Roanoke Island

 

Isn’t it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so we could discover them!

—Wright Brothers 

I’ll be honest. When I first began analyzing this puzzle, I wasn’t very excited about it. Based on John Jude Palencar’s prediction that this would be the next puzzle solved, I had gotten the impression that most everything had been worked out and that there wasn’t much left to do. In retrospect, levels 1 and 2 were figured out—but that was it! Let’s begin with how others have concluded that Roanoke Island is the general location of this casque, methods and conclusions with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Welcome to Level 1. 

In the Roanoke Island episode of The Secret Podcast, you can hear guest Brian Zinn solve the Roanoke acrostic in real time. It’s very cool. In Image 3, the items hanging to the right of the armor can be described as round, angled, nothing, and key. That gives us the Roanoke acrostic:

round

angled

nothing

key

Furthermore, just to the right of the largest bell there is a number 3 hidden in the cracks. Just to the left of the right-most bubble is the number 6. This gives us 36. Further down in the image, below the 36 is hidden the number 75, overlapping a bit. You can see these highlighted for you at thesecret.pbworks.com. These are the degree portions of the latitude and longitude for the Wright Brothers Memorial, which relates to the first line of Poem 11:

Pass two friends of octave

In December

Octave Chanute was a close friend of the Wright Brothers and a fellow aviation pioneer. This places us at the Wright Brothers Memorial. Orville and Wilbur’s first flight was in December 1903.

Ride the man of oz

From the Memorial we take highway 12 (December being the twelfth month) over the Washington Baum Bridge to Roanoke Island. L. Frank Baum authored the famous book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 

To the land near the window

In Image 3, just to the right of the window is the outline of Roanoke Island hidden in the cracks. This matches Image 3 to Poem 11 and confirms that Roanoke Island is our general location. The month of this puzzle is January as evidenced by one o’clock on the pocket watch. The birthstone is garnet and the flower, carnation. 

Welcome to Level 2. 

Now let’s look at the image and ask some questions. Again, you’ll need to acquire Image 3. This image is easily the most detailed of the twelve paintings. The sheer volume of information accosts the senses. Believe it or not, the following is all I’ve got for questions. The image is so cluttered and strange that only the following stand out to me:

• Why are there random items hanging from the arms of the armor?

• What is the meaning of the bizarre positioning of the fingers?

• Why is there an asymmetry to the breathing slits in the mouth of the helmet?

The poem continues:

There's a road that leads to

Dark forest

Now that we’re on the island, Byron expects us to find something quite obscure. I will take this opportunity to again thank the good people of The Secret Online Community for finding this and several other obscure clues in this puzzle. The plaque dedicating the Elizabethan Gardens in the northern portion of the Fort Raleigh Historic Site says:

The women of the Garden Club of North Carolina have planted this garden in memory of the valiant men and women who founded the first English Colony in America.

From this hallowed ground they walked away through the dark forest and into history.

The phrase dark forest refers to a place that is beyond civilization, where one must face their fears. It’s also a metaphor for something unknown and dangerous. It likely hearkens back to the Black Forest in Germany, a common locale for scary stories.