Raleigh's colony: Still lost, but definitely not forgotten

Sometime between Aug. 27, 1587, and Aug. 18, 1590, some 115 English men, women and children vanished from Roanoke Island on the North Carolina coast.

The fate of those missing settlers has haunted much of American culture. Tens of thousands of summer tourists (including the author Andrew Lawler as a boy) have trooped to the Waterside Theatre in Manteo to watch Paul Green's outdoor drama.

References to "Croatoan," the mysterious final inscription the colonists left carved on a wooden post, have popped up in Stephen King's fiction, in "Sleepy Hollow" and "American Horror Story." (One of my favorites, Harlan Ellison's gonzo story "Croatoan," somehow involved aborted fetuses and baby alligators flushed into the New York City sewers.) In Anthony Tata's novels, his counter-terrorist superhero, Jake Mahegan, is a descendant of Roanoke settlers and Croatan Indians.

Now, Lawler -- a longtime writer for such magazines as Smtihsonian and National Geographic -- ties the threads together in "The Secret Token," a gripping account of the life, and afterlife, of Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke Island colonies.

The "secret token" was "Croatoan," the code message that Gov. John White had arranged before he left to gather supplies in England in 1587. (Unfortunately, the Spanish Armada intervened.) It supposedly meant that the colonists had gone to join friendly Indians on what is now Hatteras Island. Or perhaps they headed to a staging point "50 miles in the main," i.e. inland.

Lawler starts with the brief history of the colony itself, then with the story of efforts to find them. Capt. John Smith of Jamestown spent months hunting for them, but aside from rumors of people off in the woods, wearing European clothes and living in stone houses, found living. Some rumors said that the chief Powhatan, Pocahontas' father, had ordered them massacred, but Smith and others did not believe it.

The legend went dormant until the 1850s when Harvard historian George Bancroft made Roanoke the foundation of his epic history of the United States. (As Lawler notes, the Lost Colonists were so much more likeable than the lazy fops of Jamestown or the joyless, heretic-killing Puritans of New England.)

A sort of cult arose around Virginia Dare, the first white child born in the colony. Victorian poets pictured her growing up, hunting in the woods and perhaps being transformed into an albino deer. (Unfortunately, as Lawler notes, the Dare story was taken over by white supremacists, both in the Jim Crow era and today.

Like Bigfoot or space aliens, the colonists and their fate have proved elusive, with trails evaporating.

Lawler gives full credit to UNCW professor David LaVere, who chronicled the history of the "Dare Stones," discovered in the 1930s, with inscriptions allegedly written by Virginia's mom, Eleanor Dare. Almost all the stones have been proved to be fakes, but the first one, found in Eastern North Carolina, has convinced at least some Elizabethan scholars that it might be genuine. (Sadly, LaVere's fascinating book on the subject, "The Lost Rocks," is out of print.)

Efforts to trace the colonists' possible descendants have proved inconclusive at best, since no verifiable samples of the settlers' DNA have been found. (Lawler detours into the history of the Lumbee Indians' claims of Roanoke ties, and proves more respectful of them than most scholars are.)

"The Secret Token" also covers the intriguing but not-yet-conclusive excavations at "Site X" in Bertie County, which might be the "50 miles in the main" location. The site was recently purchased by the N.C. Coastal Land Trust for preservation by the state.

At times, Lawler's account reads a bit like an "X-Files" episode; hardcore "Lost Colony" hunters apparently behave a lot like ufologists.

And along the way, Lawler uncovers a couple of other little-known mysteries. In 1586, for example, Sir Francis Drake stopped by Roanoke island after raiding the Spanish colonial fort of Cartagena. It's unclear, but while there, he apparently released a number of refugees, including Muslim prisoners from Spanish galleys and hundreds of West Africans. What happened to them? Where did they go? Nobody knows.

The author gives his own theory of the colonists' fate, but again, nothing is conclusive -- which may be part of the fun.

(Note this is the paperback edition of a book released in 2018.)

Reporter Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-343-2208 or Ben.Steelman at StarNewsOnline.com.

The Secret Token

• Myth, Obsession and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke
• By Andrew Lawler
• Anchor Books, $17 paperback