VIRGINIA DARE

'Virginia Dare' (born August 18 1587) was the first child born in the Americas to English parents, Eleanor (or Ellinor/Elyonor) and Ananias Dare. She was born into a short-lived colony on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina. 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.

Contents

Historical explanations

Possible descendants

Literary References

References in popular culture

Comics

Things named after Virginia Dare

See also

Notes

References

External links

Historical explanations

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, the Eno. 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. There were also reported sightings of European captives at various Indian settlements during the same time period.^[1] William Strachey, a secretary of the Jamestown Colony, wrote in 1611 that four English men, two boys, and one girl had been sighted at the Eno settlement of Ritanoe, where they were forced to beat copper. The girl, he reported, escaped and fled up the river.^[2] 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. 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.^[3] 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.^[4] 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.^[5] 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 Center for Science and Research has launched a Lost Colony DNA Project to test possible descendants.

Literary References

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''.
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 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.
From 1937 until 1941, the so-called "Dare Stones" were in the news. The carved stones were allegedly found in northern Georgia and the Carolinas. The first bore an announcement of Virginia Dare's death. Later ones, brought in by various people, told a complicated tale of the fate of the Lost Colony. 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.
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.

References in popular culture

Comics

In Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert's eight-issue Marvel Comics limited series Marvel 1602, Virginia Dare is the daughter of Ananias Dare, and the first English child born in the Americas. In this world, the Roanoke Colony did not disappear in the 1580s. Inspired by a legend that Virginia was killed in the shape of a white deer, Gaiman gives his version shapeshifting powers. She is able to become any real animal, including the Dinosaurs that in this timeline still survive in America, as well as a griffin-like form.

Things named after Virginia Dare

★ Dare County, North Carolina

★ The VDARE Project

★ 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

★ The first commercial wine to sell after repeal of Prohibition in 1933 [1].

★ Virginia Dare Extract Company, a maker of vanilla products

★ An alt-country band on the Absolutely Kosher Records label

See also

★ Lost Colony

Notes

1. Miller (2000), p. 250
2. Miller (2000), p. 242
3. Miller (2000), pp. 257, 263
4. Miller (2000), p. 257
5. Miller (2000), p. 263

References

★ Miller, Lee, ''Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony'' (2000), Penguin Books, ISNB 01420.0228 3
White,Robert W. "A Witness For Eleanor Dare"

External links

★ Searching for the Lost Colony Blog

★ Lost Colony Center for Science and Research