Andrew Lawler's new book on the Lost Colony of Roanoke is far more intricate than I imagined; I thought
The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke would be an archaeological mystery in the vein of
The Lost City of Z and it is, complete with hoaxes, red herrings, buried treasure, amateur sleuths, cryptic maps and invisible ink but I didn't realize that the book was going to use what Lawler calls "the Elizabethan equivalent of the Apollo program" and the surrounding history and mythology surrounding Sir Walter Raleigh's venture to create a permanent settlement in America as a lens to look at America itself; at times the story is confusing, the history is far more variegated, complex and violent than the boiled down version-- there are aborted missions, Algonquian assassinations, deserted slaves, shipwrecks, Sir Francis Drake, Spaniards, disease, reconciliation, two Indians of opposite purpose (Manteo and Wanchese) and a host of other history before we get to the simple story of a bunch of colonists, left to themselves for three years while their supplier and governor (John White) was waylaid in England by war with the Spanish and when he returns, with the hopes of being reunited with his daughter and grand-daughter (Virginia Dare . . . first English person born on American soil) he finds them gone, and a secret token on a tree (
Croatoan . . . which we now call Hatteras) and so I'll leave you with a few quotations from the book to whet your appetite for the layers of whirling insanity layered on top of that archetypal American story:
1) According to historian Brent Lane, "The Roanoke voyages have nothing to do with Virginia Dare and the poor lost white people-- the lost cause of the sixteenth century and all that gothic shit . . . the real story is geopolitics, colonization, the advancement of science, and development of investment"
2) The bickering of historians, professional and amateur, over the fate of the Lost Colony resembles
the scene from Life of Brian about the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's front . . . "Willard's dramatic outburst-- 'I will fucking run you over!'-- seemed to sum up the relations among the researchers . . . Lucketti and Horton were quick to criticize each other's research, while Noel Hume and the National park Service had fought to a bitter standstill about the earthwork . . . Evans's First Colony Foundation had refused to participate in a public panel that included Horton and Prentice, and organized their own symposium . . ." etc. etc . . .
3) some folks currently living in this area of North Carolina are consumed by their family trees and genetic history; Lawler describes genealogy obsessed Clyde Miller as a man "engaged in something more than a quixotic effort to trace his relations back to ancient Judea via Tudor England . . . it was as if, using his convoluted and tangled family tree, he were attempting to stitch together the black, red and white parts of his splintered past, the "mongrel" remnants that so many Americans share to some degree, a reality largely lost amid the nation's standing racial divides";
4) most historians now accept the fact that the Lost Colonists, if they survived, simply "melted" into the Native population . . . and this could have been true for the serval hundred abandoned African and Indian slaves abandoned by Sir Francis Drake, the three men abandoned by Lane in his haste to leave the area, and the fifteen men left by Grenville . . . the colonists were only "lost" to the Europeans who searched for them-- the Algonquians absorbed them (and they may not want to have been "found" by the white folks . . . it's embarrassing to be found when you've gone native, taken a native husband or wife, and are living in native ways . . . and this happened quite often in this time period-- white folks went native, but the reverse was very very rare)
5) despite the fact that the folks living in the area are a "mongrel" mix of black, Native American, and European, white supremacists and racists adopted Virginia Dare as a symbol of white unsullied American purity and turned her into a chaste and beautiful huntress who survived on her own and did not mix with the "half-naked Indian savages"
6) Lawler analogously points out that there are people "in eastern Europe who were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, grew up in Czechoslovakia, spent their teenage years in the Third Reich, lived out middle age in the Soviet Union and died in independent Ukraine-- all without leaving their village" and the people of Roanoke are similar-- they were designated English, white, black, Native America, and they designated themselves whatever was politically or practically expeditious, without worry over the truth of the matter . . . and so no DNA test will ever untangle this knot and no story will ever make everyone happy . . . the truth will never out on this and the legends will be shaped by the context: a great read, especially if you are headed for a vacation on the Outer Banks!
