If they avoided massacre, starvation, and enslavement, the settlers abandoned many of their familiar laws, foods, traditions, and beliefs as well as their native language. Decimated by disease, the Carolina Algonquians in the early seventeenth century appear to have come under the sway of the Tuscarora to the west. Their children and grandchildren might have fought the second wave of English invaders a century later. In the early nineteenth century, they would have been decreed people of color and assigned a status “only slightly higher than slaves.”
Without moving beyond a radius of fifty miles, the descendants of Raleigh’s voyages would have been labeled as originating on three different continents—Europe, North America, and then Africa—in as many centuries; truly an Alice in Wonderland journey that no DNA test could ever fully untangle. Their journey seemed as extraordinary as Miller’s genealogical scroll.
| CHAPTER FIFTEEN
An Old Buck Christmas
“You look lost,” said the young woman behind the bar, her long blond hair pulled back in a practical ponytail. She poured beer into a mug. Through the restaurant’s glass windows, I could see tourists swarming the decks of the Elizabeth II across from the Manteo marina. On this scorching August afternoon, I was enjoying the air-conditioning while poring over Google maps of the area on my laptop. I told her I was a writer doing research. “Oh, I’ll be speaking with you later!” she said brightly. I looked at her, perplexed. “I’m Eleanor Dare,” she explained and headed off with the beer on a tray.
I had arranged with the manager of the Lost Colony outdoor drama to speak with the key actors before their performance that evening at Fort Raleigh. Given that they had spent an entire season in character, I was curious if their experience gave them insights inaccessible to historians, archaeologists, and genealogists.
America’s oldest mystery is the subject of one of America’s longest-running plays. Just a short stroll from the fort, Depression-era workers carved an amphitheater out of the sloping dunes leading to the Albemarle Sound to house the production written by playwright Paul Green. It was slated for one season, but since opening night in 1937 more than four million people have seen what he called a “symphonic drama” that uses music, song, dance, and historical characters to entertain and inform.
No one since John White and George Bancroft has had a bigger impact on how Americans see the Roanoke voyages. Even for those who have not seen the production, its version of the story permeates the field. “You just can’t get away from that damn play,” one historian told me. “It impacts everything we think about the colony.”
When he began work on the script, the North Carolina playwright had already won a Pulitzer Prize for his depiction of a southern hero of mixed-race ancestry facing the insurmountable odds posed by segregation, a daring subject for that day. The 1927 award committee noted that In Abraham’s Bosom “brings us face to face with one of the most serious of the social problems of this country.” Green subsequently wrote a sympathetic drama about another mixed-race hero, Lumbee renegade Henry Berry Lowrie.
Green’s fascination with the Roanoke venture began early. As a college student, he watched the 1921 filming of the silent movie at Fort Raleigh dramatizing the colony and returned to school to write a sugary tale about a grown Virginia Dare. He toyed with a story about a Lumbee attempting to prove his Lost Colony connection. “I want to take a representative of the Croatan race who is determined to prove that he is a white man, a descendant of Sir Walter Raleigh’s lost colony,” he wrote in his diary. “He goes to all lengths to prove it.”
Green’s awareness of ethnic tensions permeates The Lost Colony, which begins with Amadas and Barlowe arriving in the midst of a Native American harvest ceremony and concludes with the hungry White colonists abandoning their fort to march off into the dark woods. In an early version of the third act, as the abandoned colonists grow increasingly sick and desperate, the feverish Anglican reverend cries out, “Evil has been wrought here, the spilling of blood, the murder of innocent ones! Shall we ever thrive here?” The call echoes through American history.
John Herbert Roper, Green’s biographer, notes that the play is “all about races mixing together.” In a pointed slap at Bishop Cheshire, the playwright has one settler who was a lonely beggar in England find love in the arms of a local Algonquian woman. “Come to your bed, old lady,” he calls to her one cold winter night. The two peoples, Green suggests, would create something new and better by mingling.
The playwright went against the grain of most of his fellow southern whites in his support of civil rights and by insisting on “the integration of all things.” In 1940, he collaborated with black author Richard Wright to adapt his best-selling Native Son for Broadway. Though their brief alliance unraveled, Green took Wright to the annual “Negro Day” performance of The Lost Colony, open to African Americans from around the region.
Yet Green was still a product of his time, and his script has its share of cringe-producing moments. Simão Fernandes—played by his Tudor name, Simon Fernando—is a dastardly pirate contrasted with the simple but virtuous Devon farmers who make up the White colony. A middle-aged Indian woman plays a giggling squaw for comic relief. And though there is no evidence that a clergyman was among the colonists, the pious priest is given to frequent prayer.
Later that afternoon, I drove to Fort Raleigh and walked through the woods leading past the earthwork. The Lost Colony is performed in the stockade-enclosed amphitheater that is all that remains of the 1930s Wild West–style state park that so irritated the archaeologist Harrington. On the main stage, several young men in T-shirts kicked up sand in a pitched sword-and-club battle. “There’s a fight call at 5:30 p.m. every night,” explained Lance Culpepper, the associate producer. “We do a full run-through of all the fight scenes.”
In a 1952 production of The Lost Colony, Wanchese (played by Carl Kasell, future NPR host) watches as Queen Elizabeth I, Lillian Prince, takes her first puff of tobacco, the “potable gold” that would tie England irrevocably to North America. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library
He showed me to the production’s greenroom, a wooden boardwalk along the Albemarle Sound. As I waited while Culpepper went off to round up Manteo and Wanchese, I noticed some of the benches lined up behind the stage were marked in block letters with the words “Indians only.” Two buff young men arrived. They weren’t yet dressed for their parts, which mostly involved applying thick body paint to give their tanned but still pale skins a convincing Native American look. “That’s why we have to sit on those benches,” explained Joseph Cassala, who played Manteo. “Our makeup could ruin the colonists’ clothes.”
I asked him why they imagine two Indians might have developed such diametrically opposed views of the English.
“Manteo felt that the coming of the English was inevitable and thought that if he helped them, it would better his people,” said Cassala, a tall college student wearing a black Nirvana T-shirt. “They had big ships and armor.” At school, he had long conversations with Native American friends pushing for Indian rights. Those discussions gave him insight into Manteo’s behavior toward the whites. “I think he tried to see the good in these people and trusted them—you could say to a fault. You could trace what has happened to Native peoples since by going back to this one person.”
Zachary Scott, who played Wanchese, said that both he and Manteo crossed the Atlantic to see what the English were all about. “After a year, I’m fully burnt out,” he said, in character, “and pretty convinced that I’m not willing to be a part of this.” Scott, who sported a baseball cap and a sleeveless Batman tank top over his stocky torso, said that the indigenous were doing just fine before the English came. He found the newcomers caught up in greed and control.
“Wanchese was really frustrated with how these people were so obsessed with material objects rather than just enjoying life. When
he finds out about Wingina’s death at the hands of the white men, that pushes him over the edge.” Scott added that Manteo’s decision to convert to Christianity and abandon his people’s gods also likely played a role in the two men’s rivalry.
That rivalry is a central theme of the play, the tension over whether to accept or reject the Europeans and their ways. Green cast Manteo as the loyal ally and Wanchese as an angry Indian brave who ultimately rejects the English and resorts to violence. Both speak in staccato Tonto-esque language.
“That’s changed some this year,” said Scott. “We each get a monologue so that we can explain our perspective. But what frustrates me is that Wanchese is still painted as the bad guy. He’s the one kids are scared of. But he is just trying to protect his people.”
He paused, looking out over the Albemarle, where a thunderstorm was rapidly building. It was just the sort of powerful August storm that prompted White to leave the island in 1590 after his brief search. “There are two villains in the play, Wanchese and Simon Fernando. I’ve heard it said that these are the two who actually speak the truth. Wanchese fears the English, and Fernando warns the colonists not to go to the New World, that they will face hunger and death. They are both proved right.” A popular T-shirt among cast members is emblazoned with the phrase “Wanchese Was Right.”
With curtain time approaching, the two left to dress as thick drops began to splatter on the wooden planking. I retreated to the shelter of the costume shop. The cramped space was bustling with colonists lacing up bodices. Wingina stood calmly in the middle of the room as a makeup artist carefully drew intricate white designs over his body paint. The patterns mimicked images of tattoos drawn by John White that were pinned on the walls of the shop.
The play’s dialogue might date to the 1930s, but the outfits, designed by award-winning Broadway costume designer William Ivey Long—whose mother acted as Queen Elizabeth I in the production—are strictly Elizabethan. Long carefully researched and designed the clothes worn by both Indians and colonists following a devastating 2007 fire that destroyed the building. He examined Tudor woodcuts and Dutch and Flemish paintings as well as John White watercolors and made clothes that reflected the middle-class status of the majority of the colonists. The European men sport cloaks over doublets and puffy sleeves, while the women wear bodices and long skirts; both sexes placed the starched and pleated adornments called ruffs around their necks. Thanks to White’s drawings, the Algonquian outfits were simpler to reconstruct, though Long made some concessions to the twenty-first century. “We use leather bras that are skin color for the women,” he told me later.
I found Simon Fernando in an open black shirt and black hip-length pirate boots. He had curly black hair and swarthy skin and looked the part of a rough pirate. “I think he was misunderstood,” said the actor Topher Embrey, in a surprisingly earnest and gentle voice. “I feel like he was with the colony from the start, but gets no credit. Everyone praises Sir Walter Raleigh, but when Simon has something to say, no one’s listening.”
I asked him why. “First off, he’s not like them,” Embrey explained. Did his status as a foreigner, presumably one with darker skin, make him a target of suspicion? “You think?” said Embrey, with a laugh presumably born of experience. I asked him if he wanted to play one of the more virtuous characters in the play, like Sir Walter. He smiled and laughed again before leaving to finish his makeup. “If I were a few shades lighter!”
A familiar face, that of my lunchtime bartender, appeared. Shannon Uphold, her blond hair now demurely braided, was in her second year playing John White’s daughter, a fearless pioneer woman in Green’s telling. “Eleanor is kind of like the girl on the farm who could run around in her sundress and have a great time,” she said. “She doesn’t need to be in finery, but she also knows how to live that life.”
I asked her why, in her opinion, the historical Eleanor, who left a young daughter behind in England, would choose to come to the New World.
“I love to think of her as a sixteenth-century feminist and that this was her choice, but in that time it may simply have been that her dad wanted her to go. Who wants to leave their own children behind? But you do what you have to do.” Uphold said that the stark message on the Dare Stone, whether it was authentic or not, moved her. “Eleanor hoped and prayed to see the masts of her father’s ship returning,” she said, pausing. “I think about it every day. Now I am getting all emotional.”
She paused again, her eyes wet. “There is something about donning that costume and holding a fake baby. There are nights onstage when I’m looking at the moon with this doll in my arms, and I think to myself that this could be a real baby and my dad is gone. I see her getting on a ship three months pregnant, in a ship filled mostly with men. I can’t imagine those conditions.”
Uphold said that Eleanor Dare has become her personal inspiration. “I was born and raised in West Virginia, and after my summer here last year I went to New York. Living the dream! These people went to a new world, and I’m trying to do that in my own way.”
Thunder boomed and lightning flashed through the windows. When I stepped out the door a few minutes later, sheets of rain hid the Albemarle. I retreated back inside to wait it out. Culpepper, the associate producer, stood nearby, peering with a scowl at a radar weather map on his phone. Bands of green, blue, and red covered the screen. “It’s been like this all week,” he said with a sigh, before making the call to cancel the performance. (After the premiere of the play on July 4, 1937, Green wrote in his diary, “Agony of rain in first act.”)
I returned the next night, when the skies were clear. Green’s drama balances primary sources like White’s account and Harriot’s descriptions with dramatic battles and a Falstaffian drunkard who falls in love with a happy-go-lucky Indian.
In Green’s final scene, he invokes a Spanish ship off Port Ferdinando to motivate the hungry settlers to abandon their Cittie of Raleigh after a long and fruitless wait for White’s return. The ragged band of men, women, and children set off, accompanied by Manteo’s nuclear family, bravely singing, downstage right, into a copse of gnarled live oak. As they disappear, the music swells and a spotlight shines on the frayed flag with a Cross of Saint George fluttering atop the fort’s stout palisade; another illuminates a post carved with the word “Croatoan.”
An experienced dramatist, Green doesn’t say what took place next; he leaves that for the audience to ponder as it shuffles out of the stockade. He understood the power of an unsolved mystery.
Just as I remembered as a child, we walked out of the theater and onto the dimly lit path winding through the woods. The earthwork was hidden in shadow, and the forest still felt by turns enigmatic and sinister. The crowd, mostly beach tourists with their sleepy kids in arm or tow, remained strikingly silent.
* * *
—
On a gray and raw morning in early January, I drove east across the causeway linking Roanoke Island to the beach town of Nags Head. Turning south into Cape Hatteras National Seashore, I crossed Oregon Inlet on a high bridge arching over the waters whipped by wind and current. At the top of the span, as I always do, I turned left to take in the Atlantic Ocean and then swiveled to the right to see the Pamlico Sound—Verrazano’s Sea.
Each body of water seemed as vast as the other; there was no other land in sight but the perilously narrow strip of sand that is the north end of Hatteras Island. It looked like a long runway set in the sea as my car descended steeply down the south side of the bridge toward land.
Exposed to the fury of northeasters and hurricanes, this three-dozen-mile stretch of island, which ends near Cape Creek, where the island makes a sharp turn to the southwest, likely never supported full-time Native American communities. Ralph Lane sent a group of men here to subsist on oysters and fish in the hungry spring of 1586. English settlers and shipwreck victims were living here by the early eighteenth century in a village called
Kinnakeet, thought by some to be a Carolina Algonquian term meaning “land of the mixed,” though it also might refer to a sumac-and-tobacco preparation. The daughter of Chief Kinnakeet was said to have married the castaway Englishman Thomas Hooper here in the late seventeenth century.
Long after the indigenous people had vanished as a distinct culture, and the U.S. Postal Service gave the town the prosaic name of Avon, the people here continued to drink yaupon, the local caffeinated beverage Harriot encountered on his 1585 mission, longer than others on the Outer Banks. “The last yaupon gatherers on Hatteras Island were Negroes,” wrote historian Gary Dunbar in his 1956 doctoral thesis. What’s clear is that this community, like so many remote areas in eastern North Carolina, was a place where Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans quietly intersected. “This was an isolated area,” Darrell Collins had said. “You are related to everyone, whether you are white or black.”
Avon today, with its sister towns of Salvo, Waves, and Rodanthe, consists mainly of rows of mammoth oceanfront rentals hunkered behind the protective walls of sand dunes, with more modest houses on the sound side. Blowing sand and water frequently cover the two-lane road that is the only link to the mainland; the occasional northeaster or hurricane severs the highway completely.
I passed beeping backhoes pushing sand from the shoulders. A few miles on, I pulled in to the parking lot of the community center in Rodanthe that was long the common school for the villages. It also marked the halfway point between Fort Raleigh and Cape Creek. Stepping out into the brisk air, I could simultaneously see the Pamlico and hear the roar of the North Atlantic behind the line of dunes. Geologists call this “a perennial erosional hotspot”; on White’s 1585 map it is a large cape poking like a sharp barb into the ocean. Today it exists only as a set of treacherous offshore shoals. More ships have wrecked on this section of coast than on any other stretch of the Eastern Seaboard.
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