A Real National Treasure: Rediscovering the Roanoke Colony

Heather Cox Richardson

Ok, I confess to loving the National Treasure movies. I know, I know, they’re stupid, and they completely twist history, and all that, but they are so much fun! Wouldn’t it be great if there really were hidden passages behind Mount Rushmore? Caches of historical treasures buried under modern cities? Old documents that held secret information, revealing the answers to ancient mysteries?

Oh, wait . . .

Perhaps there are, on that last one.

One of America’s great mysteries has been the fate of the Roanoke Colony, England’s first attempt to establish a permanent settlement in the “New World.” In the mid-1580s, Sir Walter Raleigh outfitted a settlement on Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina, just inside the Outer Banks (but what was then Virginia, named, of course, for Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen). The first years of the colony under a military governor were disastrous as the governor fought with both local Indians and his own people. The one great success of the venture was its choice of illustrator and mapmaker: John White. His meticulous observations of the coastline and the peoples he encountered are invaluable pictures of the New World as seen by wide-eyed European adventurers.

John White illustration, 1585

The first colony failed, but in 1587, Raleigh tried again to colonize the island, this time putting John White himself in charge of the expedition. (White convinced his daughter Eleanor and her new husband to join the venture. His granddaughter, Virginia Dare, would be the first English child born in America.) White proved a far better illustrator then governor, sparking a battle with the few local Indians who remained friendly. When it appeared the colony could not survive the upcoming winter, White returned to England to plead for supplies.

But bad luck continued to plague the colony. White returned to England just in time for the 1588 attack of the Spanish Armada on England. To defend her country, Queen Elizabeth prohibited any ships from leaving it, especially those whose only goal was to aid a few far-off adventurers.
It was not until 1590 that White could get back to Roanoke. When he arrived, he found the colony long abandoned. The only sign of what had happened to the settlers was the word “CROATOAN” carved on a post.

Or so we have understood. Until now.

From the report: "Examination of patches on a map of
the E coast of America by John White."

In 2007, the North Carolina Museum of History put on an exhibit that explored the fate of the Lost Colony. To that effort, the British Museum lent a number of John White’s illustrations. Crucially, their loan included a map. Members of the First Colony Foundation—a group dedicated to finding traces of the Roanoke colonists—noticed that White’s map had two patches. While patching illustrations was the seventeenth century’s version of Wite-Out, one of the map’s patches appeared to show a faint trace of something beneath it other than an error. The First Colony scholars convinced the British Museum to explore what might lie under the patches on the White map.

In early May, the British Museum announced their findings. And what findings they were! Using modern imaging techniques, they discovered that one of the patches covered a slightly different version of the coastline, and appears simply to have been used to correct an error. Under the second, though, lay a drawing of a dramatically altered ship, as well as the markings of a fort at the confluence of two rivers.

When he was back in England, White had vaguely suggested that the colonists had been intending to move inland when he left in 1587, and Jamestown settlers had heard rumors from Indians that there were Englishmen on upper Albemarle Sound. This new discovery lends heavy weight to those hints.

Is this where the Roanoke settlers ended up? Did White hide their location when he designed the map to protect the colonists from the Spanish?

The map raises new questions, but far more focused ones than the devastatingly broad “What might have happened to the Roanoke setters?” These are questions that, with the help of archaeologists, can be answered. It’s exciting to step this much closer to an answer about one of America’s great mysteries.

Now if only someone would tell us where Jimmy Hoffa is buried . . .

Historians in the News Roundup

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Melody Burri, "Historian Nancy Hewitt to present new work on Quaker Amy Post," MPNnow, August 22, 2012

Farmington, N.Y. - Nancy A. Hewitt, Professor of History and Women's Studies at Rutgers University, will give the fourth talk in the summer series for the 1816 Farmington Quaker Meetinghouse Museum.>>>

Professor Hewitt will present "Faith and Politics: The Spiritual Journeys of Amy Post."

Edward Helmore, "UK Harvard star Niall Ferguson accused of intellectual fraud," The Week, August 22, 2012

 THE British-born journalist and Harvard-tenured historian Niall Ferguson has landed himself in a nasty spat with some of America's most distinguished economists, among them Princeton's Nobel Prize-winner - and venerable New York Times columnist - Paul Krugman.

Ferguson is a promoter of Chancellor George Osborne's cut-to-growth economic philosophy. Krugman is a spend-to-grow man, as is President Obama.>>>

An interview with Victor Davis Hanson on his essay "There is No One California," Forum, KQED, August 20, 2012

California has become a target of mockery in the presidential campaign, with GOP challenger Mitt Romney holding the troubled state up as an example of where the country is headed under Barack Obama. Historian and conservative columnist Victor Davis Hanson also slams the state in a recent article entitled, "There is No One California." He joins us to talk about the piece, and to give us his take on the presidential campaign.>>>

Rebekah Higgitt, "(Pseudo)scientific history?" Guardian blog, August 16, 2012

There have been many writers who have claimed that history can be, or should be, scientific. Different things are meant by this, of course, and such statements are provoked by different motivations, although generally they trade on the perceived successes, rewards, professionalism and certainty of the sciences.>>>

"Historian Taylor Branch Critiques College Sports," Only a Game, WBUR (rebroadcast), August 25, 2012

The NCAA is facing growing scrutiny from college athletes, coaches and the people who follow college sports. The September 2011 issue of the Atlantic Monthly featured an article by Pulitzer-prize winning historian Taylor Branch — author of Parting the Waters, The Clinton Tapes, and others — entitled “The Shame of College Sports,” which criticizes the corruption within the NCAA.>>>

History, Gender, and Sexuality Roundup

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Lisa Hilton, "Mistresses through the ages Prostitute, concubine, mistress, wife: the boundaries are blurred in this study," TLS, February 9, 2011

What is a mistress? Elizabeth Abbott, who has also published A History of Celibacy and held the post of Dean of Women at Trinity College, University of Toronto, offers this definition: “a woman voluntarily or forcibly engaged in a relatively long-term sexual relationship with a man who is usually married to another woman”. Given the persistence of this model across time and cultures, Abbott maintains that “mistressdom”, like celibacy, is therefore an essential means by which to consider sexual relationships outside marriage – “in fact, an institution parallel and complementary to marriage”. Considering the media’s current obsession with love-rat footballers and cheating celebs, “mistressdom” might also be considered a safe bet for a publisher’s list, and Abbott duly provides us with a generally cheerful tumble through adultery down the ages.>>>

Elizabeth Varon, "Women at War," NYT, February 1, 2011

What do women have to do with the origins of the Civil War? Growing up in Virginia in the 1970s, I often heard this answer: nothing.

Much has changed since then. A new generation of scholars has rediscovered the Civil War as a drama in which women, and gender tensions, figure prominently. Thanks to new research into diaries, letters, newspapers and state and local records, we now know that women were on the front lines of the literary and rhetorical war over slavery long before the shooting war began.>>>

Adam Kirsch, "Macho Man: Exodus recast Israel’s founders as swaggering heroes and secured Leon Uris a place on the Jewish bookshelf even though, as a new biography shows, he was a mediocre writer and a troubled person," Tablet, February 1, 2011

Jews take pride in calling themselves “the people of the book,” and while there’s something a little vainglorious about the phrase—all peoples have books, don’t they?—its appeal is easy to understand. For millennia, in the absence of land and power, Jews found a kind of virtual sovereignty in texts, and the history of Judaism from the Babylonian Exile onward could be written as a history of books and writers—the Torah and the Prophets, the Mishna and Gemara, Rashi and Maimonides, down to modern, secular authors like Theodor Herzl and Sholem Aleichem and Primo Levi.

And then there’s Leon Uris.>>>

Carol Tavris, "The new neurosexism," TLS, January 26, 2011

. . . . Today we look back with amusement at the efforts of nineteenth-century scientists to weigh, cut, split or dissect brains in their pursuit of finding the precise anatomical reason for female inferiority. How much more scientific and unbiased we are today, we think, with our PET scans and fMRIs and sophisticated measurements of hormone levels. Today’s scientists would never commit such a methodological faux pas as failing to have a control group or knowing the sex of the brain they are dissecting – would they? Brain scans don’t lie – do they?>>>