale? The stuff is well known and I've always been interested in pioneer colonies. We did some work in Bermuda and St Kitts and St Lucia. Unlike you to choose a very nice Caribbean island to do your digs in. That's right. Sorry, don't mock the man. He's in Birmingham now. He puts in the work as well. That's a National Trust rally or somewhere, are you? He puts the hard graft in as well. But critically, I thought, well, the Lost Colony is the biggest nutcrack of all. Let's go and see if we can investigate it. So there was an enthusiast called Scott Dawson who was living, basically a school teacher on the island.

11:51And he's a descendant from the very first European settlers, English settlers on the island Hatteras. And he was obsessed and wrote a little book about it, saying that, why are we looking for all these things? So I went and visited him and he said, well, I will organise a dig. So we set up a community archaeology program called the Croatoan Archaeological Society, and we had great fun. And since 2008, I've been working with Scott and local community because all these sites are on local people's private property. And so you have to work through the local community to get access to people's land.

12:31Otherwise, you will get nowhere. and the white map shows where all the villages are on the island. And so it's really just a question of going to those villages and seeing if there's any archaeology. And when did you do this, Mark? When was this? We started in 2008, but I suppose the real breakthrough came when we managed to secure access to a site called Cape Crete in 2012. And that enabled me to really look at this site in detail, I brought students from Bristol University and we undertook British style excavations. The key thing was really careful recovery of the archaeology. So every little tiny piece of grain, every tiny bead, every, as it were, tiny bit of shell, we sieve these sites using mosquito mesh with a hose.

13:24So everything is recovered. and so we then have buckets and buckets of residue that then Scott and his volunteers spend their winter months going through checking for any tiny bees or artefact that might be in there. Right now before we reveal the reveal let's just do a tiny bit more of what you were up against because you are pushing against not just sort of mounds of soil but also collective rewritten memory. Now in the 1930s there was a particular play which muddies the waters with this. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Well, it was the play in the aftermath. So in 1937, there was a play called The Lost Colony, written by a Pulitzer winning playwright, one of the leading playwrights in America at the time, a man called Paul Green.

14:11And he staged an open air drama called The Lost Colony on the site of what was presumed to be the colony on Roanoke. Whether it was or not is a matter of debate. And actually in the years since, a performance has been held every year annually. The first season had 50 ,000 people attending. Roosevelt attended, the president attended himself, had a huge amount of publicity. Now, Green was quite a libertarian, even for the 1930s. And he ended the play with the colonists going off into the wilderness. And he speculated that some might have been killed, some might have starved. Some might have even been assimilated into local villages, looked after by the Indians.

15:01Did he suggest it in such a paternalistic way that they were looked after or that they were taken and kind of forced? No, no, no. It was a very paternalistic thing that they would have been looked after. So this was not a racist play? It was not a racist play. Well, it was like, I mean, the actors were blacked up as Indians, all that kind of stuff, until about three years ago, actually. So yeah, there was a certain amount of racism in the play about these savage Indians and things, there was various battle scenes and so forth between the Indians, which had been played out. But it ultimately had a liberal view.

15:32But this was too much for what might describe as the racist historians that were very much dominant in America in the 1930s. There's a group of historians named the Dunningites. This is named after a historian called William Dunning. And indeed, there was even a prize named after William Dunning. And this was buttressing the idea of white racial superiority, black inferiority, manifest destiny, and so on and so forth. And a lot of the historians, as it were, followed that view in particular. And it's difficult to recognize this, particularly in California. In Berkeley, of all places, like the most liberal place that you could go to on planet Earth these days.

16:18was the absolute hotbed of this, as it were, racism. And particularly connected to, you know, they were sympathized to the Klan, the Ku Klux Klan. And I suppose connected to this was isolationism. This is 1937, an idea of supporting Nazi Germany as a subtext. These historians literally wandered around with Hitler-style moustaches to demonstrate their own allegiance allegiance to a right-wing racist cause because they saw Nazi ideas about racial purity as very much the same as theirs in terms of the issue of black people in their society. Miscegenation was the word of the era, wasn't it? You do not mix bloods.

17:04And it's worth pointing out that miscegenation was illegal. And of course, we have got the Jim Crow laws, which are also based on all sorts of discriminatory ideas. So the very nation that the first English in America could have ended up being looked after by Native Americans. Indeed, their descendants today are probably to be found amongst the Native Americans. An idea that was, as it were, tentatively suggested in Paul Green's play was, of course, completely unacceptable to them. And so they had to come up with a stratagem to undermine this notion of what John White had said with the initials on the tree and what was being promoted with this fabulously popular play.

17:51The stratagem is evil and awful. And we should introduce one of the prime movies or prime actors in this subterfuge. And it's a man called Herbert Bolton, who is Herbert E. Bolton, to give him his proper title. Is he actually a Berkeley historian? He was the leading Berkeley historian of his day. There was a building even named after him in Berkeley until only about three years ago when they worked out that he was a true racist. So what did he do? What did he do? What did he do? So he was the curator of the Bancroft Library, but he had a dark side to himself as a trickster and a hoaxer. And he'd previously, maybe a few months earlier, had perpetuated possibly the most famous hoax in American history, which is Drake's plate of brass, that through the meticulous research of a historian called Melissa Darby, who I would be working with on this, has unearthed exactly the link to Bolton.

18:49And this was Drake's landing, which they were determined had to be in San Francisco because of the whole English racism story, and had faked this plate of brass where where Drake said he claimed this land as New Albion. And it's a pretty palpable fake and was believed religiously by everyone until 1977, when it was then examined scientifically, metallurgically, it worked out to be a bit of rolled late Victorian brass plate. It could not have been Elizabethan. Can I just say, this is a tomato, tomato, potato, potato, you say trickster. I say absolute fraudulent shit. I mean, this is a man who's just trying to mislead academe, isn't he?

19:32And he was doing this because there was a rival historian, a Mexican historian, who was claiming that Drake hadn't landed in San Francisco at all, but up in Oregon. And having had all various, you know, tricentenaries and statues and postage stamps and everything else, they had to undermine this testimony by creating this historical fraud. And Bolton, I say, also made a great deal of money out of it as a historical consultant, because he was the person everyone went to to actually translate it and so forth. It's a fabulous story. So this is the founding myth of North America based on not one, but two enormous fakes.

20:14So tell us the second fake. So having successfully, as it were, defrauded the world with a plate of brass, it was a very simple thing to go and defraud the world with this dairstone, as it became known. And the story goes that a few months after the opening of the play, a fruit dealer, a grocer basically, was wandering in the forest up the Chowon River, which is basically Albemarle Creek, behind Roanoke Island, collecting hickory knucks, where he stumbled upon this quartzite stone with this inscription that he didn't have any idea what it was. His name was Ellie Hammond. So he didn't know what it was, but there was a well-known Elizabethan historian called Pierce, Hayward Pierce Jr., who was in Emory University, had just been employed at Emory University.

21:07He was a Dunningite and connected again to the Bolton Coderie. And so the stone was taken to him to decipher. More money changed hands and so forth. And the stone, he was declared to be genuine, a great, enormous enthusiasm behind the discovery of not just one, but two great Elizabethan mysteries within a few months of each other. What did they decipher? What did this bunch of hoodlums decide it said? So it's still there. You can still see the stone. And it describes how the savages have murdered all but seven of the colonists, including, of course, Virginia Dare and Anastasis Dare. And this stone was signed Eleanor Dare, basically said that, please, if anyone finds this stone, we've gone for walkers and please give it to my father.

22:00And the significance of this, just to emphasize this for those that haven't taken in this point, is that Virginia Dare is the first white girl born in North America. Is that right? Yes. So the historians have to kill her off. By savages. Kill her off by savages because she can't be in a relationship with them. She can't be sort of, you know, living with them. She can't be perfectly happy, you know, having been actually in many ways saved by them. There's no food. Dad hasn't come back. He popped off for nappies. He hasn't come back for three years. They had to do something. That story, that's not going to hold.

22:31It's got to be that they were all killed. And also, can I just also add, to have a grieving mother leave that inscription and say, please tell my father. All of it is so sort of, you know, melodramatic. It's designed to pull on the heartstrings and hate strings of anyone who already believes that these people are savages. And just to put it out there, that VDare.com was an active right-wing blog started in 1999, backed by Trump supporters until it was shut down in 2024. So this is not some distant bit of sort of racist history. This is something that still sits at the foundational myths of America.

23:11And Trump's ideology and the MAGA movement, and underpinning notions of racism and immigration and everything else. So did Herbert Bolton go out in the dead of night and scatter this stone? Where did this stone come from, this fake stone, this piece of nonsense? Where did it come from? Ellie Hammond was actually George Hammond, who was one of Bolton's students and who actually succeeded Bolton as the curator of the Bancroft Library, the main library in Berkeley. And she managed to prove this because she's got their signatures. So when Stone was handed over to Emory University, it had to be notarized.

23:51And so he signed it. And she's also on earth the signature of George Hammond. So what George Hammond did was change his earlier on the Tatterdale driving license, because you had to have some form of identity, and to change the L.E. to George and left the surname the same. So if you now look at these two documents, you immediately realize that it was George Hammond who was masquerading as this fruit dealer in cahoots with Hayward Pierce, who then validated the whole thing. So the three of them involved, Bolton, Pierce and Hammond, in this conspiracy. Look, we're going to take a break. But what we have here is a conspiracy fraud.

24:32It's extraordinary. Historical conspiracy.

24:40Welcome back. So, Mark, tell us about the unmasking of this, because, I mean, presumably this is a massive deal. If this is the foundational moment of America and all these racists have muddied the waters. Is it your work or who has found - So Melissa's been doing most of the work. She lives in Oregon and she's got onto this really by trying to unearth the plate of brass fraud and who was actually behind it. And then realized that the dare stone was perpetuated in a couple of months of the plate of grass. The two frauds must be related. I mean, she just published this in the North Carolina Historical Journal.

25:15I should say after enormous trouble that all the Californian historical journals now all rejected this research and refused to publish it. So even today, there is a sense of racism in historical circles in America. But on what grounds? So let's just do the thing that I do, which is let's look at the other side. What is the reason that they are giving for rejecting it? Are they just saying that this is just completely unacceptable for which reason? They didn't give any reasons. So she shows them the signatures. She shows them the license. She shows them all of that, the timeline, everything. And they say, well, no, we don't want to have a look at it.

25:54That's right. That's it. OK, now we need to dig into your dirt a bit more because... I wouldn't advise it, Anita. Yeah, I know he's a friend. I'm not going to do that. But can we talk about the excavation at Cape Creek Village and what that taught you and how you back up Melissa's findings? I mean, the Deerstone had just put everyone on the wrong track. So I thought, well, actually, the way to find these lost colonists is to excavate Native American villages of the right period, and then see whether we can find material culture associated with the Elizabethan colonists in the, as it were, middens, the rubbish heaps of these Native American villages.

26:34Very simple methodology. And they have huge middens, metres high, full of stuff, lots of shells, lots of bone and everything else, all in these places. So the Cape Creek site was a particularly useful and important one because it was occupied until around 1700. So as we went down through the layers, you know, archaeologists go down horizontally, going down through time. The first thing we noticed in the 17th century levels was these were Native Americans. They were living with lots of Native American pottery, timber buildings, all that kind of thing. Although we noticed persistently stuff that only Europeans would have.

27:13So we, for example, had pins, dress pins. We had dress clasps. Not impossible, though, that these could be traded. That's right. And in fact, we have really good evidence for trade, because what we found was three coin weights dated 1643. And these are weights that peddlers, itinerant traders would carry around with them to work out the, as it were, the purity of a coin. So you put a coin weight on one side of a balance and a bit of gold or something on the other, and you could work out its value or its authenticity or whatever. So we found three coin weights. So clearly, they were in contact with Jamestown.