Scott Dawson was waiting in his truck. The Hatteras native had invited me to a local Christmas celebration. The rest of America had turned off the carols, put the tree on the curb, and stored the strings of lights in the attic, but the islanders were just gearing up for their Yuletide festival. They called it Old Christmas or, alternatively, Buck Christmas.
The people of Hatteras, along with North African Berbers and conservative Greek Orthodox monks, still keep to a calendar introduced by Julius Caesar. In 1582, two years before the first Roanoke voyage, Catholic Europe adopted the calendar created under Pope Gregory XIII to update the increasingly inaccurate Julian version. John Dee, the English mystic and scientist with whom Fernandes shared his cartographic knowledge, urged Queen Elizabeth I to back the more precise system, with a few caveats, but she declined under pressure from Anglican clerics opposed to adopting popish time. Not until 1752 did the British Empire, including its American colonies, accept the change. The new calendar chopped out eleven days for accuracy’s sake, but the independent-minded people of the Outer Banks resisted this innovation. That’s why Christmas came late on Hatteras.
I was curious, given the age of this peculiar tradition, if there might be a whiff of the Elizabethan to the celebration. This was, I knew, likely just a romantic notion, more Bancroft than Quinn, but I had learned not to dismiss out of hand any clue, no matter how improbable.
“You won’t be a tourist, since you are with me; you will be a visitor,” Dawson assured me as we walked to the back of the building. It wasn’t quite noon, and the inaugural event of the day, the oyster shoot, was about to begin on the basketball court behind the center. “Please don’t load your gun until after your name is called,” shouted a man sitting behind a card table. “And guns on the table can be shared.”
A burly man in a black biker T-shirt strode up grasping a shotgun, his hand adorned with a large Confederate flag ring. “I don’t share my Harley, my woman, or my gun!” he declared loudly. A few people guffawed as men, women, and children lined up to shoot. The target attached to the basketball pole was a standard round bull’s-eye.
“The winner gets a half bushel of oysters,” Dawson explained. Bits of shot ricocheted off the metal pole and rained onto the crowd. No one seemed to mind. I wedged my body behind a pickup truck to avoid the shrapnel. A man nearby introduced himself as Dewey Edwards Jr.
“How long has there been an oyster shoot?” I asked.
“Let me ask my daddy,” said Edwards, a large man in a baseball cap. Dewey Edwards Sr., seventy-two, ambled over.
“This is a new thing at Old Christmas,” he told me. “We only started doing this forty-five or fifty years ago.”
“What else happens besides shooting?” I asked.
“Oh, there’s a little music, a little dancing, a little fighting, and then there’s Old Buck,” Edwards replied.
“What—or who—is that?” I asked.
“Old Buck comes out of Trent Woods every Christmas, and it’s good luck to see him,” Edwards said. “It’s two guys under a cowhide.”
From others I heard similar versions of the same tale. Long ago, a Spanish bull shipwrecked during a hurricane and busily began impregnating the cows and raising general havoc. A hunter eventually shot what was by then called Old Buck in Trent Woods, the forested area at the southern end of Hatteras, where the last Indian village was said to have been. Every Christmas, Old Buck returns. “Maybe not this year,” Edwards told me in a confidential tone. “I heard the guy that does it is in Florida, and he’s sick.”
The winner of the shooting contest was seventeen-year-old Andrew Midgett. The Midgetts and Midgettes are the omnipresent family here, and descendants of the people who bought a parcel of land from the last recorded Hatteras Indian in the late eighteenth century. It was a Midgette who, with Willard, first spotted the Cape Creek artifacts washed up from the 1993 hurricane, and it was a Midgette who owned the Cape Creek lot where Phelps and, later, Horton dug. “I brought my own bucket,” the young man told me as he lugged his half bushel to the parking lot and set it in the bed of a battered truck.
Old Christmas was a community reunion, when children and grandchildren make the trek back to the Outer Banks to see their families and hang out with old friends. What was increasingly a busy and generic beach town reverted for a few hours to the traditional village of centuries past. The men drank beer and the children darted around on the playground, alarmingly close to the shooting range. A cold wind blew hard off the Pamlico, but the boisterous crowd, now totaling seventy or eighty people, didn’t seem to notice.
Dawson walked up. “People are complaining that there are so many tourists now at Old Christmas,” he said.
“Which ones are tourists?” I asked, looking around, unable to guess who might not be a local.
“Oh, somebody saw a couple of Virginians. But they left.”
A group of men in rubber coveralls poured bushels of oysters into a giant pot in the side yard. The team hovered around the cauldron. Every now and then, they would dump a pile of steamed shellfish on a long board littered with short knives necessary to pry open the tough covering. I went inside into the warmth of the community building, where a dozen women were preparing the traditional chicken-and-pastry supper.
A drum set dominated the stage, and a slightly askew Christmas tree stood to one side. At the foot of the stairs leading to the stage, a thoroughly modern Santa Claus was giving delighted children stockings filled with oranges and candy. When I asked around about the origin of Old Christmas, several people deferred to Maggie Midgette. She was a trim woman in a black sweater.
“There’s always been an oyster roast, a supper, and a dance,” said the seventy-three-year-old, who grew up here. “We used to have skits in blackface,” she added. “But then some people up in Virginia gave us trouble about that, so we stopped.” The critics didn’t know that this version of blackface was more likely a holdover from a medieval English tradition than from the racist shows popular among whites a century ago. A visitor in 1938 referred to the “Olde Christmas Masque” demonstrating “the persisting traditions of their colonial ancestors.”
Midgette said that at the end of the evening Old Buck invariably came. “The kids loved that. And the men would duke it out.”
I wasn’t sure that I heard her correctly. “Duke it out?” I asked.
“Sure,” Midgette responded. “My brother liked to fight; he enjoyed it. It was just something we did. Afterwards you would say, ‘It’s all good.’ It cleared the air,” she explained, smiling sweetly.
“Did this happen late in the evening, when the women and children have gone home?”
She shook her head. “Oh no. We would egg them on!” she said, relishing the memory. “And some women fought too.”
“They did?” I said in surprise.
She paused and looked at me fixedly. “I fought.” Her quiet voice and steely gaze left me with no doubts. “Now some women here wouldn’t admit it. But I don’t mind saying.”
Four white-haired men then took the stage at the far end of the room to play “Johnny B. Goode,” followed by a rockabilly version of “White Christmas.” A drunken young fisherman in rubber boots hauled a very elderly woman onto the dance floor, to the crowd’s delight. A woman joined us at the table and told me she knew something about local traditions. “We put marsh grass under our beds to get toys at Christmas,” she said loudly over the amplified music. “My mother did it, and my kids do it too.”
Only the very young and the very old seemed to be inside. Most of the adults were outside, despite the onset of a cold drizzle that accompanied the gusty winds. A few minutes later a young woman came through the door. “They’re not fighting out there after all,” she announced with evident disappointment. She said that a man threw a beer at one of the guys cooking oysters, who promptly punched him in the jaw. But that was the end of it.
The casual violence reflects a fierce autonomy with deep roots on the Outer Banks. While residents were “industrious and self-sustaining,” the authors of a book on local history report they were also “unruly and ungovernable.” Despite the recent influx of outsiders, that remains the case. Many view formal authority, such as the National Park Service, with deep suspicion if not outright hostility.
Dawson pointed me to two older women sitting at one of the long white tables. Olive Patrick was eighty-nine, and her sister Lovie Midgett was ninety-four. They were both lean with coiffed hair. I asked Midgett, who was elegant in a dark-blue blouse and pearls, about island life when she was a child. “I grew up on Rodanthe when there were no cars,” she said. “We walked. Not that there was any place to walk to,” she added with a laugh.
Once, during World War II, she recalled that the family house shook with the force of a ship torpedoed by a German U-boat just offshore. For a time, she patrolled the beach at night to keep an eye out for spies from German ships trying to infiltrate the United States. I asked her about Old Buck. A lone drummer had always accompanied the animal’s presence, Midgett said, but he had recently died.
“Maybe Old Buck won’t show up tonight,” I said, recalling what the man outside had told me.
“He’s coming,” she said firmly. “We don’t give up easy on our traditions.”
An hour or two later, the front door opened with a gust of wind. A young guy in camouflage entered holding the reins of a creature with a makeshift black-and-white head and horns. Behind was a body colored more like that of a zebra than a bull. “Here’s Old Buck!” the man chanted loudly and rhythmically as he led the rambunctious four-legged beast around the room.
As the creature lunged at squealing children and laughing adults, I noticed Old Buck wore one set of black boots and one pair of loafers. Parents crowded as close as they dared to snap pictures with their iPhones. Old Buck charged Midgett and her sister, but they ducked with glee and practiced agility. After a few circles around the room, the bull sauntered out into the darkness, presumably to his hideaway in the Trent Woods.
I couldn’t say if the strange ritual was an echo of anything that the Roanoke colonists might have performed. As part of the ancient central European tradition of Krampus still practiced in Austria and Germany, young men dress as fearsome horned animals at Christmas to terrify misbehaving children, a kind of anti–Santa Claus. Other than Joachim Gans from Prague (who was Jewish), however, there are no records of central Europeans on the Outer Banks in colonial days.
Old Buck seemed more closely related to Old Tup, an effigy of a ram paraded by young men through medieval streets of northern England at Christmas. The event survives in England only in an old folk song that goes, “The horns that grew on his head, sir, they grew so mighty high, that every time he nodded his head he nodded against the sky.” Old Tup was part of a medieval tradition of Christmas skits called mummings to solicit money. Performers blackened their faces or wore masks to avoid being identified as beggars. Father Christmas and some representation of Beelzebub might show up, and, though comic, the skits often had the sober themes of death and resurrection. The name Old Tup certainly sounded close to Old Buck, though I knew that this link was just one more bit of conjecture.
As the evening wore on, Dawson told me that there might be more fights, but not until long after midnight, when people were really drunk. “It’s much calmer now than it used to be,” he added with a note of regret. “It used to be a few-hundred-man fistfight, village versus village. My grandfather was a Golden Gloves boxer who would lay people out.”
I had a long drive ahead of me that night and the weather was worsening, so I decided not to linger. I paused to say good-bye to Maggie Midgette. “Do people here talk about being descended from Native Americans?” I asked her spontaneously.
“Most everyone here would say they have Indian blood,” she said. With her dark hair and eyes, and the faint olive hue of her skin—traits she shared with Dawson—she certainly looked as if she did. Estes, the DNA genealogist, had told me that genetic testing on a few old Hatteras families revealed more African American traits than Indian. Before I began my Lost Colony search, I would have said everyone in the room was white. Now I knew there was no such thing as “white,” much less “pure Anglo-Saxon blood,” particularly not in a corner of America like this, where the genes of Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans were jumbled through the centuries, despite the harsh laws imposed by distant legislators. The Roanoke voyagers themselves were a mélange of Welsh, Scottish, French, Portuguese, Danish, and other European groups besides English. In the land that is mixed, everyone in the room was a mongrel in different proportions.
“And what about the Lost Colonists?” I asked.
She narrowed her eyes. “Well, those colonists did settle this island,” she said slowly. “Of course, no one would say they were descended from them, but…” Her words trailed off. Then she winked.
Of course, the blackface, brawls, and Old Buck didn’t point conclusively to some lingering tradition of long-ago Elizabethans stranded on this faraway shore. The refusal to give up a quirky medieval ritual or the Julian calendar might just as well be a remnant of the English who arrived in the early eighteenth century. Like much else in the search for the Lost Colony—Horton’s rapier, Luccketti’s pottery fragments, the Dare Stone—Old Christmas offered beguiling but inconclusive evidence. Yet I liked the idea that despite assimilation with Carolina Algonquians some quirky Yuletide custom brought by the English survived the centuries, like the Machapunga’s proclivity to make nets the same way their ancestors did. This was history in peripheral vision, hard to capture, not quite myth and not quite fact.
Outside, a cold and steady rain blew as the ocean thrummed hard against the beach. I was soaked before reaching my car. Waiting for the heater to warm me up, I remembered the line from George Bancroft’s 1834 history: “Imagination received no help in its attempts to trace the fate of the colony of Roanoke.”
As I drove north over Oregon Inlet, fierce gusts blew my car across the yellow lines above the dark waters. On the opposite shore a couple of miles later, a historical marker flashed by. The highway was deserted, so I reversed the car and shone my headlights onto the gray-and-black sign canted at an angle from the relentless gales. “Roanoke voyages, 1585–1590, based operations at inlet near here. Long closed, it was named for pilot Simon Fernandes.” His surname was the Portuguese version, and his given name the English one, but the mix-up seemed appropriate.
The windshield wipers beat their fast rhythm as blasts of wind gently rocked the car. I hadn’t unequivocally found the Lost Colony, but in my fever dream of obsession I did glimpse why this story exerts such a powerful grip on our imaginations and haunts us still. We weren’t really looking for long-dead Elizabethans. We were, instead, wrestling with what it meant to be American amid our national mashup of genes and traditions. We still are. That’s the wisdom the vanished colonists can still impart, the real secret token they left behind. Through them, we get to remake ourselves with the changing times, as is always the case with any good myth.
That drama, as with Green’s play, has no inevitable outcome. It does, however, grant us the courage to do what they likely did, to step into the dark woods in an unfamiliar place and trust that, eventually, we will emerge in some new and unexpected form.
Coda: A Brave Kingdom
On a late July afternoon in 1609, almost two decades after White’s final Roanoke visit, a sturdy Spanish ship sailed north along Hatteras Island’s sandy coast on a mission to seek out a rumored English colony. Spanish spies reported that the trespassers had recently sailed into Chesapeake Bay and built a fort staffed by one hundred men at a plac
e called Jamestown. Philip III’s advisers counseled swift action. Spain’s council of war for the Indies urged, “An armada should be assembled, with all possible speed, to go hunt them and drive them out from wherever they may be, punishing them exemplarily.”
The king did not want to risk reigniting the costly war with England so recently concluded. After the death of Elizabeth I and his father, Philip II, he and James I navigated a fragile peace. The young Spanish monarch bet that the settlement would fail of its own accord. Instead of sending an armada, he ordered the naval commander Francisco Ferdinando de Ecija to sail from St. Augustine to the Chesapeake to gather intelligence. The captain also had secret orders to scout out possible sites for Spanish forts that could be built up and down the coast of eastern North America. Once the little English settlement collapsed, Spain would sweep in to assert its control from Florida to Maine and ward off any future interlopers.
To keep his cover, Ecija hoisted a Dutch flag as he moved north from St. Augustine. When the ship rounded a sandy cape, likely along the north end of Hatteras, the crew spotted a large plume of smoke rising into the hazy summer sky as the sun descended over the Pamlico Sound. He ordered his men to drop anchor at a convenient cove nearby so that they could investigate the apparent signal on the following morning.
As the next day dawned, Ecija realized that the anchorage he had chosen was “where the said English were settled earlier, and where they had been in times past.” The Spanish captain, like his predecessor in 1588, had stumbled on the decaying remains of Port Ferdinando. The rotting slipway and barrels left by the Roanoke voyagers must still have been visible. At least one of his crew recognized the place, because he had sailed with the earlier mission.
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