American History Tellers - Lost Colony of Roanoke | Searching for Traces | 3

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

The mystery of what became of the first English colonists has baffled historians for centuries. But over the past decade, archaeologists have uncovered some compelling clues, including parts of a 16th century gun, and fragments of English pottery at a place called “Site X,” both of which suggest that the Roanoke colonists survived longer than previously documented.In this episode, Lindsay discusses those findings with author and journalist Andrew Lawler. In his book, The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Lawler explores the latest archeological evidence, as well as some of the most persistent myths surrounding the fate of the Roanoke colonists. Listen to new episodes 1 week early and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/historytellers.Support us by supporting our sponsors! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's early 2020. You're an apprentice archaeologist working on your first excavation since grad school. You're in Birdie County, North Carolina, with a group that is trying to solve the mystery of the lost colony of Roanoke. The site is close to the coastline, at the mouth of Albemarle Sound. You're digging here, more than 50 miles west of Roanoke Island, to prove that at least some of the first British colonists found their way to this spot

after mysteriously abandoning Roanoke in the late 16th century. As you're digging, a young archaeology professor named Gerald walks up to your patch of scratched earth. Well, is today going to be as good as yesterday? He's teasing you about yesterday's fine, your first on the site. It was a shard of glazed pottery, but its color and the quality of the glaze were clear evidence that it came from England. It was an exciting discovery, but you smile modestly and shrug it off. Oh, that's just one of the dozens we've already found, you know that. Nah, but every bit helps. It all gets us a little closer to proving the colonists ended up moving here rather than wherever. You continue to clean a large piece of rock with your brush.

Everyone has to work very slowly, very deliberately. You're detectives of the past. Everything around you contains potential evidence. Yeah, but we haven't proven it yet. What do you think? Think we're on the right track? Maybe. Maybe, huh? The bigger team is digging over at Hatteras Island. Why'd you join us and not them? I don't know. Just had a good feeling about this site. You know, it'll be exciting to prove that Roanoke's not a lost colony,

some bedtime story to scare children. What, you don't think they were abducted by ancient aliens? You almost laugh. Not until this dig did you really begin to investigate the disappearance of the Roanoke colony for yourself. Seems everyone has a different theory, even ancient aliens. But no one's found conclusive proof of where they might have ended up. Still, that's all the more reason to keep trying. You continue brushing dirt. Yeah, there are a lot of theories. But it's important to find as much as we can at this site, because who knows when this whole coastline is going to end up buried

under a bunch of condos. God, yeah. And if we can find some more tangible... Just then, you see it. A small glint. The sun has caught the crackled glaze of yet another shard of pottery. Gerald sees it too. Both of you hold your breath as you continue to delicately excavate the earth around the shard. Today is going to be as good as yesterday. In fact, every day has brought a new piece, a new clue. There's been no shortage of finds, but you're still looking for the conclusive discovery that will finally solve the mystery of the missing colonists. Kill List is a true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger.

Follow Kill List wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C True Crumb shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Hey, this is Nick. And this is Jack. early and ad-free right now by From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers, our history, your story. The mystery of what became of the English colonists has baffled historians for centuries. But over the past decade, archaeologists have uncovered some compelling clues. On the island of Hatteras, formerly known as Croatoan, researchers have unearthed a sword hilt and parts of a 16th century gun. And 50 miles inland from Roanoke, at two spots labeled Site X and Site Y, fragments of English

pottery and other artifacts have been found. These discoveries have far from solved the mystery, and instead have only fueled further debate. The researchers at Site X and Site Y have disputed the findings on Hatteras and vice versa. Others have argued that both sites may be authentic and offer evidence that the colonists split up for reasons unknown. My guest today is Andrew Lawler. He's written about these latest archaeological findings for Science Magazine and National Geographic. He's also author of the book The Secret Token, Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost

Colony of Roanoke. In his book, he explores not only Hatteras and Side X, but also some of the strangest mythologies surrounding the mystery of Roanoke. Here's our conversation. Andrew Lawler, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you, Lindsay. It's a pleasure to be here. Let's talk about the Lost Colony of Roanoke. When did you develop an interest in it? Well, Lindsay. It's a pleasure to be here. Let's talk about the lost colony of Roanoke.

When did you develop an interest in it? Well, it was kind of a forced interest, I have to say, because I was a young child and my family would always come down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the summer. And, you know, we'd be happy playing in the surf, and then our parents would brutally put us into the station wagon, drive us across the bridge to a small island, and we would sit there for three and a half hours to watch an outdoor drama about the lost colony.

At the time, that felt like torture, but over the years, I developed an actual curiosity about this story of the 115 men, women, and children who vanished in 1587 on the coast of North Carolina. Now, you're on the coast of North Carolina right now, or South Carolina. Is that correct? Yeah, actually, I'm just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, a couple hundred miles south of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where those events took place. Are you going to be dragging anyone to historical markers today? Yes, I torture my family and friends constantly. If there's a historical marker, I pull over and have to read it. Well, what was fascinating? What turned torture

into intrigue? Well, I grew up and decided that I wanted to get as far away from stories like The Lost Colony as possible, and I became a journalist writing about archaeology in distant places like the Middle East. And then one day I was at a conference in Oxford in England. It was a conference about the archaeology of the Indian Ocean. I mean, you can't get any further away from the lost colony than that. And I'm sitting across from a British archaeologist at a dinner. And, you know, how do you make small talk with an archaeologist? Well, naturally, you say, well, where do you dig these days? And he said, oh, I'm digging at a little place called Hatteras.

And I said, Hatteras Island on the coast of North Carolina? He said, why, yes, have you heard of it? I said, well, yeah, as a matter of fact, I spent a good deal of time there as a child. And I knew that Hatteras was a place that was considered one of the spots where the lost colonists might have gone in 1587. It was called Croatoan then. So I asked him, did you find the lost colony? And he said, well, as a matter of fact, we did.

And I was stunned by this. Here's my childhood mystery, which has been solved by the man sitting across the table from me. And he said, but who are you? And as soon as he found out that I was a journalist rather than an archaeologist, he said, well, we're not ready to talk to the media. And he refused to speak more to me, turned to the person next to him.

And for the next few days, I tried to talk to him, but he would not talk to me. And it took me about a year, a year and a half to get through to him. And finally, one day out of the blue, he called me up and said, okay, we're ready to talk. So he invited me to his dig, which was located on Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. And fortunately, it jived with my family's annual vacation to that very place. So I was able to go visit the dig, and to my astonishment, they were digging at a small Indian village from the 16th and 17th centuries. And at this dig, they were finding the remains of European objects and apparently English objects that dated back to that period.

And that got me hooked. So this is one of the many theories of where the colonists end up, Hatteras or Croton. But there are others. What are some other popular theories on where these colonists went? Well, at the same time I discovered that there was this archaeology dig taking place on Hatteras Island, which was, by the way, the first attempt to actually find the colonists by digging, there was another archaeology team at work about 50 miles to the west. So Hatteras is about 50 miles south of Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks,

and 50 miles inland is another site. Now, the way archaeologists came to dig at this spot is a very exciting story in and of itself. So many years ago, about a dozen or two years ago, a researcher at the University of North Carolina was looking at a map, and it was a map drawn by John White. He was the governor of the Lost Colony. He's the one who had left in 1587 to go get supplies and then return with additional colonists and supplies

for the people he had left behind. He was also an artist, and he'd been on a previous expedition to that area. He'd done a beautiful map of that part of the coast. And this researcher was looking at the map, and he noticed that the map had a couple of patches on it. He was very curious, what are these patches? So we call the British Museum, because the British Museum has the original map. And after several months of prodding and probing and pushing, So we call the British Museum because the British Museum has the original map.

And after several months of prodding and probing and pushing, they finally agreed to examine the map. They simply put it on a light table. And sure enough, below the patch, they could tell, as the light was shining through, that one of the patches was covering a clear image of a fort. Now, what made this so exciting was that this fort was located 50 miles west of Roanoke Island. And when John White, the governor, had left in 1587, he had mentioned in passing that the colonists intended to move 50 miles inland, into the mainland. So this was literally the exit marked the spot. So the archaeologists finally had a place to dig. So they went to this area and they began to dig and they called it, in fact, Site X, in the hope that they could find the remains of, if not a fort,

then at least of the colonists having moved there in the aftermath of John White's departure in 1587. So here you had two separate archaeology digs by two separate competing teams who were vying to solve America's oldest and greatest murder mystery. This, as a journalist, was simply red meat. Yeah, it has everything. It's like a Spielberg movie. There's a treasure map and a historical mystery. So we've identified two possible locations for the eventual destination of these colonists. Were there any others? Well, certainly. There are as many theories as there are people who have studied this. And what's kind of fun about this lost colony story is that we have so little information about what happened to them that anybody can jump into the fray and propose a theory.

This is not just a story for specialists, just for archaeologists, or just for professional historians. It's a topic that has drawn the curious over the past century and a half. And a couple of the other theories that are quite possible is that the colonists left on their own decided when John White didn't return that maybe they should return themselves. There were carpenters among them, and at that time it wasn't so complicated for people of that era to build a boat. They knew how to do it. So it's quite possible they might have built a boat or several boats and then tried to make the trip either to England, which would have been quite ambitious, or more likely maybe north to, say, Newfoundland, where the English fishermen would gather. So if they attempted this very dangerous voyage, then there's no sign that they made it. And unfortunately, the evidence would be

at the bottom of the sea and very hard to prove. So we can't prove one way or the other whether some of them, if not all of them, tried to sail away. So that's one theory. Now there are other theories that you will read about online that ranges from aliens to zombies. Take your pick. As I say, there's so little data that you can imagine anything you want. But what's important is that for the first time, archaeologists entered this picture and they began to actually dig for physical evidence.

This theory caught my eye. Talk to me about sassafras. Sassafras. Now, this is one of my favorite theories. Now, sassafras is a plant, a small tree that grows along the East Coast. And at that time in the 16th century, syphilis was running amok in Europe, probably or possibly brought back from the New World, although that's currently under debate among scientists. But what we do know is that thousands and thousands of

people were suffering from the terrible effects of this venereal disease. It was affecting sailors who were then spreading it through Europe. And it was an awful disease. You could go blind, you could go mad. So people were desperately looking for a cure. And one of those cures was thought to be this plant called sassafras. If you could get the roots of this tree and boil it up in just the right way, it was a tincture that could cure you. So you can imagine today, if without our COVID vaccines, if in fact somebody came up with an idea of something that would work. And we heard a lot about potential cures for COVID before the vaccine. And this is what happened.

So people were desperate, and sassafras prices rose tremendously. The trouble was, sassafras was across the ocean from where most of the sufferers were. So, there was one amateur historian who posited that Sir Walter Raleigh had a secret effort underway to collect Sassafras, and that the lost colonists were, quote, lost in order to throw off the competition. And then, in fact, the lost colonists were busy inland gathering Sassafras, which was put on ships and secretly brought back to England where it was sold. Now, as romantic and kind of interesting as this theory is, it's clearly untrue. Why?

Well, because, number one, the craze for sassafras didn't really take off until well after, say, 1590, so years after the colonists were lost. And number two, to keep this kind of secret would have been extremely difficult. I mean, if you were a colonist forced to collect sassafras in the swamps of North Carolina, I would think that you might want to escape or get on a ship, certainly tell your relatives that you were ready to come home. So while it's an interesting theory, and it brings up this whole interesting question of economics and why Europeans came to the New World, the theory itself doesn't hold water, so to speak. Okay, well, there's other theories, too,

that the colonists just dispersed. They began to intermingle with the Native tribes around them in order to survive. And one is called the Lumbee tribe, who claim to be descendants of intermarried colonists and Native Americans. Is there any evidence that they're correct? Well, even as a child, I'd heard this story. The story is this, that when the colonists were abandoned, they moved in with the Indians nearby and eventually worked their way south and west

into what is now southeastern North Carolina. And they're a tribe which today we call the Lumbee, took them in, accepted them, and even began to use some of their English terms, were using some of their English names. And so when that area was settled by white people beginning in the 1700s or the late 1600s, people noticed. They said, isn't this odd that these Indians seem to know English? They seem to use English words. So this was what I was told as a child, that clearly the lost colonists had journeyed 100 or 200 miles to the southwest and joined up with this tribe. So when I was doing the research on my book, The Secret Token, I decided to look into

this. Well, it seems like an interesting theory that had been around for a long time. And what I discovered was even more interesting than the theory itself. And that is this story didn't appear, didn't begin to be talked about in the historical record until after the Civil War. So the question is, well, what was going on after the Civil War? Why this huge gap? Why wasn't this written about in, say, 1700 or 1800? And the answer I found was this, that at the end of the Civil War, when African Americans were free, when the enslaved peoples were freed,

there were many peoples in that part of North Carolina, including Indians, as well as African Americans, as well as whites. Now, what we call the Lumbee today were eager to be their own people, to have their own schools. They didn't want to be sent to the schools of African Americans, which were poorly funded. Instead, they wanted to control their own destiny. So what I discovered that there was a political deal worked out, and the deal was this. They asked for and received recognition by the state of North Carolina as a tribe. And as a tribe, at that point, they were called the Croatoans. And the way they got that was a white legislature convinced his colleagues that, in fact, the lost colonists had come to the Lumbee,

had settled with them, and that we white people owe them something because they took care of our ancestors. And in exchange, they were allowed to have their own schools and also expected to vote Democratic, which was, of course, the party of white supremacy way back then, the party of Lincoln, the Republicans being the party favored by people of color. So what I realized was that the lost colony was simply used as a way for these Native Americans to get what they wanted, which was control over their own destiny. But I discovered that there's no evidence that this happened. And in fact, the language they were using, which apparently was Old English, clearly came from the settlers who came in in the late 17th century and early 18th century. You don't have to call them the Lost Colonists to explain why these Indians were using English.

Partly because these tribes came from many areas that gathered in that particular vicinity, and the only language they had in common was English. So that can explain it without having to bring Los Colos across the vast Carolina sounds to settle in the swamps of southeastern North Carolina. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't

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Let's focus on Hatteras Island. What is the physical evidence there and what does it tell us? Yeah, so Hatteras Island, you have to picture this. It's really an extraordinary place. It's 20 or so miles long. At's at some point, it's just a couple of hundred yards wide. It's a very narrow strip, a barrier island that sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean. And what's important about this place is that this is where the Gulf Stream passes just offshore and then darts over to Europe. So while today it's a place that vacationers go to,

at the time it was kind of like Interstate 95. You have every ship that's going to Spain carrying gold and silver from the New World and even silk from Asia that had been transhipped to Panama. They're all passing just offshore. So it was a very exciting place to be at the time. There were shipwrecks and what have you. So Hatteras was the home of the Croatoan Indians. And these were the first Native Americans that the English encountered when they first arrived in 1584 on the first expedition before

the lost colony. And these Native Americans were kind of impressed. Hey, these people that came from the East, they have metals, they've got all kinds of cloth, they have a lot of valuable trade goods. So they decided to ally themselves with the English because it gave them some economic power. We know that from what John White had to say. We know that John White actually visited Croatoan, what we call Hatteras today. So one of the key people in this story is a man named Manteo. He was a young man at the time when the English first arrived, and he decided that he wanted to go back to England in 1584 with that first expedition. He went back to England and lived in with that first expedition, he went back to England

and lived in the home of Sir Walter Raleigh. He and Wanchese, who was from another neighboring tribe. So these two Native Americans lived in Elizabethan England for a year in the home of Sir Walter Raleigh, right off the Strand, right in the center of London. They learned English, they learned what England and Europe was all about, And then they came back. And Manteo even returned in 1585 on another expedition. He went back to England again and spent additional time. So here was somebody who was really crossing these two cultures, who could speak English and could speak the Algonquin language that the Croatoans spoke, and who understood them. So when John White left in 1587 to get supplies, although it's not mentioned in the historical record, I think it is undeniable that Manteo, this man who was now probably maybe in his late 20s, early 30s, he was the only person who could help the colonists survive. Because the colonists,

when they arrived, there were very few of them that had any experience in the wilderness. Almost none of them had ever been to the New World, and they needed somebody to help them. So I think it goes without saying that Mantio would have been a central figure to ensure the safety of these people. Not less because he had been made a lord by Queen Elizabeth, the only Native American to achieve that status ever. So it seems quite likely that the colonists would have gone, or some of them would have

gone with Manteo back to his hometown, which was on Croatoan Island. And the actual physical evidence that was found, is it convincing? Well, this is a big question that's still hotly debated. It's only been in the past few years that these artifacts have been unearthed. So here we have a Native American village, which dates from about the time of the Lost Colony. And we have European artifacts, including bits and pieces of a gun, which seems to be of Elizabethan manufacture, as well as various pieces of metal and lead, which suggests that they even had guns. Now, what were Native Americans doing with guns at that early time? So, you might say at first glance, well, if you have

Elizabethan goods in a village that dates from that time, that that is proof that the lost colonists went to Hatter's, at least some of them. However, it's a little more complicated than that, because it's quite possible that somebody had a yard sale in London, where they wanted to get rid of dad's old gun that had been made back in Elizabethan times. And that got bought and put on a ship and was brought to Jamestown, which was the first permanent English colony that took place 20 years later, about 100 miles north in Virginia, and then got traded south. So it's quite possible that some of these artifacts that had been found, which date to Elizabethan times, might have been made then, but may not have actually gotten to this village until the 1650s or 60s,

when you had white traders. So right now, the big debate is, can we provide the analysis and dating necessary to really hone down the data to determine whether these goods actually belong to the lost colonists or whether these goods were brought in by later traders? This is a debate that can only be solved by further analysis.

And we're hoping that the British team that led the group, as well as the Croatoan Archaeological Society, which is the local group that helped to honcho and start this dig in the first place, can provide us soon with some clear answers. Let's turn our attention to Site X. What artifacts were found there that might make it more compelling? So Site X is a site that was dug when the X on the map, when this fort was found on the map that John White had drawn around 1586 or 1587. So, when the archaeologists dug there, they found an Indian village. Signs of, sure enough, Native Americans were living there. That was a good first sign. And then they found something which to most of us might seem kind of boring, but which to archaeologists is better than gold. They found English pottery, just little bits and pieces of a particular kind of

pottery, which was made in England from the late 1500s into the 1600s. So this is the very window during which the lost colonists would have been alive. So the question is, were these the pots that belonged to the lost colonists? Did they in fact do, as John White said,

and move inland, settle with the Indians and break some pots and leave them there for the archaeologists to find 400 years later? Well, there's a hot debate as there is at Hatteras

as to whether these artifacts actually date to that time. It's really hard to date something. Is it 1587 or is it 1657, by which time you had whites moving down from Virginia to the north? So again, there's a fierce debate going on among scholars as to whether or not these objects actually can be assigned to the lost colonists. And we're hoping that further digs are going to shed more light on that. Okay, so we've talked about digging up physical evidence that consists mostly of artifacts, guns, pieces of pottery, small pieces of metal. What about any skeletal DNA evidence? Ancient DNA is a very, very important new tool in the tool belt of archaeologists today.

So, of course, the question is, well, can't DNA solve this problem? Well, in order for DNA to work in solving the mystery of the lost colony, we need a couple of things. First of all, we need a skeleton. And not just any skeleton. We need a skeleton that preferably was buried with its head facing east and has some Elizabethan grave goods. Now, why head facing east? Well, that would be a sign of a Christian burial. It's very different from the way Native Americans

buried themselves at the time in a crouch position. And it would be best of all if this was a woman. Why? Well, because there were plenty of men that were moving up and down the coast at that time on ships, and there were shipwrecks. We know that there were Spanish shipwrecks and later English shipwrecks. So if you found a man who was buried, then even if it's European, could belong to any number of expeditions or ships that were sailing by. But if it's a woman,

it would be much more likely that this would be a person associated with the lost colonies since this was the only expedition in which there were numbers of women involved. So the question is, can we find a skeleton like that in the sandy soil of the Outer Banks of North Carolina that has been roiled by storms for centuries? And the answer is yes, there have been some skeletal finds, but many of them are Native American and therefore they had been left

alone because of concerns, you know, ethical concerns about digging up people's ancestors. So at this point, we don't know. And even if we were to find the skeleton and we were to find a woman who was buried with Elizabethan grave goods, head facing east, you did the DNA, what would you discover? Well, you might discover that she was an English woman. But what does that tell you? You have to have DNA from today's descendants of the lost colony. And unfortunately, despite decades and decades of historical research, we don't have anybody, there's nobody that we know of in England who is a direct descendant of a lost colonist. So we've got to find those data points, find the skeleton, and also do the

research on today's people in England to see who might be a direct descendant. Then you can match the DNA, and only then will DNA help solve this mystery. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still have urged it. It just happens to all of them.

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spend your last few minutes on Earth? You can binge Incoming exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. The colony of Roanoke has developed a singular mythology. It's one of these stories that is exciting, of course, because of the mystery. But it's grown into something else.

I mean, just the name itself, Lost Colony, is evocative of adventure and mystery. But when did that term first come into use? Well, I'm a reporter, so I've learned to ask kind of the dumb questions. And one of my questions to historians when I began to research this was, when did the Lost Colony actually come into use as a term? And to my amazement, nobody could answer that question. So I finally found an English professor, of all people, at East Carolina University. And he told me that he'd done some research and he discovered that the term came into use in the 1830s. And I thought, isn't that strange? The 1830s, we're talking about, you know, centuries and centuries after the colonists were lost.

And that's when I embarked on this whole other journey that I had not anticipated. And that is the journey into discovering why the colony was lost, why it was considered lost, why it was ignored for centuries. And then suddenly in the 1830s and ever since, it has been the subject of so much interest and even obsession. So when I dug into it, it turned out that the term lost colony was first used by a woman. This is a period when women were just beginning to write for magazines and be able to earn a living as writers. And so a series of women over the decades began to tell stories about the Lost Colony. We didn't know what happened to them, so they kind of made up these mythical stories, ghost stories that appeared in magazines and newspapers around the country.

And one of the early stories was about the Lost Colony and Virginia Dare. Virginia Dare was, as far as we know, the first English child born in the New World. All we know about her is that she was John White's granddaughter, and John White was there for her christening in 1587. Then he got on a ship and left. What happened to Virginia Dare, we don't know. So she became this kind of projection screen on which women of that era could project to all kinds of stories. And there were so few women in early American history that Virginia Dare offered the possibility for women to feel

involved and feel like they too had participated in American history, which of course they had. They simply were forgotten. So Virginia Dare became a very big deal. Like Pocahontas, she became a mythical figure that most school children would have known about in the 19th century. And that was the case until later in the 19th century when the image of Virginia Dare takes a darker turn. So keep in mind, Virginia Dare was a child born in 1587. She was baptized.

We know her name. We know her parents. We know that John White was her grandfather. We know nothing else. But by the 19th century, at the end of that time, she was a symbol of white supremacy. She was this blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl who was trapped, lost on an island surrounded by dark savages. And the more I dug into this story, the more I realized that Virginia Dare says way more about this country in the 19th century than it does about Elizabethans way back in Elizabethan times. And why is that? Well, because at that period in the late 1800s, the first Jim Crow laws were coming into effect.

And particularly in North Carolina and Virginia and throughout the South, it was becoming increasingly difficult for blacks to vote. It was increasingly difficult for them to have any civil rights whatsoever. And in the North, you had this huge wave of migrants coming in. Now, we forget, we're talking a million people a year coming from places like Italy and Spain, Eastern Europe, lots of Jews. And this was creating all kinds of anxiety among white Americans. So many people seized on Virginia Dare

as a sign of the fragility of white power, basically, in America, and that it was threatened by these dark savages. So I was really astonished to find out that this figure, who had been a mythical figure in my childhood, actually had been kind of hijacked to serve the needs of white supremacy in the late 19th century and well into the 20th. Well, you've mentioned before a manufactured lore, a mythology of the Lumbee that suited almost similar ends. How did Virginia Dare as a symbol fare throughout the rest of history? What do we know of her today? Is she still an emblem? If you follow the story of

Virginia Dare, you can follow the anxieties, if you will, of American attitudes toward race and immigration. This is what makes her so fascinating. And it's not as if her role as a symbol of white supremacy ended in the early 20th century. In fact, what I discovered was that she's still very much alive and very much used by white supremacists today, or white nationalists, if you prefer. And there's even a website called vdare.com that is based on this idea that America is threatened by an influx of dark people, people of color, who are coming into this country and destroying its nationalist traditions. So you see Virginia Dare as less an Elizabethan and more as a child who is used for whatever political purposes people see fit.

Now, among feminists, Virginia Dare has emerged as a symbol of a competent young girl who was able to make her way, didn't need the help of men, and she was able to thrive in the wilderness of Roanoke Island. So the story of Virginia Dare is a wonderful way to look at who we are today, much more so than who she might have been back in Elizabethan times. And this is part of what makes the Lost Colony, I think, so fascinating to so many people. Well, let's talk about your fascination with the Lost Colony and where you've ended up. Lots of theories, lots of evidence. But what do you think happened to the

lost colony of Rona? The fact is, the lost colony never got lost. The answer to this mystery has been staring us in the face from the very beginning. But it's been obscured by our own confusions about race and immigration. And let me tell you why. We know that later Europeans who came to America often would desert and leave behind their European friends and neighbors and move in with the Indians. Sometimes they were taken by force. But even if they were taken by force, after a period of time, they often did not want to return to wearing heavy woolen dresses or wearing leather shoes or having to live in a very hierarchical kind of society. So we know that many, many white people voted with their feet to go live with Native Americans. And this fact was covered up. It was embarrassing to

people to admit this. It was very embarrassing for the English and other Europeans to admit that their own people were deserting to live with people who actually knew how to make a living in terms of gathering the foods that were necessary in order to survive and prosper. So we know that this was going on in the 1600s and the 1700s. And out West, it was going on well into the 19th century. Many, many stories of white people who became part of Indian tribes. As long as you could learn the language and you understood the stories and you had a skill, you were often accepted. Now, it's true that if you were a male of warrior age, you might be killed. But the women and children offered were considered to be an advantage. You wanted to have more people in your tribe. So white people did quite well often in Native American tribes.

So if we know this to be true, why wouldn't this apply to the lost colony? Think about it. It's 1587. John White sails away. Years go by. You're hungry. What are you going to do? Well, you obviously are going to go hang out with the people who know how to survive. And those were the Native Americans, the Croatoans, perhaps in particular. So I think it goes without saying that the lost colonists would have joined with the Croatoans. They would have learned how

to speak their Algonquin tongue. They would have learned how to speak their Algonquin tongue. They would have learned their traditions, their songs, their way of life, how to harvest oysters, how to fish. Their clothes would have rotted off of them very quickly. They would have been wearing very practical Native American clothing. And within a matter of a few years, I think it's clear they would have become thoroughly Indian. They might have retained some of their songs, some of their traditions, but we know from other examples that it was very easy for people to go native. But this was an embarrassment in later centuries. So it was covered up, and the lost colony was turned into a mystery. The real

mystery is why we thought they got lost. They didn't get lost. They simply found a new way to live. Let's review what the lost colony means. If it was such a simple answer as that, that they just integrated. They did what they had to do. They moved on to keep moving on. But it is a mystery. It is a lore. It is a mythology. Why does the Lost Colony continue to remain in our national consciousness? I think the Lost Colony retains its power

over our imagination. Of course, because it is ultimately a mystery because nobody's been able to prove what happened to these people so many centuries ago. But I think it goes

more deeply than that. I think it's more than a mystery that we want to solve. I think that people are interested in their origins. We want to know where we came from. And if we know where we came from, then we can say something about who we are or who we want to be. And the lost colony is, in a sense, our ultimate origin story. It's where the Europeans first met the Native Americans to form the seed of what became the United States. Granted, there were Spanish and others in the New World, but this is where English America first began. And I think there's a fascination with knowing how we started, why we started, what went right, and what went wrong. Think about it.

If the English had worked with the Native Americans in a different way, if instead of them being pushed aside, instead they had become allies, as the lost colonists may have been with the Croatoan, then our history might be quite different. So I think it's really powerful to think about where we come from, who are the people that founded our country, and how did the Native Americans play into all of this? And these are stories that are in the news today as we struggle with our history to understand who we are, what matters, how do we relate to people who come from abroad, how do we relate to Native Americans? These are all really vital questions for all of us that I think we're struggling with, which makes the lost colony strangely relevant today.

Andrew Lawler, thank you so much for talking to me on American History Tellers. Thank you, Lindsay. I've enjoyed our conversation. That was my conversation with author and journalist Andrew Lawler. He's a contributing editor for Archaeology Magazine and author of the national bestseller, The Secret Token, Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Next week on American History Tellers.

The Olympics are big business today, but in 1904, they were a scrappy enterprise that had just been started eight years earlier by an eccentric Frenchman who had a vision of reviving Greek-style games with modern-day athletes. His determination to bring the Olympic Games to America would lead him to an unlikely host city, St. Louis, and one of the most unusual sporting events in history. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. I also have two other podcasts you might like,

American Scandal and Business Movers. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. Audio editing and sound design by Molly Bach. This episode was produced by Morgan Jaffe. Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Louis for Wondery.