From the white man
to the fields of green
And the homeland
we’ve never seen.
—“Pocahontas,” Neil Young
Driving Route 12, the road that runs the coastline of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, can feel like performing a tightrope act of extraordinary existential proportion: to one side, open ocean; to the other, Pamlico Sound. Water, water everywhere, and that salty abyss always within a stone’s throw of the highway that offers drivers their only reassurance of solid ground. Between the asphalt and the Atlantic, the dunes of Cape Hatteras National Seashore are speckled with signs announcing the peril we pose to the sand when we walk on it. Towns interrupt the traveler’s journey like midair platforms or points on a timeline. At the outskirts of one, Mirlo Beach in Dare County, visitors are welcomed with a sign boasting a dated cultural reference in swirly font: “Dare to dream the impossible dream,” it says. The swelling melody from Man of La Mancha, associated with these lines, has rung in my ears since I drove past the sign a few months ago. The sentiment is an American birthright: the Outer Banks are where the English first came ashore and where the Wright Brothers took flight. I had gone to the region compelled by this idea of first-ness. Once there, however, I found myself preoccupied with ideas of end times. Assuming the dreams this place articulated for itself were broken the moment Europeans dropped anchor, this entire country has always been an impossible one, as impossible then as dreams of mega-homes teetering on stilts at the edge of the world are impossible now.
Checking the headlines as I wrote this, I came across the following: “During the early morning hours of May 2, part of the northbound lane of North Carolina Highway 12 in Kitty Hawk broke off and washed into the Atlantic Ocean.” The Outer Banks are disappearing in front of our eyes; the vanishing act is local tradition. Before Mirlo Beach erected itself from the sand, dreaming its latest impossible dream, there was another development that preceded it that fell into the sea. And another before that. This is how it works here: houses strain like paparazzi, each jockeying for its piece of ocean view, and are temporary at best, often gone in a flash. Big development does not stop the primordial movement of islands, and the water is rising.
Disappearance shaped Dare County and the surrounding area from the start. Twenty years before Jamestown was founded what would become known as the Lost Colony was established, struggled, then vanished on Roanoke Island, a hunk of land that is waving and drowning between the Outer Banks peninsula and North Carolina’s mainland, in the midst of the Pamlico Sound. Of the ghost stories I was told as a kid, only two left any lingering terror. The first, “The Girl with the Green Ribbon,” tells of a couple who meet, fall in love, get married. All their lives, the woman wears a green ribbon around her neck. Her husband asks about it, but she always puts him off until, as she lies dying, she gives him the go-ahead. The perfunctory last line: “He pulled the bow loose and her head fell off.” The second story is that of the Lost Colony, and whereas I can now laugh at a periodic and unfortunate decapitation, the Lost Colony still gives me pause. I locate learning about it as the first time I understood I could disappear and no one would ever find me. This awareness was heightened by the fact that the story, my teacher said with not a little flair for the dramatic to a room full of gaping first-graders, was true: not story but history. To this day I have in my head a sharp, persistent snapshot of the image that acts in every retelling as a synecdoche for the tale of the lost colonists: a weather-beaten plank of broken gray driftwood with the word scrawled in hurried, rudimentary capital letters across its length: CROATOAN.
I have a half-baked theory that every region of the United States has a ghost story disguised as history that it takes perverse pleasure in teaching to its children to reappear as material for metaphor later in their lives. The Northeast has the Salem Witch Trials; the West has the Donner Party. The upper South has the Lost Colony. The short version is this: In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh chartered territory on the midcoast of North America that the English were then calling “Virginia.” Earlier ventures had surveyed the area, but Raleigh’s plan was for a proper colony, and that required men, women, and children: the basic instruments of colonial sustainability. To act as governor, he tapped John White, an artist who had sailed on previous expeditions, illustrating the New World for those in the old one, and in March 1587, 116 men, women, and children set sail from England, arriving on Roanoke Island four months later in the oppressive heat of July.
Colonists and tribes clashed. Supplies ran low. The weather was uncooperative. The enterprise appeared doomed save for a single beacon of hope that arrived on August 18, 1587, when John White’s daughter, Eleanor Dare, gave birth to that first English child baptized on American soil, Virginia Dare. Within weeks, White was sailing back to England for supplies, his plan to return in three months. Instead, he was waylaid for three years by the Spanish Armada. When he returned, all he found were deserted dwellings, a piece of bark with the letters “CRO” etched into it, and that iconic wooden post with the word CROATOAN marching across it. The Croatoan Indians were friendly with English settlers and lived sixty miles to the south of Roanoke on what is today Hatteras Island, so White presumed his colonists had sought help there with them. His theory went unconfirmed, however, because when he sailed to Hatteras a storm blew in that prevented his ship from landing. No member of the Roanoke Colony was heard from again. It was no longer the Roanoke Colony but the lost one.
What later sprung up in the colony’s absence has become a protracted treasure hunt for clues to illuminate what monster it was that pulled the colonists under. The story has become one of our favorite national mysteries, the search for it a national pastime because to hypothesize around it is to weave an American creation myth. History is written by the victors, so the Lost Colony is this country’s first colony and its first baptized baby. It is also its first mystery story, first fable of trying to tame the wilderness, first tabloid tale, and first failed real estate venture. Eleanor Dare is the first missing white woman. Virginia is the first baby at the bottom of a well.
Because so many have become so invested in looking for the Lost Colony, every so often it is found. It has joined the Croatoans as White speculated. It has been massacred by Powhatan on the banks of the Chesapeake. It has succumbed to disease, drought, and starvation. It has assimilated with local tribes and become a beacon of brotherly love. It has endured intact as a European colony and emblem of racial purity. It has traveled four hundred miles inland to a desolate stretch now most famous for billboards counting down the miles to the roadside attraction South of the Border, whose mascot, Pedro, is a minstrel-like Mexican man in an enormous sombrero. It has traveled to Georgia, leaving marked rocks like breadcrumbs. It has been buried in a sassafras field. It has been blown away in a hurricane. It has been submerged beneath an encroaching ocean.
• •
A few years ago, I came across a blurb in the Economist tiresomely titled “Lost and Found: The Mystery of Roanoke.” It caught my eye only because the Lost Colony never fails to, and it was indeed the latest tantalizing possibility oversold in a headline. The opening read: “Clues to the fate of a 16th-century outpost claimed by the English crown may lie beneath a golf course on the coast of North Carolina designed by one of the sport’s American kings, Arnold Palmer. Markings that could bear on the fate of the members of the ‘lost colony’ of Roanoke have been found under a small paper patch affixed to an unusually accurate watercolor map of the North Carolina Coast.”
The idea that clues to the Lost Colony could sit beneath a golf course designed by the man who gave his name to that delectable union of iced tea and lemonade struck me as perfection: so ineffably American. This latest theory came courtesy of a University of North Carolina business professor who noticed two small patches on a map housed at the British Museum, one in a striking location on Albemarle Sound, seventy-five miles inland from Roanoke. Writing about the colony years later, White noted that “at my coming away, [the colonists] were prepared to remove 50 miles to the maine.” The patch was within that range of intrigue. This prompted the First Colony Foundation (FCF), which researches early English colonies, to investigate. Lo and behold, there was a symbol for a fort. Was it a mistake? Was the patch the Wite-Out of the sixteenth century? Was it there to hide the colonists’ plans from Spanish pirates?
For months this image of the Lost Colony lurking beneath a luxury golf course distracted me and, having seen no updates, I finally just picked up the phone and called the FCF. I called again. And again. After several unanswered voicemails and e-mail messages, I heard back from a man—a lawyer—who told me the foundation was researching a site with funding from the National Geographic Society and that, should any story emerge it would be reported in the National Geographic magazine. That was that. The man stonewalled me. I was miffed. Who was the macho, colonial, Murdoch-owned National Geographic Society to throw its weight around, to act as gatekeeper to anyone not on its payroll, and to stake sole claim to a piece of public history, then hawk the story in a magazine that purports to be “national” when it’s utterly private? (I’ve always been susceptible to righteous indignation.) National Geographic was going to be tight-lipped and territorial? Fine. I’d go myself. I know how small towns work. Word gets around. There’s only so much you can hide from your neighbors in the end.
Which was how I found myself at the gate of the Scotch Hall Preserve Golf Course, smiling and asking the baby-faced guard if he knew anything about a dig and if he would please pop the gate up and let me poke around.
• •
The inhospitality of the Outer Banks is evident when you look at a map and notice landmarks named, if not for the Native American world that was then, for existential states of mind, some of which must reflect the anxieties of early European adventurers: Kill Devil Hills, Bodie (pronounced body) Island, Cape Lookout, Cape Fear. These islands were built by sediments carried from the Appalachians some four-hundred miles inland and deposited by the tides on the eastern shores of this strip of sand. With the Atlantic to the west, the peninsula is flanked by elemental forces of give-and-take. Their shapes do not hold. Look at a map from the sixteenth century and you may not recognize the coastline. This evolving geography is why no major colonial city was ever established on the North Carolina coast: inlets accessing the mainland were always opening and closing, offering entrance one year, rescinding the offer the next. In this way, the islands are like glass: seemingly fixed, but actually in motion. Like glass, too, the banks are breakable.
It is not the stuff of common knowledge, but that “unusually accurate watercolor map of the North Carolina coast” is famous among historians and cartographers. It is La Virginea Pars map, rendered by John White in 1585. The bright watercolors White produced of birds, fish, insects, mammals, and plants are among the first visual records we have of America at the moment of European colonization. There is a common box tortoise, with the caption in White’s calligraphic hand, “A land tort the savages esteeme above all other torts.” A swallowtail butterfly is flattened onto a sassafras leaf. There is a smug bald eagle. White also painted humans: alone, together, still, in motion, real, fantastical. He was not a brilliant artist, but there is a tenderness to his awkward portraits of this foreign place. It’s the ungainliness of a shy man at a party where he doesn’t know a soul, so he stands in a corner pretending to admire a houseplant.
La Virginea Pars is White’s calling card. In pale blues, pinks, and browns, it maps the coast from the Chesapeake Bay to Cape Lookout. Black dots denote tribes—Weapemeoc, Chowanoac, Croatoan—and Roanoke lurks like a pink fist at its center. Albemarle Sound curves west, and the spot of the mysterious patch falls near the Sound’s northern shore. White’s coastline in particular is remarkable for its lace-like precision, and there’s something unsettling about how it bisects the paper. As is customary in maps of that period, decorative flourishes were added as vessels dotting the water. There are no corollaries, however, on land, and land occupies half the map. The only life is on the ocean as if the map’s beholder was still innocent to what will fill the blankness of the page.
• •
Roanoke was a familiar piece of the colonial puzzle. John Smith reported being told by Chief Powhatan that the chief himself had slaughtered the colonists on the banks of the Chesapeake. A variation on this theory appeared in the 1605 play Eastward Hoe in which, referring to Virginia, one character says: “A whole country of English is there, man, bred of those that were left there in ’79. They have married with the Indians, and make ‘em bring forth as beautiful faces as any we have in England. . . .” Assimilation, murder, or some combination of the two: case closed. No mystery, just another failed colony.
There was little further interest until after the Civil War when a North Carolina woman named Sallie Southall Cotten heard about Virginia Dare and became obsessed with placing a southerner among the country’s founding figures and reclaiming for the South some colonial distinction. The result was a long, narrative poem titled “The Legend of the White Doe” that Cotten presented as an “Indian legend.” She performed it live, drawing large, adoring crowds to theaters around the country, and in 1901, she published it to great success, thus putting to paper the aura of myth around the Lost Colony that would balloon in coming years. In the poem, Virginia Dare lives. She grew up beautiful and virtuous with many suitors, including two Indians—one good, one bad. When she refuses the bad one’s marriage proposal, he shoots her with a magic arrow and turns her into a white doe. In Cotton’s verses, Virginia Dare thus becomes the first pure and innocent white woman lost to savages, retroactively beating other captivity narrators to the punch. Today that white doe is the logo for the white supremacist organization VDARE, a designated hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The next step in the story’s evolution was 1921 when Dare County school superintendent Mabel Evans Jones decided to use the new-fangled film technology to teach local children local history by making a “documentary” about the Lost Colony. Jones’s film marked the first time someone took this sketchy history and, in the name of public education, filled in the holes with fiction—imagining new characters and confrontations. Screenings were held statewide. It was a hit. It also hit at the right time: the mystery genre was ascending and Agatha Christie had just arrived on the scene and would soon introduce the world to Miss Marple, the little old lady with an uncanny facility for connecting dots and an inspiration for citizen detectives everywhere.
Cotton’s poem and Jones’s movie primed the public, but the galvanizing year was 1937 when, in conjunction with the 350th anniversary of the settlement and the birth of Virginia Dare, North Carolina playwright Paul Green was commissioned by the state to dramatize the story. Green wrote a romance, the central protagonists being Eleanor Dare (mother of Virginia) and a fictional young man, John Borden, who worked the Dare family farm in England where he was not considered an acceptable husband for Eleanor. They sail together to Virginia, and Eleanor marries another—more bourgeois—man to whom Green gives no lines and eventually kills off so that Eleanor and John can at last be together, becoming American by transcending the British class system. If not love, the dynamic between the English and the American Indians forms the nucleus of the plot, with the English as heroic saviors of the savages and the depiction of bloodshed shaped to this end. By the final act, Eleanor and John have married, and the Indians have asked John to be their chief. They then parade into the woods as one united tribe.
The play was and is marketed as a family event and has been a monumental success. Since its premiere, it has been staged every summer at Fort Raleigh. Lynn Redgrave has played Elizabeth I; between 1947 and 1953 Andy Griffith worked his way from bit parts up to starring roles. In 2013, The Lost Colony received the Tony Award for Excellence in Theater. Upon returning home from the ceremony, the producer said, “So many people came up to me in New York, and the first thing they all told me was, ‘I know the Lost Colony. I saw it when I was five.’” In other words, this play has helped launch this story deep and early into many an American mind.
Its juvenile appeal may be its elements of fairy tale: the babes lost in the wood. Add a treasure hunt to that trope and you’ve got a child’s attention. This places Roanoke somewhere between academic and pop, earnest and kitsch, history and myth. It is no Monticello. It’s also no Foamhenge. It is historical cred without wonkishness. This is why there’s a series of video games called, inexplicably, “Jamestown: the Legend of the Lost Colony,” and it’s why American Horror Story built an entire season around the story, and also why FOX TV aired an episode of Sleepy Hollow (premise: Ichabod Crane comes back to life as a detective in upstate New York) in which a young boy, conversant only in Middle English, is found unconscious on the highway. The Lost Colonists didn’t speak Middle English, but that doesn’t deter Crane from identifying the boy as a Roanoke refugee. Forget theories involving Croatoans, Powhatan, or a hurricane: FOX’s theory has it that the lost colonists ended up on an island in an upstate New York pond that is a portal to the dimension 1587.
• •
Scotch Hall Preserve sits on the northwestern corner of Albemarle Sound and is a fifteen-minute drive from Edenton, once the capital of North Carolina but now a sleepy town of five thousand. The golf course is named for a plantation that used to be, and the baby-faced guard at the gate was southern-accented and wearing a pressed pink polo shirt. He knew nothing about the Lost Colony. Chris, their marketing manager, he told me, might know more.
“Chris is a woman,” he said, waving me through.
After passing expanses of meticulously maintained golfing greens, I arrived at the sales office and pro shop that occupied two duplexes on a street of condos lined up like Tic Tacs in pastel yellows and greens. There was no one else around.
I let myself into the sales office. “Hello?” My voice echoed off hard surfaces of slate and polished granite.
Chris, it turned out, didn’t know much more. She said Scotch Hall had donated a lot to some archaeologists where, twice a year, some folks she didn’t know came to dig. She pulled out a map. “I think it’s this one,” she said, drawing a circle around Lot 154 in black Sharpie. “There’s not much to see, but you can have a look around if you like. And come back tomorrow when Dutch is here. He knows more.” Dutch Remke, who manages Scotch Hall, had gone to Raleigh for the day on business.
Back in my car, I followed the map to Lot 154. The more I saw of Scotch Hall, the stranger it became. The development was superficially conventional: domestically scaled streets followed the contours of the land and freshly poured sidewalks awaited golden retrievers on leashes. Beyond the sidewalks, however, there was only the occasional house rising from a barren yard like a lone Monopoly piece. Scotch Hall was huge, and there was almost nothing there.
The advertising copy that drifts across its website says, “A place of unspoiled beauty with tranquil nights and star-filled skies. Challenges yet to win. Stories yet to be written. What was once forgotten has been rediscovered.” Rediscovery is probably Scotch Hall’s best, last hope: it opened in 2008 as the real estate crisis was tearing through life savings and retirement accounts. There are 399 lots, but no more than thirty houses had been built when I was there in 2015. In place of homes, there were stake-like flags in the ground on each of which was displayed in elegant typography the lot number, name, and provenance of the family who owned that piece of property, small nods to better years: Lot 148, the Morgans, Henrico, VA; Lot 143, the Davises, Raleigh, NC; the Goguets, Manassas, VA. It was a development of imagined houses claimed by missing people.
Lot 154 sits at the juncture of Salmon Creek and Albemarle Sound. It was spring. The trees were reembracing their leaves, but it was breezy and cool. There was a grove of maples, the sound of birds, wind, the occasional motorboat in the distance. Down where the lot met the water, cypress draped in Spanish moss staggered from swampy soil. As tall, cowboy-booted Dutch Remke told me the next day in his office, Lot 154 had been the equivalent of a Native American dump. The site thus had the greatest concentration of artifacts per square foot of dirt of anywhere around. Last time, archaeologists had pulled seventy-five pounds worth of objects from a hole the size of a refrigerator. Dutch added that there’d been gossip about another dig underway, and that’s where he’d heard about something “real big.” Over there, he said, waving his hand toward the other side of Salmon Creek.
When Dutch moved from Utah to North Carolina, he didn’t know a thing about the state’s history, but he quickly learned his way around the Lost Colony. Everyone here is an amateur archaeologist; everyone has a theory. His is Indians. Indians got them. He keeps an eye on the ground because you can’t so much as kick up dirt without kicking up an arrowhead. He pulled a small, triangular specimen from his jeans’ pocket. “Picked it up as I was getting in my truck this morning,” he said.
An arrowhead in a driveway, like a zombie hand rising from a shallow grave, is par, as it were, for the course. People only want you bugging them if you’ve found some sixteenth-century European pottery, or better yet a body: that would be the real find.
• •
I had rented a room on a farm near Edenton and, when I explained my reasons for visiting, my hosts said I needed to talk to Frances. Calls were made, and I soon had a date for tea. While much of the area is down-at-the-heels and rural, Edenton retains the sense of gentility it once boasted as one of the most prosperous antebellum towns on the East Coast, its architecture equal to that of Charleston and Savannah. Historic houses downtown boast big windows, picket fences, woodwork, and wide porches that encourage the downshifting of time. Evening church bells play “Ode to Joy”; a memorial to “our Confederate dead” sits where Main Street dead-ends into the marina.
Frances Ingles is 87. She was born on Somerset Plantation some fifteen miles away but has lived for fifty years in a large, white clapboard house with maroon shutters that’s been in her family since the 1700s. When I arrived, the light was stretching like a lethargic cat across Albemarle Sound, rolling over birds’ nests and windowsills before twilight pushed it into shadows. I found Frances in her flower garden with a neighbor, who was taking his leave.
“She wants to talk to me about the Lost Colony,” she told him.
“You know what they found this time?”
“Oh, not exactly,” she said. “Something underwater.” He left, and she turned to me: “What would you like to drink?”
We joined her forty-something daughter, Susan, who was down from Charlotte, on the front porch for cocktails, and they were soon talking Lost Colony with the off-hand expertise that comes only from having lived long enough with something to have had it weave its way through your life, like the story of how your parents met. They’d seen as many archaeologists, journalists, hobbyists, and tourists come and go as they’d seen yachts navigating the harbor. One of the archaeologists—a distant cousin—on the most recent dig had stayed with them. He specialized in underwater exploration at Howard University and was part of the recently acknowledged African-American branch of their family. Although he’d been with them for a week, he’d sworn secrecy as to what had been found. All he had revealed was that he was based at Salmon Creek near Scotch Hall. Whatever it was, Frances said, it must have been underwater because he came home every night wet to the bone.
“You know, the find that was shoved under the rug was the caskets in a ditch,” said Susan. “A field was being drained and in the drainage ditch there were disturbed a series of caskets that were just like the Roanoke colonists’ would have been. It was in the 1930s. Thirty-five or something.”
Frances nodded. “It’s the caskets that are the thing.” She and Susan traded the proverbial microphone like players in a bluegrass band. Apparently, the names on these caskets had resembled common family names in Bertie County (the county across the river from Edenton). One in particular—Malochy Pain—listed among the colonists was similar to the name of a farmer—Malachai Payne—who lived near the site where the caskets had been found. At the time, however, the Lost Colony was not a national preoccupation and, said Frances, “the local people were bothered, but they couldn’t get anyone else interested.” By the time they did, “old Malachai Paine had died and they have never found that spot since.”
“What they really need to find is a body, Momma,” said Susan. “Until you find a body, you’ve got nothing.”
“Isn’t that right,” said Frances. She set down her drink. “I want to show you something.”
She led us to a small room lined with books and pulled two from the shelf. The first was of John White’s watercolors, and she turned to his illustration of the swallowtail on a sassafras leaf, telling me as she did so about a theory that, because sassafras had been prevalent in the area where the coffins were found and thought, at the time, to have medicinal properties, the colonists had settled there and gone into the sassafras business. “They did well with it for quite a while,” she said, as if theory were fact.
The second book was a leather-bound volume of old snapshots taken by Frances’s father in 1921 during the filming of Mabel Evans Jones’s “Lost Colony.” Frances’s finger trembled with the faltering determination of age as she pointed to the people in the photographs—women costumed in bonnets, men in fringe and feathers. That, she thought, was Miss Mabel. There was her daddy.
“I recognize so many faces,” she said, and turned the page to an Elizabethan ship, its prow marking the axis of the photograph as if the vessel could sail straight out of time and into the room.
• •
When we lose a colony to wilderness, ocean, other people, thin air, an airplane in a storm, a family in a house fire, or a seemingly innocent person to the everyday abyss, we are compelled to find out what went wrong. Explanations arrive by way of magic, science, religion, police work, conjecture. Yet what starts as search and rescue can eventually degenerate to treasure hunt. There is a tipping point when the driving force becomes at least as selfish as it is generous, when the thrill of the chase becomes as captivating as that basic human need for explanation. And when treasure is at stake, competing claims arise.
The First Colony Foundation’s board of directors is a hodgepodge of academics, archaeologists, a lawyer, an accountant, an actor, an economist, a bureaucrat, a couple businessmen, and a couple former park rangers. Of sixteen members, two are women, and three live on the Outer Banks. Most live in Raleigh, Durham, or any number of places in Virginia. The FCF is not the only Lost Colony–focused organization, but it is the most high-profile and the one consulted when the national media needs a sound bite. This has nurtured resentment among other, more local, Lost Colony groups, and a sense of rivalry permeates reports if you read the local news. A couple of months before I went to Edenton, one group—the Croatoan Archeological Society—held a press conference announcing fresh evidence that the colonists went to Hatteras, specifically to present-day Buxton. Presenting a rusted Elizabethan rapier handle and a small slate writing tablet with the letter “M” still faintly visible, the CAS claimed “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” that at least some of the Roanoke colonists had trekked to Buxton, assimilated, and lived for generations.
The CAS was founded by Scott Dawson, a sixth-generation Hatteras local, and his wife, Maggie. He calls the CAS a “community group” and is passionate that the colonists came here, citing stories passed down over generations and accounts of later settlers who encountered natives with light skin and gray eyes—evidence of mixed European and Native American blood. He also points to the etched CROATOAN and has been quoted saying, “If someone leaves you a note saying meet them at Burger King, why would you go to Wendy’s? . . .When you understand this wonderful brotherhood among these natives and colonists, right from the very start, it makes sense.”
While I was there, some of Dawson’s finds were on display at the public library, laid out in a glass cabinet like a high school science fair project and standing in sharp contrast to the less democratic approach of the FCF. The exhibit wasn’t sophisticated but it was generous. It was also temporary. With finds from the ongoing dig, Dawson was in the process of opening a more permanent home for his treasures: the Hatteras Histories and Mysteries Museum. Newspapers said the museum was in Buxton, but I couldn’t find an address, so I pulled into a parking lot outside a nondescript vinyl-sided building that turned out to be a souvenir shop peddling wind chimes made out of shells and smiling plastic crabs wearing sunglasses and playing tiny pianos. An older couple bent over a pile of papers behind the counter. He had gray stubble, red eyes, a beer belly, and a hunched back. She had a permanent sunburn. They eyeballed me.
“Can we help you?” said the man.
“I’m looking for the Buxton Histories and Mysteries Museum.”
They visibly softened. “Let me call my niece,” he said.
His niece, serendipitously, was Maggie Dawson, Scott’s wife. She worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s office and didn’t pick up, but texted minutes later to say the collection was in Hatteras, but no one was around to let me in.
“I’ve been on some of them digs,” the man then offered.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I can’t talk right this minute, but come by Pop’s around happy hour. Me and a bunch of guys who done digs will be there. They’re the people you should talk to.”
“All right,” I said. “Where’s Pop’s?”
Where Edenton is genteel, Buxton feels hardscrabble. It is fast-food burger joints and tanning salons, hair spray, and florescent halter tops. You feel that archetypal tension between year-rounders and summer folks. Leaving the shop, it occurred to me that stories we tell about the Lost Colony aside, the drama of those competing to tell the stories itself is a microcosm—one of class in the United States: there is the First Colony Foundation with its white-collared out-of-towners and stamp of approval from the British Museum, and then there is the Hatteras Histories and Mysteries Museum with its blue-collar locals and name that conjures Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not—now you see it, now you don’t.
This is perhaps an all-too-real analogy. You get the sense these towns are grabbing for any dollar that floats by, and they have caught a lot of dollars. In 2012, tourism brought in a record thirty-two million dollars to Dare County alone, and which constitutes the bulk of the Outer Banks. Yet south of Roanoke, prosperity feels more tenuous. It’s essentially a single-economy region—tourism-driven development—and the beaches that bring the tourists are increasingly threatened. Over the past century, three rows of vacation homes have washed away, and 2009 forecasts for climate-related erosion over the next ninety years predicted an acceleration of that rate dramatic enough to put a shiv in the side of resale values and future development. A 2009 study by the state predicted that by 2100 the sea level will have risen thirty-nine inches. Thirty-nine inches means the obliteration of the backside of the Outer Banks. It means the near full submersion of Roanoke Island.
I did stop at Pop’s on my way back to Edenton. “Benny and the Jets” was blasting as television broadcast baseball to the empty room. Miller Light signs and fishing nets clung to the walls. A waitress emerged, and when I asked her about the guys who talked about the Lost Colony, she laughed.
“Oh, boy. That’s the 5 o’clock happy-hour crowd,” she said. “They will talk your ear off.”
The drive back up the peninsula was long, and my eyesight at night is poor, so I told her I would take her word for it. While the prospect of an evening with this crowd promised an abundance of character and quotables, I couldn’t—or rather had no desire to—wait around. In truth, my interest in the story had been waning. I already knew the contours, had known them most of my life. What had ostensibly brought me to the Outer Banks was instead a sense of indignation over narrative control. In this case, National Geographic’s power, the organization’s claim-staking, flag-planting pose was the offending entitlement. What had kept me interested was how that pose reverberated in the community.
Maybe that was my real reason for making the trek: some affinity I felt for these intrepid bands of hobby searchers. I, too, am a treasure hunter, albeit for lesser treasure. I scour Craigslist for deals on furniture, real estate magazines for rough diamonds, the forest for animal bones and antlers, the beach for shells washed ashore. But only rarely do I buy anything from Craigslist or find bones. I’ve never bought a rough diamond. I throw most of my shells back into the ocean at the end of a vacation. What I know from my time spent looking is that the looking is very often the point and the pleasure. Sometimes to find what you’ve been looking for defeats the purpose: game over. Where is the fun in that? What late afternoon small talk with strangers might that sustain? In looking for National Geographic’s dig I dealt myself into a game of which, when I thought about it, I wanted no part. To find the Lost Colony, to solve that mystery, would ruin it. How long can such a mystery sustain itself? Only as long as it lasts. Then, too, there was the adult voice in me speaking to that child who had so feared disappearance some thirty years ago when her teacher had told her such disappearance was possible. That voice told that child how the fact of the matter is that there are times, too, when you don’t want to be discovered, when all you want is to be left alone, that part of life is learning when it is you want to be lost and when to be found. That evening, for instance, when what I needed was to be alone on the road with my thoughts, my whereabouts not immediately known to anyone. Squinting at the vanishing point on the horizon, I considered how these straight, flat coastal roads sometimes seem paved with sand so that, when the setting sun shines long and low across them they can appear dusted with fool’s gold. Back in Edenton, I had a burger at a bar where I sat next to a truck driver who had been driving his route through the area a few times a month for twenty years. The Lost Colony? Oh, sure. A hurricane had done that thing in, no question about it.
• •
The next morning I was on the porch of my rental watching the rain when my host, a mustachioed former veterinarian who supplemented his income by farming, joined me. He’d been asking around and had news. He used to own property over by Scotch Hall, so he still knew folks over there. Salmon Creek Road, he said. That’s where that second dig is.
I was scheduled to head home. The clouds were low, and it was pouring. Flooded roads and a watery apocalypse crossed my mind. I knew now that I could not care less about what happened to the Lost Colony; that what got me is why we invented it in the first place, why we fought about it and got territorial, and what those squabbles tell us about who we are as Americans. I was beginning to understand that I was drawn to the way all this illustrated a need to locate a story’s beginning while stumbling toward its end, and to the way diverging myths reflect original sins and those legacies. I sympathized with the lonely human undertones whispering of a need to believe that if you were lost somewhere, someone would always care. Then there was the pure, American optimism of that persistent faith that if one could truly determine what monster pulled the colonists under, what villain first killed the dream, then the criminal element could be identified in the lineup, the rotten smell could evaporate from the innocent country.
I was no longer looking for anything, but I figured there was no harm in a final small detour. So I packed up and headed again in the direction of Scotch Hall. I again hung the left that would take me back where I began. Soon, Salmon Creek Road appeared: a dirt two-track that ran past flat, tilled fields and dead-ended into the driveway of a modest ranch house. Where the driveway ended, a grassy path continued into the woods. I almost wished the path hadn’t been there because its existence meant I had to get out and follow it far enough to find out where it went. I braced myself and slammed the door. The grass and mud gave way beneath my feet as if I were stepping on fresh cement, wanting to leave evidence, footprints that said, Nell was here. Within minutes, my jeans were soaked through. I rounded a corner and the path stopped. It went nowhere. If, that is, nowhere means into unmanaged woods that soon met their own conclusion at the edge of the water which went somewhere, then everywhere, and didn’t end.
Lost colonists lived here for a time. I’ll buy that. There’s something beautiful and right about that notion because the banks of the Albemarle Sound are among the largest undeveloped tracts of land on the eastern seaboard, but what looks empty—like that half of La Virginea Pars—is full when you know what you are looking at. All this collides into the padlocked fence of Scotch Hall and its private property sign. Across the dirt road from the golfing green is an industrial plant that manufactures the chemical that replaced whale oil as the base of makeup foundation when whaling was outlawed. Between the golf course and the factory is an eighteenth-century church with a graveyard where moss-covered stones date back a century before the American Revolution. Today Bertie County is rural and poor, but for a long time it was a sprawling plantation where hundreds of enslaved laborers worked the land for white men. You see, it’s all here: boom, bust, the leisure class, industry, agriculture, religion, slavery, conquest, race, land, water, water, water, and more water.
Back out on the highway heading north, I approached the bridge that would take me to the mainland. The structure rose and arched to breach the wide body beneath it; the clouds were so thick I could not see the other side. Its shape was sketched onto white fog by headlights pushing south into the belly of the ghost that hovers over this edge of the ocean.
