The Lost Rocks: The Dare Stones and the Unsolved Mystery of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony

Was Hammond who he claimed to be? La Vere thinks maybe he was. And, if so, then the Dare Stone (the first stone) is genuine and American History is re-written. No small thing. The story seems plausible: a retiree on a motor excursion with his wife, finds a stone carved with old English script. Thinking it might be directions to pirate treasure, he cleans it over the next few months to the point where he finds its message meaningless and so passes it off to some academics who might make better sense of it. By the end of the book I'd bought in to the possibility the stone was genuine but something that La Vere himself had brought up nagged at me. What was the chance that after 350 years in the same six months a rock would be found that would publicize a Festival about the same people who had created the rock? Impossible coincidence! But then I remembered that the festival was part of a larger commercial development and that Route 17 had just been built to bring people to this development, and that it cut through a swamp that was accessible for the first time in 350 years. With that connection it didn't seem like such a coincidence after all.