by Tony Horwitz
DESPITE THE HASTY exit of its settlers, the first colony at Roanoke wasn’t an unqualified failure. Lane and his men brought back reports and samples of potentially valuable commodities, most notably tobacco. Raleigh quickly took to the weed and popularized its “drinking,” as the English called smoking. So did Hariot, who conducted “many rare and wonderful experiments” demonstrating tobacco’s medicinal virtues. He later died of nose cancer.
Raleigh’s first colony was also an instructive test run for a second, more considered effort. The waters around Roanoke had proved too shallow and hazardous for shipping. But, eighty miles north, Lane’s men had scouted a deepwater harbor and fine land along the “bay of the Chespians,” a local tribe. Chesapeake Bay, as it became known, seemed an ideal base for harassing the Spanish and searching inland for minerals and the dreamed-of passage to the Orient.
Relocated, the colony would also be reconfigured. Lane had established, essentially, a military outpost: an all-male force of soldiers and gentlemen-adventurers, dependent on Indians and constant resupply from home. A lasting colony required settlers who could sustain themselves. The core of the next party would therefore be families, yeomen farmers, and craftsmen, led by John White, the artist on the 1585 voyage.
An illustrator might seem an unlikely leader for a colonial expedition. But White belonged to the Painter-Stainers’ Guild and was able to recruit like-minded artisans, including Ananias Dare, a brickmaker and tiler who had married White’s daughter, Elenor. The party ultimately included seventeen women, nine children, and two ex-convicts who had been jailed for theft. Raleigh provided ships and created a corporate entity, the grandly named “Cittie of Raleigh in Virginia.” He also engineered the awarding of coats of arms to White and twelve governing “Assistants,” effectively making them minor nobility in the miniature England they hoped to found.
The second colonial fleet departed late in the sailing season, in May 1587, and its pilot spent weeks trolling the Indies, ostensibly in search of provisions but also in hopes of Spanish loot. Finding neither, the ships sailed on to Roanoke, where the colonists had planned to stop before proceeding to the Chesapeake. But their pilot claimed the summer was too far gone for him to carry the settlers farther north. More likely, he was impatient to get back to pirating.
So the colonists disembarked at Roanoke, which presented a melancholy scene. Of the eighteen men Grenville had left the year before, no trace remained except bones. The fort’s walls had been razed; deer fed on melons overgrowing the site. John White learned that natives had attacked the small garrison, led by Wanchese, one of the Indians who had earlier sailed to England. Just a few days after the new colonists’ arrival, Indians ambushed a man while he was crabbing alone; they “gave him sixteene wounds with their arrows” and “beat his head in peeces.”
The only allies remaining to the colonists were Manteo (the other Indian who had traveled to England) and his kinsmen on a barrier island called Croatoan. In accordance with Raleigh’s command, the English baptized “our savage Manteo” and made him lord of Roanoke. The next week brought another christening. White’s daughter, Elenor Dare, gave birth, “and because this childe was the first Christian borne in Virginia, she was named Virginia.”
The English still planned to move on to the Chesapeake, “where we intended to make our seat and forte,” White wrote. But the long voyage had drained their supplies, and it was too late in the summer to sow and gather crops. The colonists decided someone should return to England with the ships that had brought them, to secure more aid. The obvious choice was John White. He was influential, knew where to direct a supply ship, and would be unlikely to abandon the colonists, since his family remained among them.
White at first refused, fearing for his reputation and also for his “stuffe and goods,” which might be “spoiled” or “pilfered” in his absence. So the colonists signed a bond, the first civic document drawn up in English America. They pledged to safeguard White’s goods and stated that they had entreated him to leave, “much against his will,” to secure supplies “necessarie for the good and happie planting of us.”
At the end of August 1587, White set sail, leaving behind his daughter, his infant granddaughter, Virginia Dare, and 113 fellow settlers. Neither White nor any other Englishmen would ever see the colonists again.
ROANOKE ISLAND IS nine miles long and two miles wide, most of it low and scrubby and verged by swamp. Bridges now link the island to mainland North Carolina and to the Outer Banks, a hundred-mile-long sandbar elbowing into the Atlantic. The island has two towns, Manteo and Wanchese, streets named for Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth, and a subdivision called Colony of Roanoke. It’s a hard place to get lost in today.
The novelist William Styron, who was raised seventy-five miles north of Roanoke, once observed that the historical imagination works best when fed “short rations” of fact. This has certainly been true of the Roanoke story. John White’s colony left a meager paper trail and almost no physical trace. Yet these scraps have nourished a centuries-long feast of myth, melodrama, and speculation, all of it purporting to reveal the fate of Roanoke’s “lost colonists.”
I began my own mystery tour at Fort Raleigh, the national historic site honoring the vanished settlement. In the centuries after the English fort’s abandonment, it was picked over by artifact hunters, recycled as a Civil War bastion, and buried beneath a faux-Elizabethan tourist attraction that included log cabins, a building style unknown to early colonists. No sixteenth-century house sites have ever been found. Because of coastal erosion, archaeologists believe much of the colony may lie beneath the waters of Roanoke Sound.
The small park at Fort Raleigh is nonetheless a mecca for amateur sleuths—and kooks. “We get three hundred and fifty thousand visitors a year, and almost as many theories,” said a ranger at the park’s visitors center. “Aliens picked up the colonists and deposited them on Atlantis—that’s a popular theory. You get others who talk about transdimensional time warp and how the colonists went through a secret doorway.” The ranger shrugged. “I tell them, ‘Yeah, we lose a lot of people that way.’ ”
Fantasy also reigned at the grounds adjoining Fort Raleigh, called the Elizabethan Gardens. This park had originally been conceived in the 1950s, by the Garden Club of North Carolina, as a re-creation of the sort of garden a Roanoke colonist might have planted. But overeager donors and landscape architects introduced manicured hedges, sunken flowerbeds, gazebos, and Carrara marble fountains, creating a tamed pleasure garden that bore no resemblance to the humble plot of an Elizabethan homesteader.
Also fanciful was the statue of Virginia Dare that occupied one corner of the gardens. It depicted Virginia not as a baby, but as the sexy babe the artist imagined she became in America: firm breasts, fine rump, loins thinly veiled by a fishnet. Her luxuriant hair was beautifully coiffed, despite some twenty years in the wilderness. Indian-style necklaces and braids encircled her neck and arms. The statue, known as the “Dare Venus,” had been judged too racy when it went on display in the 1920s, and was hidden for decades before finding a home in the gardens.
Fiction of a different sort prevailed on Fort Raleigh’s other flank. In 1937, an outdoor drama called The Lost Colony opened at Roanoke to such acclaim that it has run every summer since, attracting four million visitors and many noted actors (Andy Griffith played Raleigh from 1949 to 1953). The play was so big that it has spawned a parallel “Lost Colony,” much more extensive than the historic park, including a mock Tudor theater and stockade, drama workshops, and an official historian who went by the theatrically lowercase name of lebame houston.
“There’s nothing to see at Fort Raleigh—it’s the dullest national park in America,” lebame said, when I met her at a café in Manteo. “The play’s what keeps this island alive. It’s a hymn to the common man and woman trying to make it in America.”
lebame herself was anything but common, beginning with her bleached white hair and the enormous sunglasses that s
hielded half her face. As a child, she’d played Virginia Dare in The Lost Colony; she had gone on to write plays of her own. She also shared a house in Manteo with a red-haired actress known to all as Queenie or HRH, because she often played royal roles, including Elizabeth I in The Lost Colony.
Queenie—real name Barbara Hird—was a large woman with an imperial bearing and the accent of her native Yorkshire. She confessed to having known little of the lost colony before migrating to America as an adult. “Roanoke was overshadowed in English memory by the Spanish Armada, which invaded a year later,” she explained. “Also, no one much likes Raleigh in England. He was a bounder, always putting himself forward—not traits the English admire.”
Barbara found Roanoke refreshing by comparison. People were intrigued by monarchy and amused by her royal performances. “One must endure a good bit of kowing and towing,” she said, as a passing waitress attempted a curtsey. Barbara and lebame also kept a throne in their living room, a tall, straight-backed, gold-leafed chair topped by a crown. “It’s horribly uncomfortable,” Barbara said, “but it is where I must sit when I am wearing my big scary dress and wig.”
The two women were unconventional in another way. Though they’d researched and performed the Roanoke story, neither wanted its true ending to ever be revealed. “If anyone solved the mystery, we’d have to change the name of the play,” lebame said. “It’d just be The Colony. Not nearly so catchy.”
Like everyone else, however, the women had their own explanation for the colonists’ disappearance. Barbara leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Mosquitoes carried them off. In summer, they’re absolutely frightful here.”
“Of course,” lebame added, “if you tell anyone, we’ll have to lop off your head.”
“By order of the queen,” Barbara said.
AFTER LEAVING ROANOKE in August 1587, John White was waylaid by storms and piracy; he reached home to find England bracing for a Spanish invasion. Elizabeth, needing every available vessel to defend the coast, barred ships from leaving port. White, with Raleigh’s help, nonetheless managed to load supplies and a dozen more colonists onto two ships commanded by privateers, who promised to carry their passengers to Roanoke. The sailors went plundering instead, lost a sea fight off Spain, and were forced to retreat home, with White among the injured.
England defeated Spain’s Armada in the summer of 1588, but the seas remained tense and shipping restricted. White bided his time, completing illustrations of butterflies, fireflies, and cicadas he’d seen in America. Finally, after many false starts, he sailed for Roanoke again in 1590, as a passenger aboard yet another plundering expedition.
The ships spent months in the Caribbean and didn’t crawl up the Atlantic coast until midsummer, amid “very fowle weather with much raine, thundering, and great spouts.” Reaching the treacherous Outer Banks, White was buoyed by the sight of smoke rising from the dunes. But going ashore, he “found no man nor signe that any had bene there lately.” The next day an English boat capsized in the rough surf, drowning seven men. White had to beg the captain to stay a little longer.
Reaching Roanoke Island, he and a group of sailors trolled the coast in small boats, singing out “many familiar English tunes” and blowing a trumpet. “But we had no answere,” White wrote. Going ashore, he found log walls still standing, “very Fort-like.” But the colony’s houses had been dismantled, and bits of heavy guns and ammunition lay strewn about, “almost overgowen with grasse and weedes.” The searchers also found chests that had been buried and then dug up, including three belonging to White, their contents “spoyled” and “my armour almost eaten through with rust.”
Along the shore, White found something else: a tree on which “were curiously carved these faire Romane letters CRO.” One post of the fort also bore an inscription: “In fayre Capitall letters was graven CROATOAN.” Before leaving three years earlier, White had agreed on a “secret token” with the colonists: when they left Roanoke, they would carve “the name of the place where they should be seated.” If they were “distressed in any of those places,” they were to carve a cross as well. Neither of the inscriptions he found at Roanoke bore such an SOS.
“I greatly joyed that I had safely found a certaine token of their safe being at Croatoan,” White wrote, “which is the place where Manteo was borne, and the Savages of the Iland our friends.”
White prevailed on the captain to sail to Croatoan the next day. But an anchor cable broke and the ship almost ran aground. “The weather grew to be fouler and fouler,” White wrote. With food and water running short, he consented to the captain’s plan to sail to Trinidad for the winter and return in spring. But the storm “blewe so forcibly” that the battered ship was driven far out to sea, on “the due course for England,” to which it returned after the requisite detours for piracy.
The journey of 1590 was not, White dryly observed, “my first crossed voyage” to Virginia. But it was to be his last. “I leave off,” he wrote in 1593, “committing the relief of my discomfortable company, the planters in Virginia, to the merciful help of the Almighty, whom I most humbly beseech to helpe & comfort them.”
IN THE CENTURIES since, White’s handful of poignant dispatches has served as the starting point for seekers of Roanoke’s lost colonists. But White’s writing presents as many questions as clues. The tree carvings led him to conclude that the colonists had gone to Croatoan, a barrier island forty miles due south of Roanoke. Yet he wrote, in the same account, that when he’d left the colonists in 1587, “they were prepared to remove from Roanok 50 miles into the main.” In other words, due west. Then again, his earlier report on the 1587 voyage stated that colonists planned to go to the Chesapeake Bay, eighty miles north. No matter how you parse White’s writing, it leads in every direction except straight out to sea.
Two decades after White last saw the colonists, the English who settled Jamestown picked up other leads. Indians told of seven whites held captive in the interior, as copper workers, and also of a place where “People have houses built with stone walls, and one story above another, so taught them by those English” from Roanoke. A search party sent from Jamestown reported finding crosses cut in trees, but no English people. According to another account, the colonists had “peaceably lived and intermix’d” with the Chespians, or Chesapeake, a tribe at the mouth of the bay, only to be slaughtered by the Virginia chief Powhatan at about the time the Jamestown settlers arrived in 1607.
David Quinn, the leading scholar of Roanoke, spent decades sifting the available evidence and concluded that the last of these scenarios was the likeliest. The colonists had gone north to the bay, as originally planned, and been taken in by Chesapeake Indians, the rare tribe in eastern Virginia that resisted Powhatan’s control. When the Jamestown settlers arrived, Powhatan may have feared that the Chesapeake Indians and Roanoke survivors would assist the newcomers. So he ordered them killed, just as the Jamestown settlers were later told.
As for the carvings John White found at Roanoke, Quinn theorized that on leaving the island, the colonists would have sent a small group to Croatoan, as a lookout for English ships. This party may have melded into the native population, rejoined the others by the Chesapeake, or been killed.
Quinn’s tidy thesis has won over most scholars, but it’s impossible to prove without archaeological evidence, which is thus far lacking. The homeland of the Chesapeake has vanished beneath the sprawl of southeast Virginia, now a busy shipping and naval center. As the park ranger I spoke to at Fort Raleigh told me: “If Quinn’s theory is right, the lost colonists are buried under a mall in Norfolk.”
It’s also hard to square Quinn’s account with White’s enigmatic statement, upon returning in search of the colony, that the settlers “were prepared to remove from Roanok 50 miles into the main.” Quinn dismissed this, believing White confused “the main” with the Chesapeake region. Also, most of the territory fifty miles inland from Roanoke is swampy wilderness, far from the sea or other advantages. It would
have made no sense for the Roanoke settlers to go there.
But there was one man who strongly disagreed: Fred Willard, director of the Lost Colony Center for Science and Research, whom I went to see at his home office eighty miles west of Roanoke. A paunchy man with long gray hair and a thin wispy beard that looked like Spanish moss, Fred was a former marina owner who now worked full-time trying to crack the Roanoke case.
“Most of the people on Roanoke Island hate me,” he said. “They say, ‘You’ll find the lost colony and ruin us.’ They want to own the story.” He had little time for professional archaeologists, either. “Territorial geeks,” he called them. “Their scope is so narrow.” Fred took a broader tack. “What we’ve done,” he said of the Lost Colony Center, “is open a whole gamut, a holistic, multidisciplinary approach.”
To demonstrate his technique, Fred took me out the next day for some field research. He emerged from his home carrying machetes, maps, a global positioning system, and other gear. “Our study area is a million and a half acres of swampland,” he explained.
As our driver, Fred had recruited Susan Purcell, an effervescent redhead who’d met him at a local yacht club and been converted to his quest. “Fred’s brilliant,” she told me. “If he was looking for a comet, I’d follow him there, too.” As she sped east into the countryside, Fred set out his essential thesis. The abandoned Roanoke settlers moved fifty miles inland to escape Indian enemies and the Spanish, who sent several ships looking for the English. “The colonists were running for their lives,” he said. “Inland was the best place for them to hide.”
