The history of the history of the Lost Colony becomes, in Arner’s words, “the process by which the mind transforms unacceptable facts into at least minimally acceptable fictions,” a process that can happen only because there is an absence in the historical record, an absolute emptiness of known fact that we can plug up with longing and self-soothing myth. It’s why, for example, the story of the Lost Colony became a powerful narrative in the Reconstruction South, where defeated white segregationists clung to another story of white people “unjustly” defeated by non-white forces.
By the dawn of the 20th century, when the country was once again adjusting to large waves of non-white, non-Protestant immigrants, racists and segregationists turned to Virginia Dare and tried to console themselves with fictive explanations of what happened. The Reverend Joseph Blount Cheshire, at an anniversary address given at Roanoke in 1910, proclaimed that the Lost Colony had not assimilated, nor were there descendants to be sought “in the mongrel remnants, part Indian, part white, and part negro, of a decaying tribe of American savages.” Rather, he argued, they suffered “a nobler fate”: martyrdom, leaving behind only “their spiritual descendants and kindred” in “worthy and patriotic son and daughter of Carolina, Virginia, and the United States.” This racist celebration of Dare has persisted to this day. One of the more prominent white nationalist websites is named VDARE, founded in 1999, and bigots seem to turn to her story whenever they feel threatened by social change. Which is the nice thing about mysteries: They can be eerie because they remain inexplicable, but they can also be soothing because you can dream up whatever explanation you need.
Louis Hammond’s discovery in 1937 offered an end to all of this—a solution, finally, to what had happened to the Lost Colony, and a historical record that would either affirm or refute all of our metaphysical imaginings. The Dare Stone (as it came to be called) was a piece of quartz, its exterior weathered but its core still bright white, such that cutting into it created a durable and visible script. On one side was a cross, surrounded by the wordsAnanias Dare and Virginia Went Hence Unto Heaven 1591Any Englishman show John White Governor Virginia