The origins of one of the America’s oldest unsolved mysteries
can be traced to August 1587, when a group of about 115 English settlers
arrived on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina.
Later that year, it was decided that John White, governor of the new
colony, would sail back to England in order to gather a fresh load of
supplies. But just as he arrived, a major naval war broke out between
England and Spain, and Queen Elizabeth I called on every available ship
to confront the mighty Spanish Armada. In August 1590, White finally
returned to Roanoke, where he had left his wife and daughter, his infant
granddaughter (Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the
Americas) and the other settlers three long years before. He found no
trace of the colony or its inhabitants, and few clues to what might have
happened, apart from a single word—“Croat”—carved into a wooden post.
The “Dare Stones”
In 1937, a twenty-one-pound quartz stone was found in a swamp
60 miles west of Roanoke. On one side was a cross and the instruction
“Ananias Dare & Virginia went hence Unto Heaven 1591.” On the other
were carvings that, when deciphered by faculty at Emory University, were
a message from Eleanor Dare to her father, John White, that the colony
had fled inland after an Indian attack.
The story told by the stones matched some of the details of
Strachey’s account, and a number of academics believed them. During the
next three years, nearly forty more stones were found in North Carolina,
South Carolina, and Georgia. Together, they told a story of the
colonists’ journey through the southeast, ending in the death of Eleanor
Dare in 1599.
The timing of the discovery, exactly 350 years after the
English settlement of Roanoke, made the “Virginia Dare Stones” a perfect
story, and the media jumped on it. In 1941, though, an article in The
Saturday Evening Post revealed the “discoverers” of the stones to have
staged an elaborate hoax. The stones were quickly forgotten by most
people, although there are others that state that the article in the
Post was biased for “tourist” reasons. There are many scholars that
still believe the first stone found to be authentic. But the other forty
stones, conveniently “found” after the fact, are definitely suspect and
most likely a hoax.
John Dee (1527-1609) was an English mathematician and astrologer
interested in divination using crystals and mirrors. This purple
crystal was used for curing disease
and predicting the future by looking for symbols or the ‘ghosts’ of
people in the stone. Dee claimed that this crystal was given to him by
the angel Uriel in November 1582, and that Uriel had instructed Dee and
his assistant Edward Kelley (1555-1597/8) on how to make the
Philosopher’s Stone – one of the goals of alchemy. The crystal was
entrusted to Dee’s son, Arthur (1597-1651) who passed it on to Nicholas
Culpeper (1616-1654) as a reward for curing his liver complaints. Culpeper was a physician and alchemist who used the crystal to try and cure illness, until 1651, when he believed a demonic ghost burst out from it.
One side of this carved ivory head shows a human face crawling
with worms; the other side shows a skull crawling with toads after the
worms have eaten away at the flesh. Not much is known about this model,
but it is thought that it is a memento mori – literally a reminder of
death and the shortness of life. The skull was the symbol of death from
the 1500s onwards. Previously death was represented as a skeleton
accompanied by a living victim.
That’s not my baby!
A “Changeling” was a creature from European folklore that
took the form of an infant. According to legends, a demon, troll, or
elf would swap a normal infant with a Changeling, leaving the parents to
discover a strange, emotionless, or disturbed hollow creature in place
of their child.
While today there are many scientific explanations to such
phenomena (autism, mental retardation, exposure to toxins, etc.) at the
time their were no rational explanations for such occurrences. To
Medieval parents Changelings were very real. Most tragically the method
of retrieving a child was to expose the Changeling, usually through
horrific form of abuse such as exposure to hot objects, leaving the
Changeling in a pile of manure at night, or near drowning. It was
thought that by exposing the Changeling to such danger, the fairies
would return the real child, not wanting their spawn to be harmed.
Religious reformer Martin Luther believed in a more drastic approach,
advocated infanticide when shown a Changeling in 1532;
“I, Dr. Martin Luther, saw and touched a changeling. It
was twelve years old, and from its eyes and the fact that it had all of
its senses, one could have thought that it was a real child. It did
nothing but eat; in fact, it ate enough for any four peasants or
threshers. It ate, shit, and pissed, and whenever someone touched it, it
cried. When bad things happened in the house, it laughed and was happy;
but when things went well, it cried. It had these two virtues. I said
to the Princes of Anhalt: “If I were the prince or the ruler here, I
would throw this child into the water–into the Molda that flows by
Dessau . I would dare commit homicidium on him!” (Weimar: Böhlau, 1912-1921)
Belief in Changelings would continue beyond the Middle Ages, even lasting in some rural communities into the 19th century.
For thousands of years women slowly poisoned themselves by
wearing face makeup called Venetian Ceruse. Venetian Ceruse was a 16th
century cosmetic used as a skin whitener. It was in great demand and
considered the best available at that time.
Ceruse had the effect of making a woman’s skin look ghastly white. The
women who wore it usually kept adding more to the old layer rather than
washing it off. But the pigment of white lead was extremely
poisonous. It rotted teeth and turned skin color to horrible shades. It
made hair fall out and caused eyes to swell. Usage of Venetian Ceruse over an extended period of time could cause death.
The most notable user of Venetian Ceruse was Queen Elizabeth I
of England seen above. It is believed that the Queen’s constant use of
ceruse, which created her trade-mark look of snow white skin, led to her
extreme hair loss. She wore a large variety of wigs during her reign.
There were many rumors that Queen Elizabeth I was bald by the age of 30
due to her extremely high hair line, but there is no historical proof to
verify this fact.
