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- [00:01]
William Duranpool
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com. the McDonald's snack wrap is back. You brought it back. Ranch snack wrap. Spicy snack wrap. You broke the Internet for a snack? Snack wrap is.
- [00:36]
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- [01:04]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [01:45]
Anita Anand
Hello and welcome to this episode of Empire with me, Anita Anand and me, William Duranpool. And we're all in sort of back of the bus mode because we've got one of our naughty guests back on who we actually adored. I mean, honestly, 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 who said, why are you finding this so bloody funny? It's a great tragedy. What's wrong with you? But you said it funny. It's not my fault you said it funny, but it was, it was a very funny and very marvellous episode.
- [02:32]
William Duranpool
Remind them, Anita, what it was that was funny.
- [02:34]
Anita Anand
Oh, well, I mean, the thing was, it was Mark gave this list of reasons, reasons why this colonization attempt may not have been successful. And among them were the fact that they took leather cannons. I mean, already I no 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.
- [03:00]
William Duranpool
Not, not great big potential market for bonnets, even today in Panama. The sky, I mean, honestly, what they.
- [03:06]
Anita Anand
Were up to, it was a planning snafu, as we say in the. Which Mark told really well. Anyway, welcome, Mark.
- [03:14]
Mark Horton
Oh, thank you.
- [03:15]
Anita Anand
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, Willi, do you want to give people an idea of what it is we're talking about?
- [03:33]
William Duranpool
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. And 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, you know, 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 or Meyer in our Irish series earlier in the year. And when the British ultimately start their progress towards India, all this the Victorians depict as this sort of inevitable progress to world domination. In reality, it was a period of enormous setbacks. And half 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 sort of battered hulls punct punctured by icebergs and pike wielding crews mauled by polar bears. And 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 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. And 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 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 a Empire scoop.
- [06:21]
Anita Anand
Yes, it's a scoop, but also the story, when you say the story, the story kind of, you know, 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. This is an absolute study in, one might say, racism, because it has every racist trope in it, you know, 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 colored archaeological research as well, didn't it?
- [07:05]
Mark Horton
Absolutely. I mean, you would have thought this founding story about America, historians, archaeologists, would actually go to Croatoan island, the initials on the tree, and actually go and look for them. Blinding the obvious. They obfuscated it a bit by saying, well, the Croton would try, but John White, who'd done the map, actually put Curturn 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?
- [07:41]
William Duranpool
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?
- [07:55]
Mark Horton
That's right. I mean, you've got to realize the racist view is all connected with Manifest Destiny and the notion the white man has the right to colonize 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 had sex with a Native American and her descendants would be Native Americans. That was just too much for these racist historians.
- [08:44]
Anita Anand
So let's just lay out the story and flesh it out a little bit more. You mentioned John White. Just tell us exactly who John White was who marked the place on the map.
- [08:53]
Mark Horton
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. A 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 2, 300 years. The folios are in the British Museum. Some of the finest, the most important things in the British Museum, actually. And then when it then came to set up a settler colony, the one that was rescued, was rescued by Francis Drake in 1585. So the settler colony went out in 1586 with women and children, including his own daughter, Eleanor Dare, who was married to Anesthesis Dare, who was one of the colonists. So John White went back as the governor of this third colony, the settlers colony, and while he was there, his daughter gave birth to Virginia, named Virginia, obviously, after the Virgin Queen. And unfortunately, or 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. But 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 Croton written on the palisade of the abandoned fort. Unfortunately, he couldn't get back. He knew they were in Croatoan island. He'd mapped it earlier. But he was on a pirate ship, basically, who wanted to go a pirating.
- [10:54]
William Duranpool
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. And 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 mine and diverted to Charing Cross and Whitehall.
- [11:31]
Mark Horton
That's right. So the captain of the ship wouldn't let him go and find his daughter on the island of Croton, 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 Hakluyt, who was the main documenter of these Elizabethan voyages at the time.
- [11:52]
William Duranpool
He's the one witness of the founding of the East India Company in 1599, which is the same sort of period.
- [11:57]
Mark Horton
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.
- [12:18]
William Duranpool
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? What's the backstory to your involvement in this extraordinary tale?
- [12:32]
Mark Horton
The stuff is well known and I've always been interested in pioneer colonies. We did some work in Bermuda and Saint Kitts and Saint Lucia.
- [12:40]
William Duranpool
Unlike you to choose a very nice Caribbean island to do your digs in.
- [12:43]
Mark Horton
That's right.
- [12:44]
Anita Anand
Sorry. Don't mock the man. He's in Birmingham now. He gets in the work as well.
- [12:48]
William Duranpool
He said, National Trust rally or something.
- [12:50]
Anita Anand
He puts the hard grafted as well.
- [12:53]
Mark Horton
But critically, I thought, well, the lost colony is the biggest nut crack of all. Go and see if we can investigate it. So there was an enthusiast called Scott Dawson who was living a. Basically a school teacher on the island and he's descendant from the very first European settlers, English settlers on, on the island Hatteras. And he was obsessed and wrote a little book about it saying that, you know, why aren't we looking for all these things? So I went and visited him and he said, well, I'll organize 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, otherwise 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.
- [13:58]
William Duranpool
And when did you do this, Mark? When was this?
- [14:00]
Mark Horton
Well, 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. 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, so 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 artifact that might be in there.
- [14:53]
Anita Anand
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?
- [15:13]
Mark Horton
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, and 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 and had a huge amount of publicity. Now, Greene 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 and, and some might have even been assimilated into local villages, looked after by the Indians.
- [16:16]
Anita Anand
Did he suggest it in such a paternalistic way that they were looked after or was there, you know, that they were taken and kind of forced?
- [16:22]
Mark Horton
No, no, no, no. It was a very paternalistic thing that they would have been looked after.
- [16:26]
William Duranpool
So this was not a racist play?
- [16:28]
Mark Horton
It was not a racist play. Well, it was like, I mean, the actors were blacked up as Indians, all that kind of stuff. So until about three years ago, actually. So, yeah, there was a certain amount of racism in the play about these savage Indians and things with various battle scenes and so forth between the Indians, which had been played out. But it ultimately had a liberal view. But this was too much for what Mike describe as the racist historians that were very much dominant in America in the 1930s. There's a group of historians known as 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.
- [17:26]
Anita Anand
In California, in Berkeley of all places, like the most liberal place that you could go to on planet Earth these.
- [17:33]
Mark Horton
Days, was 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 to a right wing racist cause because they saw Nazi ideas about racial purity is very much the same as theirs in terms of the issue of black people in their society.
- [18:15]
Anita Anand
Miscegenation was the word of the era, wasn't it? You do not mix bloods.
- [18:20]
Mark Horton
And 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 Greene'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 has said with the initials on the tree and what was being promoted with this fabulously popular play.
- [19:06]
Anita Anand
The stratagem is evil and awful. And we should introduce one of the prime movers 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?
- [19:22]
Mark Horton
He was the leading Berkeley historian of his day. And 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.
- [19:33]
Anita Anand
So what did he do? What did he do? What did he do?
- [19:35]
Mark Horton
So he was. 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 paper brass, that through the meticulous research of a historian called Melissa Darby, who I'm be working with on this, has unearthed exactly the link to Bolton. And 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 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. Worked out to be a bit of rolled late Victorian brass plate. It could not have been Elizabethan.
- [20:37]
Anita Anand
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?
- [20:48]
Mark Horton
And 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. Baltimore also made a great deal of money out of it as a historical consultant because he was the person everyone went to to translate it and so forth.
- [21:20]
William Duranpool
It's a fabulous story. So this is the founding myth of North America based on not one, but two enormous fakes. So tell us the second fake.
- [21:31]
Mark Horton
So having successfully, as it were, defrauded the world with the plate of brass, it was a very simple thing to go and defraud the world with this Darestone, 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 Charon river, which is basically Albemarle Creek behind Roanoke island, collecting hickory nucks, where he stumbled upon this quartzite stone with this inscription that he didn't have any idea of what it was. His name was Elie 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. Emory University. He was a Dunninite and connected again to the Bolton cogerie. And so the stone was taken to him to decipher more money, change 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.
- [22:47]
Anita Anand
What did they decipher? What did this bunch of hoodlums decide? It said so it's still there.
- [22:53]
Mark Horton
You can still see the stone and it describes how the savages had murdered all but seven of the colonists, including, of course, Virginia Dare and Anastasia Dare. And this stone was signed Eleanor Dare, basically said that, please, if anyone finds this stone, we've gone for walkies and please give it to my father.
- [23:16]
William Duranpool
And 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?
- [23:26]
Mark Horton
Yes. So the historians have to kill her.
- [23:28]
William Duranpool
Off by savages, kill her off by.
- [23:30]
Anita Anand
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, it'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 going, it's designed to pull on the heartstrings and hate strings of anyone who already believes that these people are sav.
- [24:08]
William Duranpool
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 and Trump's.
- [24:28]
Mark Horton
Ideology and the maga movement and underpinning notions of racism and immigration and everything else.
- [24:35]
Anita Anand
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?
- [24:43]
Mark Horton
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's managed to prove this because she's got their signatures. So when Stone was handed over to Emory University, it had to be notarized and so he signed it. And she's also unearthed the signature of George Hammond. So what George Hammond did was change his earlier on a tattered old driving license because you had to have some form of identity and to change the le 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.
- [25:43]
Anita Anand
Look, we're going to take a break, but what we have here, it is a conspiracy, fraud.
- [25:48]
Mark Horton
It's extraordinary historical conspiracy.
- [25:52]
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- [26:49]
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- [26:54]
Mark Horton
Light em up Johnny.
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- [26:58]
Mark Horton
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- [27:00]
Anita Anand
Trust me, I hate that.
- [27:02]
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Bad plan. Come on. Terrible. That's a stupid plan.
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- [27:23]
Mark Horton
Welcome back.
- [27:24]
William Duranpool
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.
- [27:37]
Mark Horton
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 darestone was perpetuated within 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. I 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.
- [28:16]
Anita Anand
But on what ground? 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, you know, just saying, no, this is just completely unacceptable?
- [28:27]
Mark Horton
For which reason they didn't give any reasons.
- [28:29]
Anita Anand
So she shows them the signatures, she shows them the license, she shows them all of that, the timeline, everything is. And they say, well, no, we don't want to have a look at it. That's right. That's it. Okay, now we need to dig into your dirt a bit more because I wouldn't advise it.
- [28:43]
William Duranpool
Anita.
- [28:45]
Anita Anand
Yeah, he's a friend of yours. 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?
- [28:56]
Mark Horton
I mean, the deathstone 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 ripe period and then see whether we can find material culture associated with the Elizabethan colonists in the, as it were, middens. The rubbish heat of these Native American villages, very simple methodology, and they have huge middens, meters 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. Though we noticed persistently stuff that only Europeans would have. So we, for example, had pins, dress pins. We had dress clasps.
- [30:02]
William Duranpool
Not impossible, though, that these could be traded.
- [30:04]
Mark Horton
That's right. And in fact, we have really good evidence for trade because what we found was three coin weights dated 1643. These are weights that peddlers, itchinerant 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. You could work out its value or its authenticity or whatever. So we had. We found three coin weights. So clearly they were in contact with Jamestown. We found brass, for example. Sheet brass was clearly coming in as part of these imports. We found lots of beads, which also part of this trade. But we also found gun barrels, musket balls that they were making. We found, presumably, evidence for gunpowder. We found the fact that they were shooting deer because we could see the fracture marks on their deer bones. So they had firearms, they were wearing European clothes. But they're also Native Americans, clearly.
- [31:06]
William Duranpool
And what's the nature of the settlement that you're digging? I mean, are you digging a settlement or digging a midden on the edge of a settlement?
- [31:11]
Mark Horton
Oh, we're digging both. So we dug the settlement area, which was an area full of post holes.
- [31:16]
William Duranpool
Implying something more substantial than wigwams, you're saying?
- [31:19]
Mark Horton
Yes, absolutely. No, no, These are very substantial buildings that they're putting up and being rebuilt on new. Almost too many post holes to actually work out the plan because they're all one on top of another, as it were. And then behind, off the edge of the sand dune is the midden deposits where all they threw all their rubbish down. So some of these artefacts are found in the settlement.
- [31:40]
William Duranpool
And for an archaeologist finding a midden, just for those who haven't worked on a dig, is the gold dust. Cause that's where you find all the leftovers and all the goodies.
- [31:48]
Anita Anand
Yes. Imagine that. Our rubbish will be few, hopefully, God willing, if we're around that long. But they'll be digging around in our trash as well to tell our story. So just think of that when you throw stuff away, that's what's gonna happen. So.
- [32:00]
Mark Horton
Absolutely. So everyone was saying, oh, no, it can't be, because they are. You know, they could trade it from Jamestown. You know, they like European clothes. The site is quite unlike any other Native American sites in the region.
- [32:12]
William Duranpool
And the post holes, are they implying something quite different from other Native American sites? I mean, are they rectangular buildings as opposed to sort of round?
- [32:19]
Mark Horton
They're probably rectangular buildings. We get evidence of daub, for example.
- [32:24]
Anita Anand
Which is not what the Native Americans did, it's what Europeans did. So, I mean, that's. That's the conclusion that you're finding, is that you know, look, this is so specifically English. It isn't. As a result, you know, trade doesn't explain that, doesn't explain the post holes, doesn't explain the construction of these buildings. It doesn't explain the things that we're finding here. That's right, isn't it? I'm just trying to make it very clear that that's what you're saying.
- [32:46]
Mark Horton
Absolutely. We do have one historical. I know you being historians who like history. There's one historical account written by somebody called John Lawson in the early 1700s who traveled along the Outer Banks. And he described the people on Hatteras island as people who could read from the book, who had grey eyes and.
- [33:08]
William Duranpool
Wore European clothes, but were basically, in his view, Native Americans.
- [33:13]
Anita Anand
Oh, mixed race.
- [33:14]
Mark Horton
And he describes also how they have this story about this ghost ship called Water Rally that was wrecked upon these shores. And so it's all garbled and it's 120 years later, a garbled version of the arrival of the lost colonists.
- [33:31]
Anita Anand
So as you're, as you're finding this stuff out and your heart must be beating faster and faster and faster, and you, Melissa, must be getting into, you know, a frenzy of phone calls about this stuff. Are you getting pushback even then from people saying, you know what? No, we can explain this. This is trade, this is something else. I don't know what you're, why you're drawing these conclusions. Talk a little bit more about that. I mean, what was that like?
- [33:51]
William Duranpool
And is it from your society or people outside the society that you've set up who is pushing back?
- [33:56]
Mark Horton
It's basically the North Carolina, I must say too, frankly. But there have been various other attempts to look for the site on the Albemarle and the Choan river, right next door to where the Dare Stone was discovered. And this is the famous Site X. And there's an organization called the First Colony foundation that's been doing investigations and has claimed to have found late 16th and 17th century material in the Albemarle on this mysterious and unlocated site called Site X.
- [34:27]
William Duranpool
Just so I understand, these guys have found material which indicates what, what's their theory?
- [34:33]
Mark Horton
Well, they found pottery called border ware, which is the type of pottery that dates from the late 16th into the late 17th century. It's made in the Surrey borderlands. Surrey, Sussex border. It's green glazed pottery and it's found all over Jamestown and so forth, for example. And it's a bit of a sort of evidence of European settlement. The trouble is, you can't date border ware between these dates. There's very little typological change between the late 16th and into the 17th century. And we know that a later colonist called Nathaniel Batt was very active in this area in the 1640s. So there's no reason why, you know, that stuff isn't, as it were, generation two generations later than the date that they claim.
- [35:20]
Anita Anand
I've written down a thing which I need to ask about, hammer scale. Can you tell me what a hammer scale is and why it's significant?
- [35:25]
Mark Horton
So we were happy at this point to say, well, okay, it could be trade, it could be settlement. We haven't found the smoking gun. Everyone says the only way you're going to ever find if you dig up a burial and do the DNA. But we have strong ethical issues about that. Digging up Native American remains is very tricky for all sorts of ethical, legal reasons in America.
- [35:49]
William Duranpool
But you haven't actually found the Native American remains or you think you know where they are?
- [35:53]
Mark Horton
Well, let's say there have been records of them on the island in the past, but one wouldn't want to go hunting for them for ethical reasons. So, you know, that particular line of argument is certainly closed down to us. Other people have tried to look at modern DNA, but of course, finding, as it were, a direct ancestral link back to the lost colonists using ancestral DNA is also rather hard given the scale of English settlement that's happened since the 17th and 18th centuries, and also the.
- [36:23]
William Duranpool
Difficulty of dating at what point any intermarriage, if it did happen, happened.
- [36:28]
Mark Horton
So we were basically hanging around for smoking gun. And this came about this last summer in one of these famous buckets of deposits. So we. We'd excavated through the 18th century, 17th century layers through a great big thick shell midden that contained no European material in it at all. Or maybe a little bit of daub.
- [36:50]
William Duranpool
Which, again, just to clarify, shell midden is the mussels or the oysters or whatever they're eating. And so you have a bunch of people living on the coast just putting their shells on the edge of the rubbish dump.
- [36:59]
Mark Horton
That's correct. And then underneath that we found a pit. So we've got a good thick set of properly sealed. Underneath that we found a pit. And in that pit, Scott, when he went through the buckets, found hammerscale. Huge quantities, significant quantities of hammer scale.
- [37:16]
Anita Anand
Not all of us know what a hammer scale is. So come on, explain.
- [37:19]
Mark Horton
So hammerscale is the bits of metal that come off when you strike iron, bar iron, or reworking it's basically if you go to a blacksmith shop, the floor will be covered in hammer scale. As you strike the iron, little bits, little splinters come off.
- [37:35]
Anita Anand
Shrapnel. It's blacksmithing shrapnel. Okay, got it.
- [37:38]
Mark Horton
And it looks like scales of a fish, really, but metal, and it's magnetic, so you can spot it really quickly. Put a magnet on and out stuff comes. To get hammerscale, you have to heat the iron red hot, almost white hot. So you have to have a furnace, you have to have bellows, you have to really do intense, as it were, metallurgical activity.
- [37:59]
Anita Anand
None of which is indigenous.
- [38:01]
Mark Horton
None of which is indigenous.
- [38:02]
Anita Anand
Wow. Okay.
- [38:04]
Mark Horton
And so this cannot be traded because this is hammer scale as a result of smithing activities. And we're very certain that we've got radiocarbon dates, that this pit has radiocarbon dates from the late 16th, early 17th century.
- [38:18]
William Duranpool
This is very, very exciting. This is as close as you can get to that smoking working garden.
- [38:23]
Mark Horton
So the presence of metalworking in the late 16th, early 17th century. So whoever was there was working. Now, one of the sites we excavated early on, which is another late 16th century site, contained a slab of bar iron. We know from Richard Hatlett's Discourse on colonial plantations that they would have taken this bar iron with them, they would have taken blacksmiths with them, they would have taken shipwrights and so forth, all of whom would have been metallurgists.
- [38:54]
William Duranpool
So just to again clarify, so Hakluyt is writing, in a sense, a kit that colonists take out with them, and it's a to do list or what you must pack if you're flat.
- [39:03]
Anita Anand
Pack colony.
- [39:04]
William Duranpool
Exactly.
- [39:05]
Anita Anand
That's what it is. Exactly. I am just blown away by this. And this is in the last year you found all this stuff?
- [39:12]
Mark Horton
This is the last year, yes.
- [39:13]
Anita Anand
Bloody hell.
- [39:14]
Mark Horton
So combination with Melissa's brilliant work on the darestone and the fact that we've got, you know, this smoking gun evidence in there with the clear evidence that they're making iron, they're forging iron. Of course, the next question is, why are they forging it? Which I'm sure you're going to ask.
- [39:30]
William Duranpool
Me why they're forging it.
- [39:34]
Mark Horton
So this is really intriguing. Well, maybe to make nails to build their houses.
- [39:38]
William Duranpool
And do these post holes come with associated nails?
- [39:41]
Mark Horton
We find a few nails in the deposits, so that is possible.
- [39:45]
William Duranpool
And they're European style nails?
- [39:47]
Mark Horton
Well, they're nails.
- [39:51]
Anita Anand
Kind of pointy bit and a bit to hit. Okay. All right. Okay.
- [39:54]
Mark Horton
And so the really intriguing thing is, are they Actually making nails for shipbuilding. And this is the really exclusive idea.
- [40:01]
William Duranpool
European style.
- [40:03]
Mark Horton
European. But were they actually, they. All they had was a couple of. Also known as pinnaces, which are slights of large yachts, really in size, 10 meters long, something like that? Maximum. Certainly not.
- [40:15]
William Duranpool
How do you know that?
- [40:16]
Mark Horton
Because from the nails from historical sources. So we know they were left with two pinnaces. And they could easily have disassembled those pinnaces because of course, it had all the nautical kit on it and rebuild with plenty of sources of oak on the islands and so forth, and could rebuilt there in order to escape. And of course, if they might then have been lost at sea, we have no knowledge. Obviously they never made it to any historical sources. But you think this is odd, but we have two very well documented cases of people abandoned who then build their own boats to go home. Both actually in 1609, the Sea Venture. These were the people shipwrecked on Bermuda.
- [40:59]
William Duranpool
Bermuda was meant to be rather improbably a Puritan colony, wasn't it?
- [41:04]
Mark Horton
That's right. But it was discovered in the shipwreck by these people who were resupplying Jamestown in 1609. And they realized that on this uninhabited island was wonderful, but they want to get home. So they then built a ship, salvage what they could from the Sea Venture and build a ship and sail back, sailed on to Jamestown.
- [41:24]
William Duranpool
So, Mark, rewrite the story then. So we start with the story at the beginning of this episode of Colonies left on Roanoke Island. And when the finally the rescue fleet comes, there's no one there, and they've disappeared. Now, in your version, after what you've dug and what you've found, what's your best guess for what happened to these guys?
- [41:46]
Mark Horton
So they load all their stuff on board these small boats and go to Hatteras Island. They have good reasons why they want to go to Hatteras Island. And it's where Manio, who was their great supporter, he was a Native American and he came back, he met Queen Elizabeth, was brought back to England. He was bilingual, he spoke Algonquian language, but also he spoke English. He was baptized, and he was their great friend and supporter. And he was the chief or sub chief of the tribe of the Croatians on Croatoan. And so the key thing about Cape Hatteras is that it sticks out into the Atlantic. So any ship that's coming back to Europe has to go past Cape Hatteras because it sticks out. You've got the Gulf Stream that comes out and then goes eastward across the Atlantic. So Cape Hatteras is exactly a place where you want to go, because you can sit there on the huge sand dunes, look out to sail, light a fire if the English are coming to rescue you.
- [42:45]
William Duranpool
Robinson Crusoe stuff. Exactly.
- [42:47]
Mark Horton
Absolutely. So you've got friendly Native Americans who look after you. You light your fires. You have lookouts watching for ships coming. If it's Spanish, you go and hide. If it's the English coming to rescue you, you go and light a big fire.
- [43:00]
Anita Anand
Okay, so I've had this question in the back of my head. It's now going to come out of my mouth. Indians have oral history. Is there an oral history that talks of settlers coming in to an Indian village and assimilating with the local people? I mean, these stories get passed down for, you know, hundreds, thousands of years. Is this story in the oral tradition anywhere in any of the tribes, anywhere near this place?
- [43:24]
Mark Horton
Not really. It's obviously in Lawson's account where he picked up all history in 1700. But it seems that the Croatoan Indians were largely wiped out in the course of the 18th century. They played a part in the French Indian wars. They were resettled. And there's a tribe called the Lumbay who live up in the interior of North Carolina, who claimed descent from the lost colonists. But we suspect that it was probably mostly created in the 19th century to give them, as it were, an advantage to the English authorities so they could get better education and so forth.
- [44:02]
William Duranpool
And, Mark, what is your strategy now? If. If you found that there's great institutional inertia, rejecting your findings or ignoring your findings, how are you planning to do a documentary? Write a book? Because this is a really important discovery.
- [44:17]
Mark Horton
Yeah, absolutely. We did a documentary which recently was shown on PBS for the Discovery Channel, was then shown on pbs, but that was pre hammer scale. So I do think that time is now, right, that we need to tie in this whole interpretation the racist misinterpretation and the reluctance in even modern America to accept that the old first English were assimilated into Native American communities. I mean, it rewrites the origin history of America.
- [44:50]
Anita Anand
I am shook and I am seriously. This is an extraordinary story, and we feel kind of privileged to have you on so soon after the event to talk about these things. Look, it is always such a great privilege, and we're going to have you on to talk about the Panama Canal as well, because that's another place where you've been a digging. Some extraordinary stories have come from that. But thank you so very much. That's about it from us. Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.
- [45:20]
William Duranpool
And goodbye from me, William Durimple.