Sir Walter Raleigh is still celebrated as a pioneer importer of tobacco and potatoes, and there's that cloak-in-the-puddle gallantry which must have charmed Queen Elizabeth I. She gave him the right to settle North America. But as a colonist Sir Walter was a flop.
He sent an exploratory expedition in 1584, which found Roanoke Island, off the shore of what is Snow called North Carolina. He sent a military expedition there the following year. The garrison built a fort and sailed back home in 1586. Then, in 1587, he sent 116 would-be settlers, men, women and children. After landing in Roanoke, they were supposed to move up to the more salubrious Chesapeake Bay. Physical features close to Roanoke include the Dismal Swamp and Alligator Sound. Their governor, John White, in the year of their arrival, immediately returned from Roanoke to England for more supplies. However, there was no relief expedition until 1590, which was too late. By that time, the colonists had disappeared from the island without a trace, there and beyond. What happened? Why did England neglect them for so long? Did Spaniards, then England's prime imperial foe, massacre them? Did Indians kill the colonists or abduct them? Did they voluntarily abandon their infertile landfall and move inland? Several tribes lived in the region, militantly competitive agriculturalists and hunters, who might have been more or less hospitable to foreigners.
Lee Miller has a Johns Hopkins master's degree in anthropology and has traced her ancestry to the Kaw nation. She is an expert on Indian linguistics, the founder of the Native Learning Foundation and the author of From the Heart: Voices of the American Indian. She is well qualified and sympathetically inclined to consider the missing intruders from the local peoples' points of view. She is evidently a diligent researcher. The main text of her new book is followed by two appendices, 58 pages of notes and references and a 20-page bibliography. But the relevant evidence is scant and circumstantial. Her subtitle should be "Elaborating the Mystery of England's Lost Colony", rather than solving it. She poses more questions than she answers; and her answers, though not unreasonably deduced, are inconclusive.
Working backwards from the final mysterious effect, she eventually blames the first cause on jealousy in the Elizabethan court. By painstakingly and, it must be said, pains-givingly detailed analysis she shows why she believes that several senior courtiers were not most likely to have sabotaged Raleigh's colonial enterprise. She clears the Earl of Leicester, Sir Christopher Hatton and Lord Burghley, and condemns Sir Francis Walsingham, the Secretary of State, a Machiavellian plotter with an international army of spies, who was "undeniably the most influental figure in Elizabethan England". If the Roanoke colony had succeeded, Miller writes, Raleigh could have become "the wealthiest and most powerful man in the realm". Walsingham coveted that wealth and power himself.
Indians have been sighted with tribally uncharacteristic grey eyes. Were they descendants of Lost Colonists enslaved to labour in Indian copper mines? I don't know; nor does Lee Miller. She tries for staccato sprightliness. Sentences without verbs. There are anthropomorphic metaphors: she says the ocean, "devourer of men, hungering for more," has changing moods, coy, playful, slumbering. Fierce." She describes "a wild storm, full of malice and greed." Perhaps the book would read well in Algonquian, Shawnee or Kaw.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic