While his DNA said nothing of a link to the Lost Colony, it did provide Lowery with a fresh perspective on his rich and complicated heritage. “I am proudly Lumbee,” he said, “but recognize that is an identity constructed by my ancestors to secure a better deal for themselves in the Jim Crow South.”
Not all feel that way. When Lowery presided over a funeral for one of his father’s brothers at an Indian church in Robeson County a week before, “one of the locals at the service commented on how proud he was we no longer pretended to be white,” he recalled. “I didn’t get into the African DNA thing. It just wasn’t worth it.”
Estes, meanwhile, continues to build the databases that might someday provide clues to the Lost Colony’s fate. “I don’t want people to come away with the idea that DNA is a magic bullet,” she said. “But it could solve some of this mystery by inferring that the colonists survived.”
New pieces of the puzzle, both English records and more precise genetic data, could emerge in time. Though it is fraught with technical challenges and ethical implications, Estes is confident that this fresh line of evidence could complement historical and archaeological finds. But as with archival searches and excavations, genetic testing is not likely to resolve the mystery of the settlers anytime soon. “We will never be able to say positively that we have traced the Lost Colonists,” she added. “The best we will be able to say is ‘we think’ or ‘probably.’ There is no genie to wave a wand and give us the answer. This is a waiting game.”
* * *
—
One day in the 1940s, Margaret Locklear was picking cotton in the flat farmland a few miles outside Pembroke. “Some people from New York came up to the field and dug up a casket and took the boards and bones,” she recalled one crisp fall afternoon as she sat in her nephew’s pickup truck near the same spot. “We knew it was Virginia Dare’s grave.”
Locklear, who is ninety-three, is a slight woman who wore a Carolina blue beret over her lean nut-brown face. She grew up the child of Lumbee sharecroppers who turned over half of every harvest to the white landowner. The family home was gone, swallowed by pines and underbrush, but her memory of the gravesite under a tall hickory tree just beyond her father’s mule barn remained vivid. An old black man born into slavery told her of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman marching through and raiding white smokehouses to distribute meat to the hard-pressed Indians in the area. He also told her about Virginia Dare. “She was the first white person born in America. And this was her grave,” Locklear recalled him saying, and she pointed out the truck window at a bare patch of sandy soil. That was all she knew. “The white people then didn’t let you know nothing,” she added.
A 1938 local newspaper account, written when Locklear was thirteen, mentions “a gnarled hickory tree” standing sentinel over what was rumored to be Virginia Dare’s grave, “surrounded by a sea of waving white cotton.” Lush grass grew in an area six feet long and two feet wide. Indians left the place alone, the article reported, because of a legend that “the Great Spirit will frown upon those who dare to molest this sacred soil.” Where the hickory tree once stood was now the edge of a field. I asked Locklear what had become of the wooden boards and human bones taken by the New Yorkers. “We never heard nothing more about it,” she said.
Her nephew, Raymond Cummings, a county commissioner, recently decided it was time to commemorate the oral tradition while the older generation still survives. “Be sure to see the sign—we just put it up,” he told me as he stood beside the pickup. Locklear rapped hard on the window to signal that she was ready to go, and he was quick to comply. “It’s just down the way.”
I waved goodbye, wondering about this strange story of the white child passed down for generations by Native and African Americans. The tale’s validity seemed less important than its tenacity. Long after the alleged link with the Lost Colony ceased to offer political advantage, the legend persisted. The inhabitants of this remote rural region, despite centuries of social taboos and laws designed to ensure racial purity, had quietly mixed their traditions and genes, blending Indian, European, and African into one people. The infant of Roanoke seemed to serve as a kind of mythic token of their unusual heritage.
In the fading autumn light, I drove a few hundred yards down the nearby two-lane road without seeing the gray-and-black state historical marker I had expected to find. I turned around in the parking lot of an old clapboard church—Henry Berry Lowrie is said to have used its steeple as a sniper post—and cruised slowly back. And then I spotted what looked like a street sign facing the bare field. I rolled to a stop as the sun slipped behind a distant line of trees. It read, simply: VIRGINIA DARE BURIAL SITE.
| CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Return to Roanoke
“It is an odd fact that many Americans who arrive at Jerusalem are either lunatics or lose their mind thereafter,” a visiting Anglican vicar observed in 1870. Protestants from the United States seem particularly susceptible even today to the temporary religious psychosis called the Jerusalem syndrome. A mild case leads to an obsession with ritual purity or the need to deliver an impromptu sermon in a sacred place while wearing a hotel bedsheet. In its most famous variety, the victim believes he or she is an important figure like Jesus or Mary. The city’s Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center treats dozens of people for the condition annually, though officials say those affected likely number far more.
But the affliction, which can affect those with no previous history of mental disturbance, is not unique to this tinderbox of monotheistic religion. In Florence, visitors can be overcome with what is called Stendhal syndrome, named after the French author, when viewing the city’s dazzling artistic treasures. Dizziness and disorientation can result. Something similar afflicts some Japanese tourists confronted for the first time with Paris.
What I had begun to call Lost Colony syndrome seemed to take the form of an urgent and overwhelming need to resolve the question of what happened to the colonists. The victim is compelled to set out his case like a prosecuting attorney, no matter how conjectural the conclusion. It has many variants, from a fixation on the hunt for artifacts to a mania for genealogy, but it metastasizes to dominate a person’s waking life. This obsession was what Brent Lane had described to me—and which held him, despite his claims otherwise, in its grip. I myself evidence a mild form. Historians like Quinn and archaeologists like Horton were caught up in it to varying degrees. Phillip Evans and Fred Willard fell further down on the spectrum, having each devoted decades and a small fortune to the exclusion of much else. Then I met Clyde Miller.
The first annual Lost Colony Festival took place in the little town of Windsor in Bertie County, about sixty miles west of Roanoke Island. It was a cloudless and shimmering April day, like the one Verrazano described half a millennium ago. There was standing room only in the local nature center as an archaeologist with the First Colony Foundation outlined recent findings from the nearby Site X excavations. After he finished his presentation, a tall older man with disheveled white hair suddenly stood up and waved a three-foot-long cylinder of paper above our heads.
“I would love to present this list of people who say they are Lost Colony descendants,” he announced in a loud and sonorous voice. The archaeologist smiled wanly from the podium as the man went on for several minutes about his genealogical research. People seemed to know him; they quickly jostled to the exit. Curious, I intercepted him later, and we walked out of the dark room into the blinding sunshine.
“This is not legend!” Miller exclaimed, as if I had challenged him. He had smudged black-framed glasses and a distracted air. “This is all done with wills.” The last word sounded like “wheels,” but more drawn out in the middle. With a flick of his thick wrists, he unrolled the paper he was carrying on a nearby picnic bench. It opened like an ancient scroll. It was large enough to serve as a tablecloth. The entire surface of the paper was covered with twisting family trees stretch
ing in loops and curves, folding in over themselves before branching back out, like kudzu on the side of a southern barn. The tiny script of the names was nearly too small for me to read.
“I have been working on this tree for forty-six years,” he said proudly in his slow and booming delivery. “That’s my entire family tree—over 133,000 names. Daddy’s line goes back to Joseph of Arimathea. And Mama’s goes back to the Mandeville family in the Tower of London. But I didn’t put my great-grandfather in out of respect for the queen.” The queen was Queen Elizabeth II. He explained that he would not publish the full story while she was alive, given certain sensitivities that better remained secret but that I took to be some sort of interracial scandal involving the House of Windsor. As he pointed at a series of names on the chart explaining his relation to the colonists, I quickly found myself lost. But while Miller’s detailed family tree seemed difficult to understand, his insistence that the Roanoke settlers lived on in the genetic and social fabric of North Carolina did not.
The stories of the colonists that still pervade eastern North Carolina serve a variety of purposes, just as Virginia Dare does for feminists and white supremacists. For Lumbee, the link helped ensure better schools and a measure of respect from the dominant culture. Among whites, the lineage provided a noble past to rival the wealthier and imperious planter aristocracy of Virginia and South Carolina. (An old southern saying has it that North Carolina is a “vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.”) These are practical ways to put distant history to use.
Miller looked as white as almost everyone else at the festival, apart from a few Native American vendors, though the town of about thirty-five hundred people was half African American. “My grandmother told me about being part Croatan,” he was saying. “She said if they had known I was Croatan Indian, they’d have forced me to go to Central, the black school. Of course she didn’t tell me about her father. That would have torn the family apart.”
My head was still spinning from a family tree that went back to Joseph of Arimathea, the man credited with burying Jesus. But from what I could make out, Miller was using the mystery of the Lost Colony to make sense of a shadowy past. That history embraced not just the initial conflict between Europeans and Native Americans but the shadowy legacy of a slave culture that brought Africans to this region—likely as early as 1586. The succeeding centuries were often unimaginably violent, from the devastating war fought between English and Indians that ended in the creation of a Tuscarora reservation near Windsor in 1717 to the brutal lynching two centuries later of a black man named Peter Bazemore a few miles outside town.
Miller was being literal, trying to build a link between an American today and a Lost Colonist from 1587. Of course, being lost means, by definition, lacking records of births and marriages and deaths. DNA, for the time being, is no help. Between the time of White’s departure and the second wave of the English is an unbridgeable gap that even the most upgraded version of Ancestry.com cannot span.
Yet it struck me that Miller was, in some way that he could not quite articulate, engaged in something more than a quixotic effort to trace his relations back to ancient Judaea 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 long-standing racial divides.
It was getting late, and the festival was winding down. I made my excuses and edged toward my car. As I rolled out of the gravel parking lot, he was still chatting with me through my open window, talking about his plans to study at Oxford. During the long trip home, I pondered my next step. Eliza Cushing, who first coined the term “Lost Colony,” warned that when it comes to the Roanoke story, it is unavoidable to go forth “into a world of conjecture.” Even Quinn could not resist making that leap, though he dressed it up in scholarly language. I decided to follow Miller’s example and succumb fully to the Lost Colony vortex to see where it led me, but in my own way. I began with Occam’s razor.
* * *
—
If the best hypothesis is the one with the least number of assumptions, then which applies to the vanished Roanoke settlers?
After returning from Windsor, I walked through the possibilities. First, there is no evidence in Spanish archives that England’s European enemy destroyed the colony. Second, the settlers might have used a pinnace left behind or built a boat to sail to Newfoundland or England, or moved to Chesapeake Bay. Either option required complex logistics, and in any case some might have stayed behind.
Third, massacre, starvation, and illness resulting in death were all possible outcomes. But if they occurred while the English were still on Roanoke, at least, John White reported no evidence such as graves or skeletons on his brief return to the settlement in 1590. Fourth, Wingina’s people or another tribe might have enslaved them; the strong palisade the governor found suggests the settlers felt endangered. But he found no Greek cross, the secret token to be carved into a tree if the settlers left in distress. Of course, White might have made this all up, to hide his failings or protect Raleigh, but this meant accepting a successful cover-up.
At Jamestown, the stories that emerged about Powhatan’s culpability in killing the colonists, and of English slaves made to work copper, seemed tied up with the London Company’s public relations problems. They were in any event based heavily on the testimony of Machumps, who might have had his own agenda. Later, the colonists’ needed to justify Indian extermination in the wake of the 1622 rebellion, so painting their enemies as murderers made Powhatan’s perfidy politically valuable. That didn’t make these claims true.
Even John Smith’s intelligence about a few scattered people in European clothes and stone houses seemed at best ambiguous. It could just as well point to distant Spanish towns or shipwreck victims. Besides, would an English woolen coat or dress even survive intact if worn for more than two decades? And was a stone house necessary or even desirable in a land where wood was so readily available?
That left the fifth possibility: the settlers joined nearby Indians, either “fifty miles into the main” or on Croatoan—or both. The fort symbol White hid on his map pointed to the head of the Albemarle Sound. This was a strategic spot for trading and exploring the Carolina hinterland while keeping an eye out for arriving ships. Such a move also might have reflected an annual Native American migration from the coast to the interior during the winter. In the wake of Wingina’s murder, however, moving in that direction would have posed dangers, because it is not clear the English or Croatoan had any remaining allies in that direction.
Scott Dawson’s analogy was hard to dispute. “Imagine a time before texting,” the Hatteras native said. “You ask your wife in the morning to leave a note at home naming the restaurant where you will meet for dinner. You come home from work to change clothes and find a note that says, ‘We’re going to the Shipwreck Grill.’ What do you do? Will you head on over to the Shipwreck Grill, or Café 12?” To him, it was self-evident that at least some of the colonists did what their message for the governor said (if White reported his find accurately). They went to Croatoan. As Horton suggested, this might have been the best place for many of the women and children, far from Wanchese and his people and where they could keep an eye out for the governor’s return.
Yet even if White made up the “secret token” or misread it for some reason, the Croatoan were without a doubt the single most important allies for the English, and quite probably the only ones. This alliance was crucial for the settlers’ survival. The colonists were primarily middle-class city people, like the ones criticized by Harriot on the Lane expedition for their lack of survival skills. As John Smith wryly noted at Jamestown, “Although there be deer in the woods, fish in the rivers, and fowls in abundance in their seasons,” yet “we [be] so unskillful to catch them,
we little troubled them nor they us.”
For the Croatoan, an alliance with the unpredictable foreigners made eminent sense. With a small population likely not much larger than the English on Roanoke, they faced a daunting confederation of enemies on the mainland. Backing the English could offer a constant flow of weapons, tools, and commercial goods that would provide a critical advantage over their more numerous rivals. After all, they expected the governor to return with more settlers and supplies.
White even leaves us with a moving image of the Indians and Europeans working together in the aftermath of the botched mainland raid that killed or injured some Croatoan busy looting Wingina’s abandoned town of Dasemunkepeuc. As the sun rose, they joined awkwardly together to gather “all the corn, peas, pumpkins, and tobacco that we found ripe, leaving the rest unspoiled.” The fact that they didn’t destroy the unripe crops is a sign that both groups felt confident they could hold on to this territory. English guns and Croatoan local knowledge made the two small and vulnerable bands a formidable local power.
Manteo was the critical link between the two cultures. At Raleigh’s orders—and, almost certainly, with the blessing of the queen—he was made lord of both Roanoke and Dasemunkepeuc, “in reward of his faithful services.” Most historians mention the honorific in passing, as if it were a gold star given to a good student. In Tudor England, however, titles were serious business, translating into power and wealth. As a member of the peerage, Lord Manteo was technically even higher in rank than Raleigh, a mere knight. No other Native American has since been granted the title. He was, in fact, the obvious choice to lead the colony after White’s 1587 departure; as far as we know, none of the assistants had been to Virginia before or spoke Carolina Algonquian. He also knew, better than anyone, the principal foe of the English: Wanchese.
The Secret Token Page 35
