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  By then it was afternoon, and a summer storm was brewing. The men abandoned their search and returned to the ships; the tempest blew hard the entire night. The next morning the sea was still rough as the ships prepared to sail the short fifty miles south to Croatoan, “where our planters are.” Suddenly the anchor cable snapped in the surging seas, and the ship nearly wrecked on a sandbar before the captain managed to steer into a deeper channel. Only one anchor cable remained. Supplies were low, and the weather grew worse.

  White reluctantly agreed to a new plan; the Moonlight would return to England while the Hopewell would spend the winter in the Caribbean and return in the spring “to visit our countrymen in Virginia.” But as they sailed south, a powerful wind from the west pushed the ship deeper into the Atlantic. The ship arrived off the Azores, an island chain three thousand miles to the east, but ill winds prevented a landing to restock the dwindling stocks of food and water. The captain had no choice but to make for England. White landed in Plymouth on October 24, 1590, ending a voyage he called “as luckless to many, as sinister to myself.”

  There would be no more search-and-rescue efforts by the governor. “Would to God my wealth were answerable to my will,” he wrote, keenly aware that he lacked the deep pockets necessary to finance a new transatlantic expedition. The father never found his daughter or laid eyes on his granddaughter again. They, and the entire colony for which he was responsible, vanished from history.

  Introduction: The Terror Within

  Roanoke Island is an unassuming oval of land that today serves as an enormous trestle for the bridges funneling tourists from the marshy North Carolina mainland to the beaches of the Outer Banks. Not quite a third the size of Manhattan, the mostly wooded landscape fringed by swamp is home to a couple of sleepy towns and fewer than seven thousand people.

  As ground zero for the mystery of the Lost Colony, it is also inhabited with wraiths and werewolves, enchanted animals and aliens, and all manner of supernatural beings held responsible for what happened to eighty-five men, seventeen women, and thirteen children more than four centuries ago. Roanoke has long been a setting for our national nightmares. Even the U.S. National Park Service trades on this delicious dread. As Halloween approaches, “make plans to brave the haunted trail” filled with “creatures, maniacs, zombies, and disembodied spirits that roam freely on the desolate Fort Raleigh National Park on historic Roanoke Island.” It’s all part of “PsychoPath: The Terror Within.” If the event gets too real, just yell “safety” and you will, unlike the hapless colonists, be promptly rescued.

  Our lurid fascination with the disappearance of these Elizabethans stretches back to the early nineteenth century, when a Harvard historian and several women writers transformed an obscure and embarrassing debacle at the nation’s dawn into the origin myth of the United States, adding a twist of gothic horror in the process. Stories of evil Indian warriors and a beautiful but doomed blond huntress—the now mature granddaughter of John White, Virginia Dare—proliferated.

  Such tales drew visitors like George Higby Throop, a schoolteacher with a delightfully Victorian name, who visited Roanoke (twice) on his 1852 beach vacation in order to savor the island’s history of “massacres, murders, and other bloody scenes, on which it is almost sickening to dwell.” You can almost feel the self-induced shiver down his spine.

  Yet by any measure, the violence in later English colonies surpassed anything recorded during the Roanoke voyages. One hundred miles to the north at Jamestown, the first enduring English town in the New World, settlers resorted to butchering the skull and shinbone of a teenage girl during the starving time of 1609, when eight out of ten perished. A dozen years later in New England, the pious Miles Standish stabbed an Indian to death during a meal, using the man’s own knife. He brought the head back to Plymouth to display it with a cloth soaked in the dead man’s blood.

  Cycles of savage attacks by and on Native Americans in seventeenth-century America, not to mention the list of torments perpetrated on the rising number of enslaved Africans, prompted one historian to dub this period “the barbarous years.” Murder, massacre, and mayhem were a way of life as these cultures clashed. Thousands of people, European, African, and indigenous, disappeared or died violent deaths.

  But the ones we can’t seem to forget, the ones who have since earned the title of the Lost Colonists, are the Roanoke settlers. They were mostly middle-class people of no particular distinction: tradesmen, lawyers, and shopkeepers. There was a small-town sheriff. Three of the boys were orphans. A handful of single women and a dozen married ones made the perilous journey. One was nursing a child, and two were pregnant when they stepped aboard the ships bobbing in the Thames. There’s not a single portrait of any of them, and most of their identities are blurred by time and the ubiquity of those common English names—Cooper, Powell, Stevens.

  The Lost Colonists seem ordinary in a way that makes them more familiar than the incompetent gold-obsessed gentlemen of Jamestown and the sanctimonious Pilgrims who banned Christmas celebrations. These were not people trying to get rich quick or build a fundamentalist refuge but individuals more like the millions who followed in the succeeding centuries seeking a piece of land and a marginally better life. Yet because we know so little about them, and nothing for certain about what they did after Governor White left in 1587, they also make perfect blank slates, encouraging tales of the unfound and the undead to collect on the island. Actress Kathy Bates played White’s deranged wife in FX’s American Horror Story in 2016, terrorizing a nice mixed-race couple on twenty-first-century Roanoke with her bloody knife and Elizabethan brogue. A traumatized historian in the popular series explained that Croatoan “is actually a word of dark power and blood magic.” The Zombie Research Society recently warned that “there could be something sinister still in the ground on Roanoke Island, waiting to be released into a modern population that is more advanced, more connected, but just as unprepared as ever.”

  All this supernatural activity concentrated in one out-of-the-way place is a sure sign that there is something deeper and darker at work than mere historical curiosity or the natural desire to solve a persistent riddle. Our fairy tales are about losing our way in the enchanted forest. In our movies we are looking for Nemo or Dory in the animated depths. Our books are filled with conquistadors swallowed up by the jungles or Arctic explorers disappearing in the ice pack. To die is tragic, but to go missing is to become a legend, a mystery. “Wander off the stage of history and leave only a moving target,” writes novelist Charles Frazier. That is why Roanoke exerts such a powerful attraction and why it draws those of us harboring—and who doesn’t?—that quiet fear of getting lost ourselves.

  Myths cast spells that cannot be broken by facts. They operate in the background, like a computer program hidden deep in a hard drive. Their job is to help us get our bearings in each age, as Aeneas did for Rome and King Arthur still does for Britain. That’s why Roanoke does for America what Jamestown and Plymouth cannot. There simply aren’t enough facts to get in the way of a good story that can reveal something fresh about who we were, who we are, and who we want to be. This is a haunting as much as history, a spooky tale reinterpreted by each generation to reflect our current national dreams and anxieties.

  All these layers of legend can quickly shade into kitsch, delighting horror writers and cable producers but repelling serious academics. Open a book about the nation’s past, and it might grant a grudging sidebar to Raleigh’s effort before skipping quickly to the firm ground of 1607 Virginia and the inevitable arrival of the Mayflower. “This venture had little long-term significance,” Philip Jenkins writes dismissively about Roanoke in A History of the United States, summing up conventional thinking among scholars. “The fate of the ‘Lost Colony’ is one of the unsolvable problems with which some modern historians amuse themselves in their moments of leisure,” sniffs Oliver Perry Chitwood in A History of Colonial America. “But so far,
all the efforts in this direction have been no more fruitful than the study of a crossword puzzle.” When I told historians what I was pursuing, several rolled their eyes as if to say, not that again.

  But the public understands intuitively what most scholars do not—that the story of Roanoke is about much more than a dead end or false start. “Raleigh’s missing settlers still haunt the American imagination not simply because history, like nature, abhors a vacuum,” writes the perceptive historian Robert Arner. “But also because they have not yet imparted all the wisdom that such wayward wanderers may be presumed to possess.” The vanished colonists remain lost because, more than four centuries later, they still have wisdom to impart.

  The Roanoke venture lasted for six years and involved two dozen vessels and well over a thousand people crossing the treacherous breadth of the Atlantic to establish England’s first beachhead in the New World. In size, scope, and cost, it far outstripped the later inaugural voyages to Jamestown and Plymouth. It was the Elizabethan equivalent of the Apollo program. Led by the queen’s principal security guard, the Esquire of the Body Extraordinary, Walter Raleigh, the enterprise was born during a cold war that threatened to turn hot, with a technological underdog itching to take on its more seasoned rival in the era’s new frontier.

  The ambitious effort, which cost the equivalent today of many tens of millions of dollars, began with a reconnaissance mission in 1584, followed two years later by a males-only settlement dominated by a military mind-set that ended disastrously with starvation and severed heads but produced a wealth of scientific and commercial data. It was the next and final try that brought together men, women, and children to create a New World utopia, what we remember as the Lost Colony. Larger forces at work, namely war in Europe, cut the settlers off from their mother country.

  While the biographical details of the abandoned colonists are sparse, those who organized and executed the undertaking are not only better known to us but also appear borrowed from an over-the-top production on the rowdy south bank of the Thames. There is a young and preternaturally brilliant Oxford bachelor befriended by a flamboyant courtier and a quarrelsome Portuguese pilot who may be a secret saboteur. The first acknowledged Jew in the Americas is given the impossible job of finding gold in a land lacking even stone, while a rogue with the comic-opera name of Marmaduke Constable stirs up trouble. One Indian youth is charmed by the clamor and chaos of Shakespearean London while another is repelled. A grandfather desperately seeks his family against the menacing backdrop of an enemy invasion. The tale is punctuated by storms, shipwrecks, and surprise attacks gone awry.

  Though the colony ultimately fizzled, it generated detailed knowledge of the Americas. The maps produced in those years, as well as descriptions of the plants, animals, and people of eastern North Carolina—including the magnificent watercolors that White himself painted—forged the first link in the chain that came to bind North America and the small island nation. Jamestown followed two decades later as a thinly disguised sequel. Subsequent settlements along Chesapeake Bay and then on New England’s rocky coast formed the seedbed for what grew into the American colonies. They, in turn, led to the creation of what became the United States and played an essential part in the rise of the British Empire. By the time of the American Revolution, Britain had surpassed Spain in global power and influence—an outcome that would have astonished even Raleigh, the quintessential Elizabethan conquistador. In his day, English dominance of North America was an outlandish fantasy maintained only by a few eccentrics. The Spanish and Portuguese had all but sewed up control of the strategic parts of the Americas long before the first ship bound for the Outer Banks sailed down the Thames.

  “The profound significance of Raleigh’s Virginia voyages to the history and culture of the modern world is often forgotten or undervalued,” writes Neil MacGregor, an art historian and former director of the British Museum, which today houses White’s drawings of the strange world that he encountered. That has begun to change. Historians believe that these paintings profoundly shaped the European view of Native Americans and the concept of the noble savage. And while scholars long assumed that the venture imitated English outposts in Ireland, archaeologist Audrey Horning of the College of William and Mary argues persuasively that the opposite is true: Roanoke served as a model for the way the English went on to colonize Ireland. It was Raleigh and his cohorts, concludes American literature specialist Lewis Leary, who “gave the most powerful impetus in practice to the idea of English settlement in America.” The colonies—and the empire and nation that grew from them—“built on that foundation.”

  Native Americans, it has also become increasingly clear, were central players in constructing that foundation. Without their food and expertise, England’s ambitions to settle the New World would have been quickly thwarted. Roanoke Island is where the complicated and contentious relationship between the peoples of the British Isles and indigenous Americans began. At the start, they traded peacefully while sharing recipes and meals. They learned each other’s strange tongues and formed mutually advantageous alliances. Yet this is also where the newcomers impaled their first Native American head on a sharpened post and where vengeful Indians pierced a colonist with sixteen arrows and then crushed his skull with blunt wooden swords. It was from here that the English first spread their microbes that would upend Native life across the continent more ruthlessly than their muskets. D. H. Lawrence might have been speaking of Roanoke when he wrote that American soil “is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons.” No wonder we’ve turned it into our little island of horrors.

  There are also intriguing hints of a second, and even more mysterious, lost colony on Roanoke that may have spawned another sort of haunting. Hundreds of enslaved North African Muslims and West Africans, along with South American indigenous women, were brought here to help build the initial English settlement, a third of a century before slaves arrived at Jamestown. Many researchers believe these refugees from Spanish rule were abandoned on the island when the first colony pulled up stakes and returned to England the year before White’s settlers arrived. If they are right, then this is where the stage was first set for the drama that was to unfold among the British, Africans, and indigenous peoples that shaped—and still shapes—our national identity.

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  I can’t say that I wasn’t warned. “The Lost Colony has a kind of inexorable pull, like a black hole,” Brent Lane told me when I set out to pursue this story. He teaches heritage economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has long felt the gravitational attraction of the Roanoke voyages. “You may think you are immune, but if you get too close to it, it sucks you in. You have to run up to the edge and veer off. Or else you get lost.”

  Long childhood exposure made me immune, or so I thought. Once a year, during our summer vacation on the Outer Banks, my parents would drag my sisters and me out of the surf for the thirty-minute drive to Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island. Dusk fell as we entered the buggy amphitheater lined with hard wooden benches to watch one of the country’s longest-running plays, an outdoor drama called The Lost Colony. There were Indian dances, sword fights, and fireworks to keep me entertained.

  But my strongest memory is what came after the colonists marched off singing to an unknown destiny in the final scene, their voices soaring over the pipe organ’s crescendos as they disappeared into the woods. We filed quietly out of the palisaded theater and down a winding path through the dark forest. For a moment, clutching tightly to an adult hand, I would feel the fear and awe of what it meant to be abandoned in a strange land. The sensation struck me more viscerally than anything in the three-hour drama.

  When I was a teenager, that sense of magic and mystery turned to adolescent scorn. My sisters and I would mimic the more melodramatic lines in the play. “Roanoke, oh Roanoke, thou hath made a man of me!” exclaims one actor in Ye Olde
English. Only much later did I appreciate the influence of this annual pilgrimage. Drifting into journalism, I wrote about space exploration before switching beats to cover the search for ancient lost cities and civilizations in the Middle East. One rainy night in Cambridge in Britain, while attending a meeting on Indian Ocean archaeology for a magazine, I crashed a dinner held for conference speakers. Seated across from me was a rosy-cheeked man who introduced himself as Mark Horton from the University of Bristol.

  “Zanzibar,” he said cheerily, when I asked where he was excavating. “Oh, and I’m doing a little digging in a place called Hatteras.”

  “Did you find the Lost Colony?” I responded jokingly. I knew that Hatteras, fifty miles south of Roanoke, was the modern name for Croatoan, the place where White was sure the colonists went.

  “Indeed!” he said and then let out a nervous giggle.

  When he discovered that I was a reporter, the archaeologist clammed up. “We aren’t ready to go public,” was all he would say. Horton turned abruptly to his neighbor to chat while I picked irritably at my chicken curry. His evasion stoked my curiosity, but he kept giving me the slip during the meeting. Later, after I returned home, he ignored my badgering e-mails. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to pursue the great mystery of my childhood.

  Nearly a year passed before I received his abrupt and startling reply: “We have now pretty compelling evidence for the fate of the Lost Colony.”

  He agreed to chat the next morning on Skype from his home in Britain during his breakfast and long before my dawn. “I’m digging dead Saxons tomorrow,” he explained. When his round face popped up on the screen, he told me that his Hatteras excavation team had, among other things, found the hilt of an Elizabethan rapier in a Native American trash heap. I doubted that one lost sword unraveled a four-hundred-year-plus enigma. “Well, why don’t you come see for yourself?” he said brightly.