Eleanor Dare

Eleanor Dare (née White; c. 1568 – after 18 August 1587) of Westminster, London, England, was a member of the Roanoke Colony and the daughter of John White, the 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. It is known that she gave birth to their daughter Virginia Dare on Roanoke Island, in what is now the state of North Carolina. The girl was the first child of English parents to be born in North America, on 18 August 1587, shortly after their arrival. Eleanor Dare, along with everyone else remaining in the "Lost Colony", disappeared during the two years before her father returned to the colony with supplies from England.

Roanoke colony

In her book Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (2000), anthropologist Lee Miller speculates that Eleanor and the other members of the Roanoke Colony were religious Separatists who left England at a time when the political climate in England was dangerous for such religious dissidents. She suggests that this might be why the colonists, two of whom were pregnant women and several of whom were parents with young children, were willing to undertake the dangerous journey to

William Strachey, a secretary of the Jamestown Colony, wrote in his The History of Travel Into Virginia Britania (1612) that, at the Indian settlements of Peccarecanick and Ochanahoen, there were reportedly two-story houses with stone walls,built in the English fashion. The Indians supposedly learned how to build them from the Roanoke settlers.^[3] There were also reported sightings of European captives at various Indian settlements during the same time period.^[4] Strachey wrote in 1612 that four English men, two boys, and one girl 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 Choanoke river, the present-day Chowan River in Bertie County, North Carolina.^[3][5]

Possible descendants

The Chowanoc tribe was eventually absorbed into the

Eleanor Dare stones

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 the death of Eleanor's daughter, Virginia Dare and her husband, Ananias Dare, at the hands of "savages" in 1591. Successive stones describe Eleanor's eventual marriage to an Indian and her death. Most of the stones were exposed as forgeries in 1941. But some scholars believe that the first "Dare Stone" is authentic.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• List of colonists at Roanoke
• List of people who disappeared

Notes

References

• Miller, Lee, Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (2000), Penguin Books,
  ISBN 0-14-200228-3
• White,Robert W., A Witness For Eleanor Dare (1992), Lexikos,
  ISBN 0-938530-51-8

• Ananias Dare at the Lost Colony Retrieved April 2011
• Account of the Roanoke settlements Retrieved April 2011