by Tony Horwitz
They were joined in their flight by their Croatoan allies, whose domain extended to the mainland. Fred’s evidence for this was a tangled paper trail, which showed that the last of the Croatoans—by then known as Hatteras Indians—had migrated in the eighteenth century from the Outer Banks to the interior. He believed they’d done so to join a preexisting settlement.
Fred also made use of satellite and infrared images, which he said revealed “anomalies” in the landscape fifty miles inland from Roanoke. His mission now was to probe this territory for artifacts or evidence of a fort, and also to DNA-test current inhabitants of the area, who he believed had Croatoan blood.
At least that’s what I extracted from his rapid-fire monologue, which looped across centuries and counties and tribes, connecting dots that seemed obvious to him but not always to me. “You got to take Fred on faith,” Susan said. “I don’t always get where his thinking is headed, but you know he’ll get there in the end.”
After an hour of driving, we stopped to collect two more of Fred’s acolytes, Eddie and Vickie Squires. Eddie, a muscular millwright and welder with deep-set brown eyes, had learned from Fred that his family could be traced back to a man identified in a 1739 document as a Hatteras “King.” Vickie was an avid genealogist who had researched Eddie’s family tree and found pictures of forebears with dark hair, olive skin, and wide, high cheekbones.
“I’m real proud of it,” Eddie said of his lineage. “We always knew my grandmama was Indian, but it was all kind of hush-hush when I was a kid in the fifties and sixties. Back then, being Indian was about as bad as being black.”
We drove on, through Hyde County, one of the poorest and least populated counties in North Carolina. Trailers and tar-paper shacks perched before fields of corn and cotton. Then, near the head of the Alligator River, we plunged into swampy barrens. One dirt road led to a locked gate, another to a lonely deer stand, a third to the place where we’d started. “Fred’s great with old maps and hopeless with modern ones,” Susan quipped, patiently driving us in circles. “The joke is that he found the lost colony and then lost it.”
Finally, we picked up a dusty track that wound around fields and onto a low, heavily vegetated ridge. “A perfect place for the colonists to hide,” Fred said. He walked us into the woods, talking about all the landscape’s “anomalies.” A line of walnut trees, for instance. “Someone had to plant them, but there’s no known community that’s ever been here.” The soil was different, too, and the land rose sixteen feet above the surrounding plain. “The English had to be high enough off the water to grow corn,” he explained.
Then he led us to what he called a berm, a barely discernible embankment that ran for over a hundred yards through the briars and vines. “I’m thinking this is part of a bastion,” Fred said. He did a rough sketch of the Roanoke fort and held it up against the landscape. “This berm could be the longest line of the fort they built here.”
“Or it could be a logging skidder trail,” Eddie pointed out.
“We’ll have to do a flyover with ground-penetrating radar,” Fred replied. He studied a map and asked Eddie to take a reading off the GPS. Nodding meaningfully, Fred said, “We’re exactly fifty miles into the main.”
We were also, according to the car’s odometer, 162 miles into a road trip that had carried us only twenty-five miles from the Squireses’ house, which we’d left four hours before. It took us several more hours to drive back, with long detours to remote grave sites, where Fred took down names of families he believed had some connection to the Indians who moved here from Croatoan.
“We got that much closer today!” he exulted, as Susan drove us through the twilight back to Fred’s house. His wife, Carol, served us cold cuts and talked about her passion for ferrets. Then Fred led me upstairs to his computer station, which shared space with Carol’s caged pets. As Fred pulled up satellite images, I didn’t know what to make of them, or of him. For all the grand talk, the Lost Colony Center for Science and Research seemed a one-man band, playing at a computer in a room full of ferrets.
BUT ONE ASPECT of Fred’s quest intrigued me. Whichever direction the colonists went, it was likely they’d settled among Indians. Most of the English were young and single, including six of the women; eleven others were children. Virginia Dare was a week old when John White left in 1587, and, if she survived, a woman of twenty by the time the Jamestown settlers arrived. Raised in America, in close company with Indians, would she have remained, in any real sense, an English person? And what of her children?
“A whole Country of English is there, bred of those who were left,” a character declares in the 1605 London play Eastward Hoe, one of whose authors was Ben Jonson. “They have married with the Indians and make them bring forth as beautiful faces as any have in England.”
In 1701, a naturalist named John Lawson picked up the theme of intermarriage, though he viewed it less sanguinely. While visiting the Outer Banks and the remains of Roanoke’s fort, Lawson met coastal Indians who said “several of their Ancestors were white People and could talk in a book, as we do; the Truth of which is confirm’d by gray eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians, and no others.” Lawson concluded that Roanoke’s colonists “were forced to cohabit” with natives, “for Relief and Conversation: and that in process of Time, they conform’d themselves to the Manners of Indian Relations. And thus we see, how apt Humane Nature is to degenerate.”
In the nineteenth century, when Victorian sentimentalists revived the Roanoke story, race once again took center stage. A North Carolina writer, Sallie Southall Cotten, founded an association to honor “the first white child born on American soil” and penned an epic poem, “The White Doe,” which imagined Virginia Dare as a babe of “tender whiteness” who blossomed into a maiden with golden tresses and eyes of “limpid blueness”—a stark contrast to the “squaws of darksome features” all around her. She was worshipped by Indians, not only for her pale beauty but also because she imparted to the “rude, untutored savage” the uplift and wisdom of a “higher type of being.”
Virginia Dare, in other words, had become a symbol of racial purity and progress. Her name was even adopted as a brand of vanilla extract and, in more recent years, by an anti-immigration group that takes the white doe as its emblem.
In North Carolina, the celebration of Roanoke’s lost white tribe also focused interest on Indians in the southeast part of the state, many of whom had pale eyes, light skin, and English surnames that matched those of Roanoke colonists. In 1885, North Carolina’s general assembly designated them “Croatan Indians”—descendants of Manteo’s people—and accorded the tribe marginally greater rights than the rest of the nonwhite population.
THE CROATAN HAD since changed their name to Lumbee, and few of them cared much about their alleged link to Roanoke. But Fred Willard gave me the name of a man who was tracing his own ties to Manteo’s people. Charles Shepherd lived in the rural community of Free Union, an hour’s drive west of Roanoke. He worked as a FedEx courier and invited me to visit on his day off, at the brick home he shared with his parents.
“Hi, I’m Charles Sweet Medicine,” he said, greeting me at the door wearing shorts, T-shirt, moccasins, and a “Native Pride” cap. What made this a little startling was that Charles otherwise resembled a young version of the African-American activist Al Sharpton: dark-skinned, heavyset, with a long sloping forehead, a faint mustache, and swept-back hair. He also had a New York accent.
“I’m from Brooklyn, originally,” Charles explained, leading me to a side porch. “But I never really belonged there.” He laughed, wiping sweat from his brow. “I don’t really belong anywhere.”
At thirty-five, Charles was still trying to work out his complicated identity. Free Union, the longtime home of his mother’s family, occupied land marked on old maps as an Indian settlement. Some of its early inhabitants were Croatoan refugees from the coast, who had been reduced by war and disease to a tiny band. Later, remnants of other tribes mixe
d in, as did free blacks. In the course of the nineteenth century, their designation on censuses ranged from “other free person” to “free person of color” to “mulatto or other” to “Negro.” A few Indian customs and words lingered until about 1900, but Free Union’s several hundred inhabitants gradually lost their connection to native history.
“We knew we were different, but we just accepted the way we were classified by others, which was black,” said Charles’s mother, Pearl, a copper-skinned woman who had moved to New York as a teenager and married a black shipyard worker.
Growing up in New York and Connecticut, Charles never quite fit in. Most of his classmates were of Polish or Italian extraction. His black peers were different, too, “into rap and inner-city culture, which wasn’t my thing.” Only on family visits to Free Union did he feel at home. He loved hearing stories about forebears who hunted with bows and arrows and treated illnesses with herbs and poultices. When he was sixteen, applying for his first job, Charles replied to the race question by checking “Other.” Later, he went to work as a pharmacy technician at an Indian reservation in Connecticut and began attending powwows.
“The first time I heard someone beating a drum, I felt my heart was going to explode,” he said. “That was me, where I was from.” On forms, he began identifying himself as American Indian, though he felt this was unsatisfactory, too. “I’m probably two-fifths African, two-fifths Indian, and one-fifth European,” he said. “The categories in this country are too rigid. I’m everything.”
Five years ago, Charles had moved to Free Union, but he didn’t really fit there, either. Few locals shared his passion for reclaiming their hidden Indian heritage. At powwows elsewhere in the state, Charles felt quietly shunned. “I can tell they don’t really view me as native,” he said. “I’m too black, and there’s still that segregation, even among Indians.”
Then he heard about Fred Willard’s search for Indian communities that might have ties to Roanoke. Charles contacted Fred and compared notes: two autodidacts on related quests. “Free Union was an isolated place and didn’t mix much with the outside world,” Charles said, “so it might be the key to the puzzle.”
He took me to a spare bedroom he’d converted into an office, cluttered with books, census reports, maps, old church records, and anthropological studies. He unearthed a volume of the sketches and watercolors John White made of Indians in North Carolina. First published in 1590, White’s sensitive portrayals of Algonquians caused a sensation in Europe. He depicted Indians not as “savages” but as sympathetic individuals, performing domestic chores or at leisure, dancing and sitting around a fire. White’s Indians often smile; in one portrait, a girl gaily clutches an Elizabethan doll given her by colonists.
“I like to think these people are my ancestors,” Charles said. He used their fringed deerskin clothes as models for the regalia he wore to powwows, where he went by the name Sweet Medicine in homage to the traditional healers in his family. Charles also hoped to use White’s art as a blueprint for his ultimate dream: the full-scale reconstruction of an Indian village, patterned on one called Secotan that White had drawn.
Indian dancers: an engraving of a drawing by John White, an English artist in Virginia, first published in 1590
“In a way, we’re halfway there,” he said, taking me for a drive around Free Union’s scattering of modest houses, separated by large gardens and plowed fields. “Tobacco and corn and beans, mostly,” Charles said, “same as the Indians grew.” White’s drawing of Secotan showed tidy fields of these crops alongside loaf-shaped longhouses. “We could build a few of those, too.”
Charles imagined the resurrected Secotan as a tourist draw and summer camp for kids who wanted to live as Indians had. The village might also inspire his neighbors to reclaim their native identity. As he went on excitedly, about the details of late-sixteenth-century life near the Carolina coast, only one thing was missing: Roanoke’s lost colonists.
“For me, personally, they don’t mean that much, I already know I have Scottish and Irish heritage,” he said. “But it would be a huge bonus if it turned out we’re connected.” Charles laughed. “I’d love to see a TV newscaster announcing that the lost colony had finally been found. Then the camera would pan around Free Union. Can you imagine the reaction? People would be watching their TV sets and thinking, ‘What? Virginia Dare’s descendants are black? No way!’ ”
The Indian village of Secotan, near Roanoke, from a drawing by John White, published in 1590
I asked Charles what he’d say if the TV camera turned to him.
“I’d say, ‘Yes, we’re black, and also white, and Indian, too. A melting pot. Isn’t that what it means to be American?’ ”
IN 1591, A year after John White’s return from his final voyage to Roanoke, Sir Walter Raleigh impregnated and secretly married one of Queen Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting. The queen was enraged by the couple’s stealth and their failure to ask her permission to marry. She seems also to have been jealous of the match. In her pique, she threw Raleigh and his wife in the Tower of London.
Though they were released soon after, it took years for Raleigh to regain the queen’s favor. His attention also turned away from the colony he’d named for her. Instead, he became caught up in the search for El Dorado, the legendary city of gold in South America. But he still held his charter to Virginia, and, as late as 1602, he dispatched an expedition to search for the Roanoke colonists and scout the coast for possible trade posts.
Elizabeth died the next year, bringing to the throne King James, who disliked and distrusted Raleigh—and despised the weed he’d made popular at court. James even penned a tract called A Counterblaste to Tobacco, which described smoking as “a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmfull to the braine, daungerous to the Lungs, and, in the blacke stinking fume thereof,” resembling the smoke of hell.
Soon after James’s accession, Raleigh was arrested for plotting against the king and found guilty of treason, as well as of “holding heathenish, blasphemous, atheistical, and profane opinions.” The judge’s sentence gives some context to the brutality that the English and other Europeans visited on Indians. “Hanged and cut down alive,” the judge told Raleigh, “your body shall be opened, your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off, and thrown into the fire before your eyes; then your head to be stricken off from your body, and your body shall be divided into four quarters, to be disposed of at the King’s pleasure.”
On the day of his execution, Raleigh won a reprieve, but he returned to the Tower, where he remained for most of the next fifteen years. Then, in 1618, James found an excuse to reinstate the death sentence—a simple beheading this time, rather than drawing and quartering. Raleigh composed a final poem, smoked a last pipe of tobacco, donned his finest garments (black velvet cloak, taffeta pants, silk stockings), and climbed the scaffold, imploring his hesitant executioner, “Strike, man, strike!” His widow embalmed his severed head and stored it in a velvet bag, as a keepsake.
Sixteen years before his execution, when Elizabeth was still queen and Raleigh’s colonial charter remained in force, he had written of Virginia, “I shall yet live to see it an English nation.” Strictly speaking, he never achieved this dream: his grandly conceived “Cittie of Raleigh in Virginia” vanished with the Roanoke settlers, and he lost his charter to the colony upon his conviction for treason.
But Raleigh’s failure, like that of his half-brother Humfrey Gilbert, nonetheless bore fruit. As he sat in the Tower, others took up his colonial mantle and headed, once again, for the Chesapeake. They enlisted Raleigh’s “trumpet,” Richard Hakluyt, and consulted the writing and art of Thomas Hariot and John White. Before long, colonists in the Chesapeake also discovered the crop that would ensure their survival: Sir Walter’s beloved tobacco. As Raleigh climbed the gallows in October 1618, Virginia was maturing into a permanent settlement, the beginning of an English nation in America.
FROM FREE UNION I drove back e
ast and over the bridge linking Roanoke Island to the Outer Banks, a very different world from the swampy woods and struggling towns of the interior. Here, there were few trees, just huge stands of condos and commerce: beach supply shops, malls, mini-golf courses, and a “Brew Thru” liquor mart, where I bought a six-pack without leaving my car. All of this was built literally on sand, a thin line of shifting isles buffeted by ocean surf and winds.
I followed the coastal highway south, toward Croatoan, where so many threads of the Roanoke story seemed to lead. The road took me through empty dunes and wind tunnels so fierce they shook my car and peppered it with sand. Reaching Hatteras Island, I found a motel for the night and then went searching for the remains of Croatoan’s main settlement. But the coordinates Fred Willard had given me were characteristically vague. After wandering the shore for an hour without success, I drove down the road to ask for directions at a place called the Frisco Native American Museum.
Inside, I was greeted by haunting Plains Indian music and a Navajo blanket adorning one wall. A man appeared from a back office, leaning on a cane carved from a gnarled branch. He wore jeans, cowboy boots, a silver belt buckle, and a string tie with a turquoise clasp, and his long gray hair was gathered in a ponytail. From his appearance, and the museum’s, I took him for a migrant from out West, possibly a Native American. His response to my query about Croatoan quickly disabused me.
“What did you say your last name was?” he asked.
“Horwitz.”
“So you’re searching for the lost tribe. Are you meshugge?”
I laughed and told him I might be crazy, but I wanted to see all the places connected to the Roanoke colonists.