Mysteries From Vast Early America: The Lost Colony and Novo Albion

by The History of the Americans PodcastNovember 22, 20213 min read

As previously reported in the various “Set Fair For Roanoke” episodes of the podcast, I’m not too worked up over what actually happened to the “Lost Colonists” of Roanoke, but lots of other people are. A listener just today forwarded this bit from Real Clear Science, published … just today. While we know a lot, we still do not know exactly what happened. At least not to the satisfaction of archeologists, or passionate North Carolinians. Nevertheless, the topic remains of such interest that people are still writing more or less the same stuff in the high confidence that it will drive some clicks.

The mystery of the Lost Colonists is more famous than but quite similar to the debate over the location of Novo Albion, the location of Francis Drake’s “fair & good bay” on the west coast of the United States. There was a day when patriotic Californians were incredibly wrapped up in locating Novo Albion, to the point that pillars of the Bay Area community and an internationally famous historian at the University of California conspired in a fraud to “prove” that Drake spent five weeks near San Francisco, rather than the coast of Oregon, Washington, or British Columbia. This is the story of the famous hoax “brass plate,” which for forty years was thought to establish the location of Drake’s landing. One of the next two episodes — I have not decided yet which — will dig into the story.

Curiously, there was a similar fraud to “prove” the survival of the Lost Colonists. In 1937, a mysterious figure from California materialized with a stone that seemed to have been chiseled with a message from Eleanor Dare, the daughter of John White and the mother of Virginia. The front of the stone read as follows:

ANANIAS DARE &
VIRGINIA WENT HENCE
VNTO HEAVEN 1591

ANYE ENGLISHMAN SHEW
JOHN WHITE GOVR VIA

For more, the Wikipedia entry on the Dare Stones does nicely.

Here’s the cool part, which I may or may not have the patience to work into the podcast — the Dare Stones hoax and the Drake’s plate hoax may have involved some of the same people.

There, that’s the teaser. Now I’m stuck.