Virginia Dare

Virginia Dare
Virginia Dare
	US postage stamp issued in 1937, the 350th anniversary of Virginia Dare's birth
Born	August 18, 1587; Roanoke Island, Colony of Roanoke
Died	Unknown; Unknown

Virginia Dare (born August 18, 1587, date of death unknown) was the first English child born in America to English parents, Eleanor (or Ellinor/Elyonor) and Ananias Dare. She was born into the short-lived Roanoke Colony on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina, USA. What became of Virginia and the other colonists has become an enduring mystery. The fact of her birth is known because the leader of the colony, Eleanor Dare's father, John White, returned to England to seek assistance for the colony. When White returned three years later, the colonists were gone.

During the past four hundred years, Virginia Dare has become a prominent figure in American myth and folklore, symbolizing different things to different groups of people. She has been featured as a main character in books, poems, songs, comic books, television programs and films. Her name has been used to sell different types of products from vanilla products to wine and spirits. Many places in North Carolina and elsewhere in the Southern United States have been named in her honor.

Parents

Eleanor White Dare (born c.1563) of Westminster, London, England was the daughter of John White, the Roanoke colony's governor. While little is known about her life, more is known about her than most of the sixteen other women who left England in 1587 as part of the Roanoke expedition. She married Ananias Dare (born c. 1560), a London tiler and bricklayer,^[1] at St Bride's Church^[2] in Fleet Street, City of London. He too was part of the Roanoke expedition; very little else is known of him.

Historical explanations

John Smith and other members of the Jamestown Colony sought information about the fate of the colonists in 1607. One report indicated that the Lost Colonists took refuge with friendly Chesapeake Indians, but Chief Powhatan claimed his tribe had attacked the group and killed most of the colonists. Powhatan showed Smith certain artifacts he said had belonged to the colonists, including a musket barrel and a brass mortar. The Jamestown Colony received reports of some survivors of the Lost Colony and sent out search parties, but none were successful. Eventually they determined they were all dead.^[3]

However, in her 2000 book Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony, historian Lee Miller postulated that some of the Lost Colony survivors sought shelter with a neighboring Indian tribe, the Chowanoc, that was attacked by another tribe, identified by the Jamestown Colony as the "Mandoag," but who Miller thinks were actually the Eno, also known as the Wainoke. Survivors were eventually sold into slavery and held captive by differing bands of the Eno tribe, who, Miller wrote, were known slave traders. Miller wrote that English settlers with the Jamestown Colony heard reports in 1609 of the captive Englishmen, but the reports were suppressed because they had no way to rescue the captives and didn't want to panic the Jamestown colonists. William Strachey, a secretary of the Jamestown Colony, wrote in his The History of Travel Into Virginia Britania in 1612 that, at the Indian settlements of Peccarecanick and Ochanahoen, there were reportedly two-story houses with stone walls. The Indians supposedly learned how to build them from the Roanoake settlers.^[4] There were also reported sightings of European captives at various Indian settlements during the same time period.^[5] Strachey wrote in 1612 that four English men, two boys, and one maid had been sighted at the Eno settlement of Ritanoc, under the protection of a chief called Eyanoco. The captives were forced to beat copper. The captives, he reported, had escaped the attack on the other colonists and fled up the Chaonoke river, the present-day Chowan River in Bertie County, North Carolina.^[4]^[6]^[7] For four hundred years, various authors have speculated that the captive girl was Virginia Dare. When White left the colony in 1587, there were eighty-seven men, seventeen women and eleven children among the colonists. Virginia Dare was one of two infants born to colonists in 1587 and was the only female child in the Lost Colony.

Possible descendants

The Chowanoc tribe was eventually absorbed into the Tuscarora. The Eno tribe was also associated with the Shakori tribe and was later absorbed by the Catawba or the Saponi tribes. Today one group is known as the Haliwa-Saponi tribe. From the early 1600s to the middle 1700s European colonists reported encounters with gray-eyed American Indians or with Welsh-speaking Indians who claimed descent from the colonists.^[8]^[9] In 1669 a Welsh cleric named Morgan Jones was taken captive by the Tuscarora. He feared for his life, but a visiting Doeg Indian war captain spoke to him in Welsh and assured him that he would not be killed. The Doeg warrior ransomed Jones and his party and Jones remained with their tribe for months as a preacher.^[8] In 1701, surveyor John Lawson encountered members of the Hatteras tribe living on Roanoke Island who claimed some of their ancestors were white people. Lawson wrote that several of the Hatteras tribesmen had gray eyes.^[9] Some present-day American Indian tribes in North Carolina and South Carolina, among them the Coree and the Lumbee tribes, also claim partial descent from surviving Roanoke colonists. A non-profit organization, the Lost Colony of Roanoke DNA Project, has launched a Lost Colony DNA Project to test possible descendant.

Eleanor Dare Stones

From 1937 until 1941, the so-called "Dare Stones" were in the news. The 48 carved stones were allegedly found in northern Georgia and the Carolinas. The first bore an announcement of the death of Virginia Dare and her father, Ananias Dare, at the hands of "savages" in 1591. Later stones, brought in by various people, told a complicated tale of the fate of the Lost Colony. Later stones, each addressed to John White and signed with the name of Virginia's mother, Eleanor, called for revenge against the "savages" or gave her father the direction taken by the survivors. A stone dated 1592 indicated the survivors had reached a sanctuary in the Nachoochee Valley area and lived there in "primeval splendor." Another stone, dated 1598, indicated that Eleanor had married the "king" of the tribe, while another said she had borne the chief a daughter, the tribe was angry, and asked for White to send the infant girl to England. A stone dated 1599 announced Eleanor Dare's death and said she had left behind a daughter named Agnes.

Professor Haywood Pearce Jr. of Brenau College (now Brenau University) in Gainesville, Georgia, believed in the stones, and his views won over some well-known historians, according to contemporary press accounts. But a 1941 article by journalist Boyden Sparks in The Saturday Evening Post attacked the story, pointing to improbabilities in the stones' account and producing evidence that the "discoverers" were hoaxers. Pearce and the other scholars were not implicated in fraud, and no legal action was ever taken, but all of them renounced belief in the stones. Sparks theorized that the fakery was inspired by the 1937 publicity in North Carolina surrounding the 350th anniversary of the Lost Colony. Today, Brenau keeps the Dare Stones as a sort of 20th-century media curiosity, but generally does not display them or publicize their existence. The stones have a few supporters today, most notably Robert W. White, whose book A Witness For Eleanor Dare insists they were genuine and that criticism of them was false.

Symbolism

In the more than four hundred years since her birth, Virginia Dare has become a prominent figure in American myth and folklore, representing different things to different people. A 2000 article in the Piedmont Triad, North Carolina News and Record noted that, for many Americans, particularly Southerners, she symbolizes innocence and purity, "new beginnings, promise, and hope" as well as "adventure and bravery" in a new land. She also symbolizes mystery because of her mysterious fate.^[10] For some residents of North Carolina, she has been an important symbol of the state and the desire to keep it predominantly European-American. In the 1920s, a group that opposed suffrage for women feared that black women would get the vote. One group in Raleigh, North Carolina urged "that North Carolina remain white ... in the name of Virginia Dare."^[10] Today Virginia Dare's name is used for the anti-immigration group The VDARE Project.

Some people also see her as a symbol of women's rights. In the 1980s feminists in North Carolina called for state residents to approve the Equal Rights Amendment and "Honor Virginia Dare."^[10]

Literary and cultural references

The fate of Virginia Dare and the Lost Colony has been the subject of many literary, film, and television adaptations, all of which have added to her myth. One of the first was Cornelia Tuthill's 1840 novel Virginia Dare, or the Colony of Roanoke, in which Virginia marries a Jamestown settler. Virginia Dare met the Indian princess Pocahontas in E.A.B. Shackleford's 1892 novel Virginia Dare: A Romance of the Sixteenth Century. Virginia Dare was the main character in Sallie Southall Cotten's 1901 book in verse The White Doe: The Fate of Virginia Dare. In the book, she is turned into a white doe by an Indian witch doctor after she rejects his advances. When her true love, an Indian warrior, shoots her with a silver arrow, she turns back into a woman just before she dies in his arms. In the 1908 novel The Daughter of Virginia Dare, author Mary Virginia Wall made Pocahontas the daughter of Virginia Dare. In Herbert Bouldin Hawes' 1930 novel The Daughter of the Blood, Virginia Dare is involved in a romantic triangle with John Smith and Pocahontas.

Neil Gaiman has extended this story in his comic book series, "1602" where a time-traveling Captain America meets Virginia Dare when she is about twelve and an artifact of his travels causes her to transform into a series of white creatures whenever she is in danger. The storyline ends when Peter Parquagh and Virginia Dare head home to her father to plot the rescue of those left in England.

Other authors have given the myth a fantasy twist. In Philip José Farmer's 1965 novel Dare, Virginia and the other Lost Colonists are abducted by aliens and settled on a planet called Dare. In 1969, Steve Cannon wrote Groove, Bang and Jive Around, in which Virginia Dare is one of two stewardesses aboard the Statecraft One who engages in a wild orgy with Annette, the foxy adolescent chick from New Orleans, and Estavanico, "Little Stevie" to some, the flight engineer. Near the end, in the land of Oobladee, she is eventually magically transformed into a frail, old woman with a cane, who explains the reasons for which she was left to explore much darker horizons, sexually. Ultimately, she falls to the floor as a pile of ashes. Virginia Dare appears in Mark Chadbourn's fantasy sequence Kingdom of the Serpent, comprising the novels Jack of Ravens and The Burning Man with a third yet to be published. She is kidnapped along with the other Roanoke colonists and taken to the Celtic Otherworld, the home of all myth and legend. She plays a key role in the final volume of the trilogy. A woman named Virginia Dare appears in Gregory Keyes' fantasy novel The Briar King. Keyes uses several hints and word clues to indicate this character is meant to be the historical figure. Another fictionalized version of Virginia appears in the Neil Gaiman Marvel comic 1602. In the comic she is a shape shifter who is able to turn herself into a white doe and other white animals. In Volume I of Tales of the Slayer, a horror story collection set in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe, Virginia Dare appears as the vampire slayer "White Doe," an English girl adopted by the Croatoan Indians. She is turned into a white doe by a wizard of the tribe when she rejects his advances. Her true love, Seal of the Ocean, finds her but later kills her because he does not recognize her as a deer.

She was the main villain in the short-lived television show FreakyLinks. Inspired by The X-Files and The Blair Witch Project, it followed a young man who took over his twin brother's paranormal Web site, Freakylinks, after his death. It was later found that his brother's death was related to his investigations into the lost colony of Roanoke. It was implied that Virginia Dare was a demon who destroyed the colonists, either directly or indirectly. However, the show was canceled before the end of the first season, and the mystery was never resolved.

In the 2007 made-for-TV movie on the SciFi Channel, Wraiths of Roanoke Virginia Dare is the sole survivor after the colony is wiped out by Old Norse ghosts, or wraiths, who had died on the island centuries earlier but failed to achieve transit to Valhalla. In the movie the infant Virginia, whose innocence is needed by the wraiths, is used by her father to lure the wraiths onto a flaming raft set adrift for a Viking funeral. The last act of Ananias is to cast Virginia away from the raft in a wicker basket. She is found and adopted by the mainland Indians the next day.

In Caitlín R. Kiernan's novel Silk (1998), a character briefly encounters a ghostly young girl not far from the site of the "Lost Colony". The girl identifies herself as "Jenny Dare", and the author has stated that she had Virginia Dare in mind when the scene was written.

In Margaret Peterson Haddix's novel "The Missing Book 1: Found", where thirty six children are found in a mysterious plane, a character is used as Vriginia Dare, a baby who moves and grows up in the twenty-first century as a different person and soon finds out that her life isn't what it is really supposed to be. The cause of this is mean time-traveling freaks from the future who capture important children of the past and take them back to the future to be given up for adoption.

Susan B. A. Somers-Willet's chapbook Roam includes a running poem in six parts called "Virginia Dare", about the missing child and her grandfather.

In Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) several female characters order a drink called Virginia Dare. An alternative country band on the Absolutely Kosher Records label is also called Virginia Dare.^[11]

In Episode 16 of the CBS series, Moonlight, the name "Virginia Dare" appears on a list of vampire residents of Los Angeles sent anonymously to ADA Benjamin Talbot. Other famous names on the list include the "Mad Monk" Grigory Rasputin, the Marquis De Sade (by two names - Donatien Alphonse and Francois De Sade), "Bluebeard" Gilles De Rais, Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Richelieu, Caesars Julius and Augustus, "The Blood Countess" Elizabeth Bathory, and "Dracula" - Vladimir Tepes.

In the video game The Conduit, a secret message can be revealed in one of the early levels that reads "Where is Virginia Dare?".^{[citation needed]}

Tourism and advertising

Virginia Dare's name has become a tourist attraction for North Carolina. Many locations are named after Virginia Dare, including Dare County, North Carolina; the Virginia Dare Trail, a section of NC 12; Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge, the second, newest, and widest bridge spanning the Croatan Sound connecting Roanoke Island to Manns Harbor. It carries US 64. Residents of Roanoke Island celebrate Virginia Dare's birthday each year with an Elizabethan Renaissance Fair. A statue of Virginia as a grown woman, naked and wrapped in a buffalo skin, is on display in the Elizabethan Gardens on the island.^[10] At Smith Mountain Lake there is an active tour boat named Virginia Dare.

Virginia Dare's name has also been used to sell a number of products. Virginia Dare was the name of the first commercial wine to sell after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.^[12] The Virginia Dare Extract Company, a maker of vanilla products, sells its products with a symbol of Virginia as a fresh-faced, blonde woman wearing a white ruffled mob cap. The company's Web site notes that Virginia Dare symbolizes "wholesomeness and purity."^[13] In Rancho Cucamonga, California, a now-defunct winery on the corner of Haven Avenue and Foothill Boulevard (U.S. Route 66) is called Virginia Dare.

References

Miller, Lee, Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (2000), Penguin Books, ISBN 01420.0228 3
Stick, David, Roanoake Island: The Beginnings of English America (1983), University of North Carolina Press, ISBN 0807841102
White, Robert W., A Witness For Eleanor Dare (1992), Lexikos, ISBN 0938530518

Notes

^ Miller (2000), p. 27
^ St Bride's: American Connections
^ THE LOST COLONY: Roanoke Island, NC ~ Packet by Eric Hause: Articles about the Outer Banks NC and the Mainland
^ ^a ^b Stick (1983), p. 222
^ Miller (2000), p. 250
^ Miller (2000), p. 242
^ *Warner, Charles Dudley, Captain John Smith, 1881. Repr. in Captain John Smith Project Gutenberg Text, accessed April 1, 2008.
^ ^a ^b Miller (2000), p. 257
^ ^a ^b Miller (2000), p. 263
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Patterson, Donald W., "Time Hasn't Diminished the Image of Virginia Dare," News and Record (Piedmont Triad, N.C.) April 23, 2000
^ Virginia Dare
^ Wine Review Online - Wine Lore
^ Virginia Dare Extract Company