the moon, I’m sure we would have done everything we could to rescue them. But again, I’m making the mistake of trying to look at the past as if it’s the same as the present.
After Roanoke, the English waited twenty years before they tried again to start a settlement in the Americas. This time they targeted a site a little farther north, on the James River in Virginia. The Jamestown settlers heard rumors about sightings of people nearby who had fair skin and blond hair-or people who wore English clothing or spoke English or lived in English-style houses. And there were suggestions that some of those people might have been the remnants of the Roanoke Colony. But the Jamestown residents put very little effort into searching for them. This is frustrating for historians, but understandable. The Jamestown settlers were struggling just to survive. In their first year, all but 38 of the 104 original Jamestown settlers died.
So what really happened to Virginia Dare and the rest of the Roanoke Colony in “original” history? The most depressing possibility is that everyone died not long after John White left. Maybe some of their Indian enemies killed them all. Maybe a Spanish raiding party murdered them. Maybe everyone starved to death.
What John White found in 1590-particularly the lack of a cross alongside the word CROATOAN-would seem to indicate that, if nothing else, the colonists did manage to get safely off Roanoke Island. Some historians theorize that the colonists might have split into two groups: One group could have gone to the Chesapeake area as originally planned, while a smaller group stayed with the Croatoans, close enough to Roanoke to watch for White’s return. A modern Indian tribe in North Carolina known as the Lumbee claims that the Roanoke colonists intermarried with Native Americans and became their ancestors. One study of these Indians in the late nineteenth century found that 41 of the 95 surnames represented among the Roanoke colonists were carried by members of this tribe.
Others tell different stories about the colonists. Captain John Smith said that Powhatan, the powerful Indian leader near Jamestown, claimed at one point that he had killed all the Roanoke colonists. (Powhatan was also Pocahantas’s father, as you might remember if you were paying attention in Social Studies and/or watched the Disney movie.) Another sad possibility is that some of the Roanoke colonists might have become slaves of a rather cruel tribe farther inland from the coast. There were reports of unusually light-skinned people working for that tribe, along with the reports of light-skinned people living more happily alongside other natives.
Of course, the Roanoke colonists of 1587 weren’t the only ones with light skin who might have been wandering around North America in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Besides the Spanish and the English, other Europeans such as the French and the Dutch were exploring North America. And the history Antonio describes really did occur: European sea captains did leave behind cabin boys to learn native languages, so they could eventually serve as translators. If the European ships then sank or just didn’t bother coming back, the European kids who managed to survive would have blended in with the native cultures. Or maybe, like Antonio, some of them might have decided they liked life as adopted Indians better than life as lowly cabin boys. Apparently, many of the Native Americans were quite open-minded about welcoming outsiders into their tribes.
Even before the official “Lost Colonists,” the trial-run settlements on Roanoke Island provided several missing persons who might also have accounted for some of the reports of people who looked or acted like Europeans, residing in various places along the Atlantic coast. Virginia Dare may be the most famous person to have vanished from Roanoke Island, but she had a lot of company. There were the fourteen soldiers who vanished from the island sometime between the summer of 1586 and August 1587. There were also three men abandoned in June 1586 when their fellow soldier/explorers took Sir Francis Drake’s offer of a free ride back to England.
I had never known the story of Drake’s rescue effort before, and, like Brendan, I was horrified by his choices. Drake really did abandon hundreds of slaves (both of Indian and African origin) on Roanoke Island to make room to rescue the English soldiers. And he undoubtedly thought he was being heroic and generous, doing this. The slaves immediately vanish from the historical record-nobody knows what happened to them.
It is hard to read the history of this time period without feeling appalled: by how slaves were treated, by how Native Americans were treated, by how the common (nonnoble) English people were treated. And so many of their stories are lost to history because their voices weren’t considered important either. I do think time travel would show us many, many fascinating individuals and perspectives and events that have been completely overlooked by history.
Even without time travel, history is constantly re-evaluated. Historians have a much better understanding now of how devastating it was for Native Americans to be exposed to European diseases. It is true that entire villages vanished; entire tribes were reduced to a handful of survivors. It’s impossible to know exactly how many people died, but early European accounts of travel to the Americas tell again and again of explorers meeting teeming communities of natives at first contact and then, when Europeans came back later, finding nothing but a vast empty wilderness.
If I were a time traveler, I would want very badly to sneak vaccines into the past.
In the absence of any verifiable accounts of what really happened to Virginia Dare and the other Roanoke colonists, numerous stories and fables and myths have grown up during the past four hundred years. Sometimes the stories are passed off as truth: In the late 1930s, people across Georgia and the Carolinas found 48 carved stones allegedly left by Eleanor Dare to tell her family’s story. A 1941 magazine article discredited the stones and revealed them as elaborate hoaxes. But as recently as 1991 a book called A Witness for Eleanor Dare argued that the stones were authentic.
Even more fancifully, a woman named Sallie Southall Cotten wrote a book in 1901 claiming to retell an “Indian fable” in a long narrative poem: Virginia Dare spurns the advances of an evil Indian magician so, in revenge, he turns her into a white doe. Her true love, an Indian warrior, tries to rescue her by shooting her with a magic arrow, but a rival is hunting her as well. Struck by two arrows at once, she turns back into a human just in time to die.
Maybe if we’d known what really happened to Virginia Dare from the beginning, nobody would remember her or care. Maybe it’s just the mystery that makes her so interesting.
Or maybe the truth is an even better story than anyone can imagine. We just don’t know what it is.
Margaret Peterson Haddix
