← After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
Lost Colony of Roanoke: Mystery of Virginia Dare
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- [00:00]
Anthony Delaney
Hi, we're your hosts Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling. And if you would like After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal ad free and get early access.
- [00:10]
Maddy Pelling
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- [00:21]
Anthony Delaney
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:27]
Kristen Thorne
If you work as a manufacturing facilities engineer, installing a new piece of equipment can be as complex as the machinery itself. From prep work to alignment and testing, it's your team's job to put it all together. That's why it's good to have Grainger on your side. With industrial grade products and next day delivery, Grainger helps ensure you have everything you need close at hand through every step of the installation. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickranger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
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Dr. Misha Yuen
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- [01:46]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Hello.
- [01:46]
Maddy Pelling
And welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony, and in this episode we are going to be talking about the Lost Colony of Roanoke. This is one of the greatest mysteries in American history and the myths that grew up around it in the decades and centuries that followed, focused on one particular mother and child, Eleanor and her daughter, Virginia Dare, the first English child to be born on the American continent. It's a story that takes us right up to the 20th century to get us started, here's Anthony.
- [02:22]
Anthony Delaney
It'S the summer of 1587 and Eleanor dare is on the Atlantic waves. Tall spars reach up into the cloudy sky above her head where sails bulge outwards, lugging the colonists on. Eleanor Dare is somewhere around 18 years old and pregnant in her second trimester. By now, her husband is on the voyage with her. Her father is too. He is the leader of the whole endeavour. He's been to this new world before, brought back incredible paintings of what he saw there. The landscapes, the people, the food. Now Eleanor is coming with him to establish a colonial outpost for Ser Walter Raleigh and than for England in this far flung, most foreign land that she knows will be the place she gives birth to her first child. The ocean swells and the salt air strikes her skin. The rhythm of the ship rises and falls, creaks and groans. Eleanor turns back to her work. There were more than a hundred colonists on board. I have no doubt that amongst them were many who fancied making a name for themselves. None of them would have guessed that it was young Eleanor and an unborn child in her belly. That would be the ones to go down in history. They would be the ones that hundreds of years ahead, a new nation called the United States would turn into a myth. Welcome to After Dark. This is the history of the lost colony of Roanoke.
- [04:24]
Maddy Pelling
Hello, everyone. I'm Maddie.
- [04:25]
Anthony Delaney
And I'm Anthony.
- [04:27]
Maddy Pelling
And I am so excited for this history. Today we have a returning guest. We love a returning guest here today. We are joined once again by Dr. Misha Yuen, who's a lecturer in early Modern history at the University of Sussex and is author of the Virginia American Colonialization and English Society 1580-1660. Misha, you've been on once before to talk to us about Roanoke and you were so great. We've had to have you back again. So welcome.
- [04:52]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Thank you. So nice to be here. See you both again.
- [04:54]
Maddy Pelling
We are honestly thrilled. This is such an interesting history. I think we took a little bit last time, but the myths that are built around this case and the real life mysteries, the mysteries that are maybe imposed and invented and added onto it, there's so many layers to get into. Can we start though with a little bit of a recap? And for listeners watching on YouTube or listening in your ears, go back and listen to our first episode. I think is the advice here. We will give a fuller history of the lost colony there. But Misha, just for those of us who just need a little bit of a reminder, just a potted history, if you will, of Roanoke.
- [05:31]
Dr. Misha Yuen
So Roanoke is the first English attempt at permanent settlement in North America. So it's led by Walter Raleigh. He has a charter from Queen Elizabeth I. And initially they send a group of men and boys to establish something more akin to a sort of fort or Military outpost. But in 1587, as you said, a group of around 100 settlers, including women and children, venture to modern day North Carolina for the first time. And that group includes kind of different families, a lot of people who knew each other from the same parts of London. And there's a real sense that this is now going to be the creation of a new English society in what they're calling the New World at the time. But after a few years, yeah, the colonists disappear and it now kind of goes down in history as the lost colony of it.
- [06:17]
Maddy Pelling
It doesn't end well, does it?
- [06:19]
Anthony Delaney
You talk there, Misha, about first ventures being men and boys only. And here, obviously, we are very much focused on a woman that's heading over and a child that's to be born. What was the significance of sending women this time? Because it seems like it's a very deliberate choice. Right.
- [06:36]
Dr. Misha Yuen
And it's the first time it happens really in English history, in terms of English colonial history. It's something that then is a repeated sort of characteristic of English colonial efforts into the 17th century. But when it happens in the late 16th century, it is particularly sort of novel. And I think there isn't much evidence at the time which explains why it's so important, so important to these colonists to take women and children. But what we know from later colonial settlements in places like Virginia and also Providence island is that women are seen as being really important because there's kinds of work that they'll perform in the colony. They'll fulfill particular roles, doing domestic work, caring, labour, but also this idea that if you want to attract suitable men who will be willing to kind of stay permanently in these settlements, to defend them, to help them kind of flourish and prosper, essentially, they need to be able to bring their wives, and that's a way to kind of attract kind of, you know, men of good character, but also to retain them as well. So I think if we kind of look into the kind of next century, some of the evidence that we have of why women are so important, I think we can kind of read back and imagine that it was similar for the colonists of Roanoke as well. There are these kind of, like, practical reasons, but also these kind of broader sort of imaginings that they have about kind of developing new families, new households, and this kind of permanent foothold in America for an English society.
- [07:55]
Maddy Pelling
It's so interesting that women are seen then as this kind of civilizing force and that maybe civilizing there should be an inverted commerce to talk about. You know, that is a really Loaded term in terms of this history. What fascinates me, though, is that for these particular colonists, what you describe, Misha, is a fresh start that they think they're making this kind of this virgin settlement that they can mould however they want. But you mentioned that people already knew each other in London, and so surely they're bringing with them existing tensions, existing family dynamics. You know, this isn't necessarily the fresh start they're describing. They're just being transplanted from one place into another. Right. Like, is that going to cause problems?
- [08:32]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Definitely. You see in other colonial settlements, you know, rivalries and disputes over things like leadership, but also things like religion as well, and how that should operate in these new societies. So even though there is often this sense in which they're going to transplant kind of Protestantism into America, you know, obviously you get people who are much more kind of pious than others, and sometimes that creates tension. There's not anything that we know about Roanoke in terms of these kinds of disputes, but these are, like you say, ordinary societies that would have been people of slightly different. Different kind of social backgrounds and hierarchies, men and women, and I think probably some kind of working out of how these new societies would function, who would be in those kinds of leadership positions. I can definitely imagine that there would have been some kind of.
- [09:13]
Maddy Pelling
Yeah.
- [09:14]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Kind of grappling over those issues.
- [09:15]
Maddy Pelling
Yeah. And even just thinking about, you know, the fact that Eleanor is on the ship pregnant, that people are literally bringing not just their baggage with them, but new life potentially, and that everything is kind of. It's not that fresh start, like everything's already been set in motion in England. It's so interesting and it's such a sort of point of tension. I think it's such a good opening to a story in many ways. Do we know much about Eleanor and Virginia themselves?
- [09:40]
Dr. Misha Yuen
We don't know that much about them. So we know that Eleanor is the daughter of John White, who obviously is the leader of the Roanoke colony under the kind of patronage of Sir Walter Raleigh. Eleanor's married to somebody called Anaisda, who is a stone carver. He also travels to Roanoke. So she travels with her husband, both a young couple. She's pregnant. And then we know that she gives birth to Virginia shortly after their arrival in Roanoke. And Virginia is baptised in the summer of 1587. And to be honest, after that, there's not much else that we know about them.
- [10:12]
Anthony Delaney
Yeah, there's so little like it, really. There's nothing there, really. I mean, the bare minimum, you could look for is a baptismal record. And, yeah, that's essentially all we have. And two names. That's it.
- [10:22]
Dr. Misha Yuen
And I guess looking at, you know, the kind of. The background. So we know that these families are from similar parts of London, the kinds of churches that they attended, their kind of Protestant. We have a sense of their kind of social background. So middling status. So someone like Eleanor Dare probably was at least partially literate. She probably would have learned, you know, the kind of different household domestic skills that she would need to, you know, to be a kind of good wife. Sewing, baking. So we can kind of fill in the gaps a little bit, based on our kind of broader understanding of what a woman's life was like in late Tudor England. But in terms of hard archival evidence, we don't know much more.
- [10:56]
Anthony Delaney
We will talk about this in a little bit more detail, but I'm just. I think now might be a. Because just reacting to you saying we actually know very little. Why then do you think these two individuals, of all the people that were on, there were 17 women in total on the board. So it's not like this is the only woman on board. Why have these two women. And we'll bear this in mind as we continue to talk about some of the myths. But why have they endured so much and how. Why have we built stories around them?
- [11:22]
Dr. Misha Yuen
That's a massive question.
- [11:24]
Maddy Pelling
Well, answer it, Misha.
- [11:26]
Dr. Misha Yuen
So I guess partly it's to do with the White kind of family name and the sign of John Wyett as the father and grandfather. I guess also the fact that for Virginia, she's the first known child to be born and baptised in English America. So that bears significance. And I guess the only other person who has received so much attention for their baptism in this early colonial period is Pocahontas. And there is a certain symmetry or even asymmetry between the stories of these women.
- [11:55]
Maddy Pelling
They're naturally paired together.
- [11:56]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Yeah, I think so. And then I think, obviously, the legends that kind of grow up around Roanoke because it becomes this lost colony. And the carving that we talked about last time and again, the links, that perhaps this was a carving that Eleanor Dare may have done, leaving a message for her father. So there's kind of. Even at the time, I think, you know, this family had some significance. You know, John White after, you know, the colony is abandoned and it's lost, you know, he writes these really kind of heartfelt letters about it as well. From his. He moves to Ireland. I believe he moves to the plantations there. And, you know, he's still Kind of thinking about what kind of went wrong and sort of his regret over it. So I think even at the time, there's a sense in which these women kind of represent something that is quite poignant for English colonists who are trying to now kind of repeat those efforts later in places like Jamestown and then Plymouth, of course, as well, I suppose.
- [12:45]
Maddy Pelling
Because they become at first that symbol, like you said, Misha, of sort of civilizing influence amongst the society of men and potentially kind of violent men thinking about colonisation in. In North America at this time. And then they become those symbols of something that's been lost or kind of violated in some way, I guess. For listeners who maybe haven't caught up with our previous episode, can you just tell us very briefly about the fact that it becomes a lost colony? You know, we have these families that go out there hoping for a new life and it doesn't go that way, does it?
- [13:17]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Yeah. So essentially what happens is there are. There's a resupply mission to England. So John White leads, you know, several boats to go back to England to basically gather more supplies, more investment and essentially to kind of help drum up some support as well. But because of the Spanish Armada, there's a stay on shipping. Elizabeth I basically says, you know, we cannot risk any of our ships kind of crossing the Atlantic. And so there's a period of about two or three years when the colony, you know, nobody is able to travel there. So by the time John white returns in 1590, there's no trace of the colonists and all that they do find at the settlement is three words, CRO, carved into this wooden post. And perhaps that gives them a clue of what might have happened to the colonists. And I know that last we spoke about this, you were really fascinated because of your work on graffiti, but we think this carving refers to the Croatian people, which is also a place name and perhaps was an indication that the colonists may have sought shelter there and perhaps assimilated themselves into this local indigenous group. And in fact, most historians think that probably is what happened. If that did happen, there's a likelihood that men and boys of fighting age may have not been accepted or may have been killed off. There could have been, you know, some kind of hostilities or violence, but there's a likelihood that women and children might have been absorbed into the. Those communities.
- [14:33]
Maddy Pelling
Which sort of goes against the narrative that was being sold at the beginning, Right. That these are women designated for white European men. And now that's been, again, in a voted commas, corrupted.
- [14:44]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Yeah. And I think, like you say this idea of this being a kind of lost opportunity. So Virginia symbolizes what might have been in the 1580s, the beginning, the kind of new birth of a new kind of English nation in America. And because it basically is a complete disaster and failure as far as the English are concerned, you know, it takes them another kind of 20, 30 years before they even attempt this again. Because the feeling in England is that, yeah, this has been such a disaster that they can't actually drum up the kind of support and investment that they need. And when they initially settle jamestown in 1607, again, they don't take women and children at first because they do see it as being really dangerous and potentially kind of perilous. But again, quickly they realize that actually if you want men to stay and you want them to behave in a sort of, you know, quote, civilized manner.
- [15:27]
Maddy Pelling
And if you want a new generation.
- [15:28]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Yes. And if you want to kind of grow that population, you do need to be able to bring over English women. And not least because English investors, colonists, policymakers, are always staunchly against kind of the mixing of English men with indigenous women. Although that is encouraged in other European empires. It's never encouraged in the English context that they might intermarry with indigenous women and kind of, you know, give birth to children that way.
- [15:54]
Maddy Pelling
Of course we know that that happened all the time in reality.
- [15:57]
Dr. Misha Yuen
But yeah, it kind of on paper officially wasn't condoned. And that's why it's so important for them to be able to English women over to marry colonists.
- [16:18]
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- [18:56]
Maddy Pelling
So the Colony does disappear. We know that, we've established that. But am I right, Misha? And you've spent a lot of time working on Jamestown, another colony, Am I right in saying that people at Jamestown are sent to try and find this earlier colony of Roanoke?
- [19:10]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Yeah. So Jamestown is established about 20 years after.
- [19:14]
Maddy Pelling
So basically a generation.
- [19:15]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Yeah, a whole generation. But there are kind of links between Roanoke and Jamestown. So Raleigh, for example, is also involved in kind of backing Jamestown. So you see these kind of like links of personnel if you like, between the two ventures. But John Smith, who is the one time governor of Jamestown, he is in conversation with the local leader of the Powhatan, who was actually Pocahontas father. And in their conversation Powhatan kind of conveys some stories that there potentially are some descendants of the English settlers. So groups of men from Jamestown do go out to try and kind of find where these descendants might be. And the report back seeing children who have fair hair and fair skin and look like they could have English ancestry. But it's Never confirmed and they never actually find the colonists. But certainly there's enough there to make them believe that the colonists, or at least some colonists, might have survived and been assimilated within the local indigenous communities. And because of that kind of earlier interest and perhaps sort of, you know, breadcrumb of clues that they may have survived later in the 17th century and into the 18th century, you also see that, you know, people in that region who travelled to Roanoke are also trying to find a trace of them as well. But there's never any confirmed reports other than certain myths again that come down of people describing ancestors who owned books and maybe were watching for rallies, ships and these kinds of things. But these stories come to us again, kind of secondhand testimony from English travelers via Native American peoples. And it's not clear that there's any truth behind it.
- [20:46]
Maddy Pelling
Essentially so tantalizing, isn't it? But it is, as you say, it's a breadcrumb trail. Really.
- [20:51]
Anthony Delaney
One of the things historian brain is turning on here and going, if I were to want to write turned up at this point in the episode, if I wanted to write a book about Virginia Dare or Eleanor, both of them together, I probably wouldn't begin because there isn't enough to write an actual full on history book, 500 pages, whatever it is, 100,000 words. And therefore, if we've learned anything about lack of information, it becomes very tempting for people to fill that information in themselves. And so I want to fast forward a little bit into the 18th and kind of early 19th century and I have a poem here that, that speaks to this history and that starts to fill in some of the blanks in the history that you were talking about. And so I think here we move from history into something far more fictive and far more egregious. I think as well. I just want to read. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I'm just going to give you a taster of what this poem says. It says, in the tangles of her tresses sunbeams lingered pale and yellow in her eyes the limpid blueness of the noonday sky was mirrored. It goes on then to say, she whose mind bore in its dawning impressed of developed races to the rude untutored savage, seemed divinely daued with reason. She the heir of civilization. They the slaves of superstition, gave to her a silent reverence. And we'll do one more. Thus the babe of Roanoke grew to be the joy and teacher of a tribe of native heathen in the Land which gave her shelter. You know, they're using her. They're using the idea of her and her history to, well, to do something that doesn't seem that far away from what potentially is happening in America at the moment in terms of underlining what American ness might look like.
- [22:41]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Yeah, she does. So this is Virginia Dare, who does an enormous amount of, I guess, ideological legwork, we might call it, for white supremacists in America. And this begins in the mid 19th century, when we see a lot of anxieties in that period over kind of, you know, racial purity, immigration. And again, these anxieties recur in the early 20th century when again, you have kind of migrants coming from Europe to America. And this idea that, you know, we need to keep America white. And even today, you know, keep America American, these kind of slogans are often attached onto Virginia Dare. And doing the research for the podcast, you know, I came across, you know, a hate organization which is called the Vdare Foundation. And this is the kind of symbolic significance that she still has today in terms of this kind of yet very white version idea of America that, of course, never existed and was always completely fictional. And it's obviously astounding that these kind of this, you know, kind of anti immigrant rhetoric completely misses the point that these people were themselves immigrants to America into a land that was already occupied by Native Americans. So the whole thing is a madness.
- [23:51]
Maddy Pelling
The irony is surely writ large. One thing that I think is so interesting about the myths that start in, as Anthony says, the late 18th, early 19th century is this idea of Virginia and Eleanor is kind of like the mothers of America. And, you know, going back to what you were saying, Misha, about women being brought over as this kind of fresh start, and that they are. There's something there about the reduction of their story to their gender, to their bodily experience. And of course, in reality, we don't know what happened to either of them. Whether little Virginia grew up to have children of her own and who she maybe had those children with or didn't have them with. Is that something that is unique to this story? Do we see that with other settlements at the time? Or is it because there's this lack of information at Roanoke that that narrative is just an empty void that can be filled with these other very problematic and, to put it mildly, sort of stories that are layered over it?
- [24:53]
Dr. Misha Yuen
I do think it's particularly unique in the way that this kind of origin myth around Roanoke develops in the ways that it's so highly and kind of explicitly gendered in the ways that you've described. It's so much about kind of, yeah, women, mothers, kind of ideas of generation and reproduction. You don't really see that so much with Jamestown, for example, where there's kind of a lot more kind of horrors around. You know, the kind of cannibalism and the fact that, you know, the first few years of colonial settlement there are so sort of dangerous and hard and kind of characterized by. Yeah, disease and famine and all these kinds of things. But I guess with Pocahontas, she serves a similar kind of symbolism in the colonial imagination at the time, in the sense that, you know, she's baptized, she becomes Christian, she's kind of whitened, if you like, by the colonists. But of course, she dies prematurely. She dies in England in 1617, having given birth to one child. But maybe because that child is male, I don't know, it doesn't seem to kind of grow up into a myth in the same. Obviously, Pocahontas is incredibly mythologised, but not in that same sense.
- [25:59]
Maddy Pelling
It's not really an origin story.
- [26:00]
Dr. Misha Yuen
No. And maybe not so much as a mother either. Not so much this idea of her being kind of like the mother of English America, but rather someone who kind of gets caught in the crosshairs of colonization, essentially.
- [26:11]
Maddy Pelling
Would you think it's fair to say that both Pocahontas and Virginia Dare kind of. They represent turning points in the story of America, at least, even if they have different stories, they're both a kind of a moment when they. And things do change.
- [26:24]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And I think this idea that what people in the 19th century believe is that Virginia Dare probably was assimilated within the indigenous community, so she becomes part of that kind of native community. And I guess with Pocahontas, we see the opposite. So there is this kind of parallel in some ways between their stories.
- [26:44]
Maddy Pelling
Talking about Pocahontas and her story Misha, and the fact that we do know how her story ends. Of course, the reality is with Virginia Dare, she may have been assimilated into an indigenous community, but we just don't know. And as Anthony set out there with that poem, the 19th century fills in these blanks. It makes up these stories, and it adds layers of myth. So what is the sort of typical 19th century version of Virginia that we get? What kind of endings to her story are put onto paper?
- [27:13]
Dr. Misha Yuen
So there are kind of different stories that emerge, but the kind of famous one is this idea of her as the white doe. So in this myth and this is a myth that apparently, you know, you can find in different parts of the kind of Chesapeake region, you know, this kind of white doe that you might see in the forest. And this idea that Virginia kind of grows up in this community of Native Americans, that she's this kind of beautiful young woman and a man falls in love with her, but someone else is jealous. And because of this kind of jealousy, this kind of wicked sorcerer turns her into the white doe and then her lover is kind of distraught with grief and she's shot through the heart with a kind of arrow. And it's all very kind of tragic, but I guess this idea that, you know, she kind of remains kind of like pure figure and actually she isn't corrupted, she doesn't kind of lose her chastity. She never actually kind of intermarries with a Native American man, but she's kind of, yeah, idealized. She's this kind of beautiful figure. And then I think into the 19th century, these other stories about her that she, you know, she's kind of older and she meets John Smith, you know, the kind of Jamestown colonist, and he falls in love with her and she's in this kind of almost like love triangle with John Smith and Pocahontas. So she kind of. She is kind of featured in these different, almost kind of like quite sometimes silly romantic stories, but often the kind of messaging behind them is quite sort of dark. And again is about this kind of portrayal of her as this white, pure, kind of feminine figure and also the.
- [28:34]
Maddy Pelling
Kind of claiming of her body as territory by different men, indigenous men and white men, thinking about obviously the colonists, but also John Smith potentially as well, that she's not only kept pure, but like the colony itself, she's something to be kind of claimed and protected and fought over.
- [28:51]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Yeah, and that's actually, I mean, the language of colonisation that's used by the Elizabethans is often about, you know, women's bodies actually in very kind of sexualized terms. So in, I think it's Eastwood Hoe by Ben Johnson, they talk about taking Virginia's maidenhead, you know, so this idea of the kind of pure virgin land obviously kind of relates to Elizabeth I as well. And so Virginia Dare just kind of neatly fits into that narrative that people already have about the colonization of Virginia.
- [29:31]
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- [30:40]
Anthony Delaney
I want to move slightly forward into the 20th century now. And. And so we have this thing where, as we go through the 19th century, particularly in Britain, where there is this thing to categorize and own and solve and understand. And I'm going to take us to 1937 and see how this starts to lend itself to this particular myth, I suppose is the best way to put it at this point. So we are now 350 years exactly since the establishment of the lost colony of Roanoke. And historian Heywood Pearce Jr. Is sitting in his office at Emory University in Georgia with his eyes closed when a mysterious stranger appears. This stranger is holding an item and he says that he has found this while looking for hickory nuts by the side of the road. And he dumps a 21 pound quartz stone on the desk. It's stained a light rusty brown, about the size of a large frying pan. On the smoother side of the stone is carved a crude Latin cross. Beneath the cross are inscribed these Ananias Dare and Virginia Went hence unto heaven, 1591. This was the first of many mysterious stones that would appear on Hayward Pierce Jr. S desk in the years that were to follow. Chiseled into them were messages that answered the mystery of what happened to the lost colonists of Roanoke and to Virginia Dare herself. Or did they? What exactly is going on here?
- [32:29]
Maddy Pelling
Misha I'm obsessed with the Darestones. I am obsessed with them. I love every element of the story. It's so ridiculous and so interesting in terms of its own historical context. But for people who maybe aren't obsessed with them, can you just explain what they are?
- [32:45]
Dr. Misha Yuen
There's this first stone that is found as you've described it, that has this, what appears to be Elizabethan carving on it that gives some account of what might have happened to the lost colonists. And this is this, you know, huge motion, I guess, for historians and archaeologists who, for, you know, essentially by this point, kind of centuries have been searching for the truth behind Roanoke. But after this first stone is found and kind of essentially verified as probably being authentic, there are several more that are kind of found. And nowadays we think that all the others are probably fakes, but this first one, actually, you know, a lot of historians do still think there is some.
- [33:24]
Maddy Pelling
Oh, wow.
- [33:25]
Dr. Misha Yuen
I mean, not. I mean, not necessarily including myself in this, but some people do think that.
- [33:29]
Maddy Pelling
Probably we demand this. That you say right here.
- [33:32]
Dr. Misha Yuen
I couldn't say one either, but that perhaps it is genuine. But, yeah, I mean, this is a time, though, I guess it's not long after the kind of 350th anniversary when we do get all these kind of commemorative stamps and kind of imagery about Roanoke. So, I mean, there's a sense in which perhaps, you know, it's kind of a bit, you know, it's quite dodgy and perhaps it is serving some kind of, you know, purpose.
- [33:54]
Maddy Pelling
Yeah, I mean, I think there are several things to say about it. The first for me is that because in the centuries since Roanoke has been lost, has disappeared, there has been so much myth building. And for me, I think part of the appeal of the Darestones in their own moment is that it feels like going back to the archaeology, it feels like here is tangible physical evidence on the site that could be used to explain the story. And so you can see what the appeal is. You can see the pull of it. Right. But also, you know, these are found. The first one appears in 1937. And thinking about American identity in that moment, it's coming out of the 20s and the Great Depression, and in the 30s in Europe, there's the rise of fascism. Sound familiar? Anyone? This context and that there's a sort of a reassessment once again of American identity, of kind of national myth, but also national future, and sort of projecting the past onto the future and making it work really hard for what future Americans want to be, what they want their country to look like. Like, to me, coming to the surface literally is tied to all of those things. And it's a very specific moment. And you can see why, even though we know now that most of them, if not all of them, are probably fake, that you can see why people would absolutely accept that in the moment and cling onto them, actually.
- [35:09]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Yeah. And it's also tying America to Englishness as well, and I think that's really important. So kind of in amongst all those things that you've already described, this idea of really wanting to of kind, you know, harken back to that kind of English identity and that kind of part of the kind of American origin story as well, and so kind of bringing in these characters, Dare and John White is a kind of reminder of those kind of links to England. And, you know, it was kind of English colonists who kind of gave birth to America, essentially. But America, you know, isn't black. It isn't Native American. It is white American and kind of.
- [35:45]
Maddy Pelling
Yeah.
- [35:45]
Dr. Misha Yuen
European, essentially.
- [35:47]
Anthony Delaney
That's kind of the overriding thing I'm getting from the ways in which this history goes on to be used in the myth making is. Is whiteness? Yeah, absolutely. Plastered all over us. And we have this. I'm looking at a stamp here as well, which is also from 1937. So we're commemorating something we don't know about, actually. And it says, in memory of Virginia dare, born Roanoke, 1587. And it's this very kind of bucolic, not period appropriate.
- [36:19]
Maddy Pelling
She's totally dressed as Victorian.
- [36:21]
Anthony Delaney
Yeah.
- [36:22]
Maddy Pelling
So this stump, I mean, it's completely remarkable and actually quite laughable, I think, in terms of the depiction. We've got who I assume is Eleanor Dare, sat down as a young woman. There's a man behind her, presumably her husband, and she's in this various sort of domestic scene. There's a basket of fruit on the floor. There's this spinning wheel behind her. She's this image of sort of perfect domesticity. And then in her arms is little baby Virginia, looking sort of healthy. And they look like they're a Victorian family, not necessarily from the 16th century.
- [36:53]
Dr. Misha Yuen
It's the image of America that many Americans at the time want to believe is the kind of origin of America, isn't it? Because actually, it completely erases. Yeah. The history of slavery, for example. It erases indigenous people. And I think, you know, the reason that kind of mothers and this idea of this kind of white mother is so important is because, you know, in the kind of history of America and the kind of legal history of America, children, you know, often kind of, you know, we think about them inheriting the kind of status of their fathers, but kind of in wider English America, in the context of transatlantic slavery, children actually inherit the status of their mothers. And that's a way to kind of ensure that enslaved mothers give birth to enslaved children. So although maybe the context has shifted somewhat by the 20th century, in the kind of centuries before, actually, the role of the mother is so important for kind of slavery versus freedom kind of ideas of race as well.
- [37:43]
Maddy Pelling
And people would have absolutely understood it in those terms.
- [37:45]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Yes, they would have understood it in those kinds of terms. And I guess, as well, you know, this image is created in kind of the 1930s, the kind of height of the Jim Crow era, lots of anxieties around things like the one drop rule. You know, how do you know who is black and who is white? And here you have, you know, this kind of very explicit. There's not a kind of. Of a stronger image of whiteness. I think, as you put it, that you could sort of imagine.
- [38:06]
Anthony Delaney
You might think we can maybe discuss this in brief, because it's a whole other episode unto itself. But then you start to ask, and I ask this as an Irish person who a lot of their national identity, my national identity is based on myths and myth making, too. But in the specific case of America, in this specific case, it's very difficult to treat this lightly, actually, because. Because we see how foundational it becomes, and we see how this idea of Americanness and whiteness and white Americanness is impacting. And I can hear the voices now going, why are we politicizing Virginia Dare? Why are we.
- [38:41]
Maddy Pelling
Well, she has been politicized since before she was born.
- [38:44]
Anthony Delaney
In fact, if you're not doing this to this, you're not doing history. So, I mean, you can take a seat and you can listen to the discussion or you can move on to something else that feeds into your narrative, but this is impacting us today or impacting American people today in terms of an idea of whiteness and Americanness.
- [39:01]
Maddy Pelling
This.
- [39:01]
Anthony Delaney
And it therefore becomes far more insipid, I think, than just a, oh, here's a wholesome, you know, myth that is part of our thing. Like, we have a guy hitting a schlitter into a wolf's mouth. Like, it's a very different thing. This is so racially coded that we and Americans are experiencing this in real time today. The impact of this very myth, because it's not a history, this isn't real. You know, because you talk about this subject with your students or, you know, what's the impact that they feel that this is having? How do they interpret this in the shaping of modern America potentially? Do they make those links? Do they see those links blatantly?
- [39:39]
Dr. Misha Yuen
We do. So I do teach the kind of early colonial history with my students, and many of them are kind of coming at this only ever having studied, say, the civil rights movement before. And there is something helpful about, I think, for them as kind of students being able to kind of reach back kind of, you know, several centuries in understanding where that history really began. And actually, it does begin in the 16th century with Roanoke. I mean, there aren't instances enslaved people in Roanoke, as far as we know, that won't happen until you Know, kind of another sort of, yeah, another generation with the colonisation of Jamestown and Bermuda. But already these kind of ideas about what the shape of English colonisation will look like are being kind of set in stone, essentially. And it is bound up with kind of racist ideas about Native Americans and kind of the civilizing work that people like Virginia and Eleanor Dare will do, as we saw in that 19th century poem. And how incredibly damaging that is over kind of many sort of centuries for indigenous people in America, but also then later kind of history of transatlantic slavery as well.
- [40:44]
Maddy Pelling
One thing that struck me, looking at that stamp of the very white, very 19th century version of Virginia, is that presumably that went out across America on the envelopes of multiple pieces of post and letters and expressions of love and demands for money and all of that. And that she's so literally written into that national story. But also that how many hands of the descendants potentially of Virginia imagining that she was assimilated into a Native American community, How many of her descendants picked up pieces of mail with that stamp on and that is her real legacy. Actually there may very well be at this point, gosh, can't do the maths or the biology, but presumably thousands and thousands of potential descendants who have been living in America for centuries and their history has been overwritten. Actually, Misha, if people want to read more about Roanoke or about your work on Jamestown, where can they find that? Where can they read more?
- [41:48]
Dr. Misha Yuen
So there's some great scholarship by James Horne, actually. He's written some fantastic books about Roanoke that I would definitely recommend. And also there is a journalist named Andrew Lawson who's also done a lot of investigative work, not just about Roanoke, but the that it kind of continues to fascinate as well. So I definitely recommend both of them. I kind of write a little bit about Roanoke in my book the Virginia Adventure, but I'm writing a new book which will be looking at kind of women in kind of colonisation the British Empire.
- [42:16]
Maddy Pelling
When can we expect that?
- [42:17]
Dr. Misha Yuen
Not for another couple of years.
- [42:18]
Maddy Pelling
Okay, well, we'll be waiting with bated breath for that. Misha, thank you so much. It's been absolutely fantastic. And thank you for listening to After Dark. If you have episode suggestions or want to get in touch, then you can After Dark History hit dot com. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, you can leave us a five star review. It helps other people to find us and it's always lovely to hear that you enjoy listening. If you're watching on YouTube, give us a big thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe.
- [42:49]
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