Arctic Light

The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke by Andrew Lawler.

Thing one: I cannot believe that, with a whole entire ocean to get lost in, this many people kept running into each other this many times on the same small stretch of 16th-century North Carolina coastline. I mean, it's not completely random, because a major Spanish shipping lane ran past here, but there is also a lot of "and then the Spanish just happened to drop by; it was inconvenient for everyone" and "Oh hi, Francis Drake here, fresh from pirating in the Caribbean, anyone need anything while I'm around?"

(The Spanish concluded that the British were setting up a pirate base on the North American coast to harass their shipping, which helped matters not at all.)

Thing two: These people were the worst possible people to put in charge of first contact with another continent. THE WORST. FWIW, I didn't feel like the author was condescending towards his subject - I actually hate that in a nonfiction book - it's just that his subject was really, really bad at the whole "competently administering a town in a foreign land" thing.

And then even after they managed to lose a whole entire town, IT JUST DIDN'T IMPROVE.

This book is hilariously full of things like "we sailed across the Atlantic for half a year, spent a couple of days looking for our missing colonists and then sailed back to England because there was a storm." And then I got to the modern-day archaeological parts and IT IS EXACTLY LIKE THAT TOO. Endless iterations of "we thought we'd found Virginia Dare's gravesite so we walked around in the swamp for like an hour and but it was getting dark so we left and never came back"; "follow-up emails were never returned so that's it for THOSE long-lost papers I guess"; "the developers mentioned finding European-style burials while they were digging for the subdivision but then they went ahead and built a subdivision on top of it while everyone stood around doing nothing"; "somewhere around circa 2010 it started to occur to people that maybe it would be a good idea to also search for archaeological traces on Croatoan too, i.e. THE ISLAND WHERE THEY SAID THEY WERE GOING."

I don't know if I've ever seen this many people look this hard and this incompetently for anything. Even the author says at one point, paraphrasing, that he's written several books about archaeological subjects before and What the fuck.

... I really enjoyed it, btw. The book is entertaining written and doesn't soft-pedal the incredibly brutal and bloody colonial history of early European-North American contact (at least I didn't think so), while discussing in a generally non-judgmental way (again, YMMV) how the mythologizing of the island is really more about us - those who came after them - than about the actual historical events, about cultures building their own mythology and the currently vibrant and interesting culture of the modern-day residents of the island chain, and the people here and elsewhere who may or may not be the much-changed descendants of the original colonists. Also, the entire surrounding context was really interesting and something I didn't know very much about, ranging from the sheer number of Europeans running around with their own agendas on the Atlantic-to-Caribbean coast at this point in time, to the not-unrelated British war with Ireland going on concurrently. (Basically, some of the very same people who were involved in that went on to similar actions in the Americas. I mean, if you hire a guy who is known for massacreing villages and staking out heads on pikes in Ireland, it's all going to end up heads on pikes eventually. I summarized some of this for Orion and he said, "So they put Murtry [from Expanse] in charge of the colony?" .... yes. Yes, they did, at least in Roanoke 1.0, the previous but no less disastrous version of the "lost" colony. It worked out about like you'd expect.)

Roanoke and Jamestown are both often talked about in an American political context as isolated incidents, first of their kind, rather than being indelibly embedded in a cultural and political milieu that was incredibly complex and full of self-directed iconoclasts on both sides of the Atlantic, and I think for a standalone book dealing with one small slice of the conflict, this book does a pretty good job of getting across a general snapshot of the bigger context, as well as the way it's still echoing down today in various ways.

Plus swamp-dwelling treasure hunters stuffing possibly priceless artifacts in the trunks of their cars and suburban developers burying trash bags of 400-year-old bones. I would say that some of the sheer bonkers-ness of all of this makes me believe the island is cursed, except the book makes a pretty good case for "curses" being simply the guilt and history we drag behind us.

Also, looking up more information on all of this led me to my new favorite Wikipedia caption.