Chapter 1: Searching for Virginia
Dare
I applied mine heart to
know and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the
reason of things…
- Ecclesiastes 7:25
Let’s say there’s a scuppernong vine, its trunk the
size of an elephant’s leg--no, the size of a baobab
tree. Its tendrils extend across miles and miles of
coastal drift, along sand and even into the water.
Bronze globes float in the brine when the tide is
gentle, become crushed and pulpy in pounding storms.
Let’s say it’s August, and the Gulf Stream is warm, and
it is bringing things to shore that the shore has never
seen: gold signet rings; Spanish amphoras filled with
wine; the bones of Englishmen. Let’s say there’s sex in
this story, and beautiful virgins, and the root of the
vine goes deep beneath the sand to the river of time.
And the river of time connects all things, sifts and
dissolves all memories of scented vines, all bones, all
intentions into one slow moving tide of myth; we dip our
feet in it. Myth is the language in which we live, that
soaks and permeates everything we know and most of what
we don’t know.
The coastal islands of North
Carolina sweep up the mainland shore like a string of
long beads hugging the scalloped neckline of a dress,
from the South Carolina border to Bald Head at the mouth
of the Cape Fear, up past Wrightsville to a stretch of
summer resort towns. North of Cape Lookout, the Outer
Banks scatter toward the Gulf Stream, as if stretching
to hold the vast waters of Pamlico Sound: here are the
wilder reaches of the coast, Portsmouth and Ocracoke,
Hatteras and Pea Island. Here are more treacherous
inlets and shifting sands. Just as the string returns to
hug the mainland, there is an anomaly: Roanoke Island,
doubled up behind Nags Head, straddling Albemarle and
Pamlico Sounds--an extra bead strung between the Banks
and the main. The single strand continues, past
Albemarle Sound, up Currituck to peter out at Back Bay,
beyond the Virginia border.
The sand banks shift and twist with the winds of
nor’easters and hurricanes; the sounds behind them swell
with fresh water in flood, invade rivers and inlets in
high salty tides. Betwixt and between, Roanoke Island
bides her time, anchored by bridges, awash and protected
in the amniotic fluid of two great estuaries. On this
island, among shifting tides and treacherous bars,
England made her first American colony. She staked her
tenuous claim on the New World with the birth of a girl
child, baptized Virginia Dare. What happened to that
girl child is one of America’s great mysteries:
An English baby is
born in an island wilderness.
The baby and her family and friends all
disappear.
They leave behind two cryptic messages
carved in trees: CRO and CROATOAN.
No one knows where they went.
Or whether they survived.
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Speculation on the fate of the
colony has grown over four centuries like a grapevine
planted in fertile soil, sending off tendrils in all
directions, having long since wrapped the facts of the
story in extravagant ornament.
In 1999 I set out on a fool’s errand, in search of
Virginia Dare. Like a toddler wandering off in a
snowstorm, Virginia and her Lost Colony have compelled
many failed searches. They have inspired books filled
with bizarre theories, obscure studies, legends, and
even an epic poem whose heroine is blonde with misty
blue eyes and a pink-beribboned bonnet. I found myself
browsing the back shelves of university historical
collections, cracking bindings on books that had not
been opened in fifty years.
At first Virginia’s story seemed dusty and unused as
some of those books. But as I dug deeper I felt the
irresistible pull of some deep new story, fresh
territory for someone like me who wasn’t born in North
Carolina, someone who came from the north to settle
here:
You mean there was a colony
before Jamestown? Before Plymouth? How come I never
heard of it?
The more I found out about Virginia Dare, the more I
found myself seduced by her: She seems to captivate
those bent on obsession. She brings out the storytellers
and mythmakers and charlatans, people who pick a single
aspect of her story and let it fester in their minds,
for reasons that may have very little to do with the
facts. The facts are thin branches on which they hang
elaborations. There is a grandfather, a daughter, and a
babe. All are lost. Much of the rest is context or
conjecture.
I soon learned the meaning behind something people say
here in the South: I know what happened to Virginia
Dare. They mean they know a story, and you’d better
listen, because it’s a good one and it’s been kept
secret for a long, long time.
There are times in everyone’s life when a good story is
what you need. A story full of hope and tragic endings,
speculation and drama, a story that binds you more
tightly to your life, your family, your hopes, when it
seems these things might spin out of reach. Or a story
that spins you into a new world before you have a chance
to take a breath and say, Stop. The summer of 1999 was
one of those times for me. And the story I found did
both – cleaved me more tightly to my life, and opened up
a world.
I started out thinking facts would satisfy me. The facts
are extraordinary in themselves, making a shape like an
Elizabethan drama wrapped in deerskin. Virginia Dare was
the first child born of English parents on American
soil, on August 18, 1587. She was part of the first
English attempt to plant families in the New World, a
colony of one hundred-plus sturdy souls. The expedition
was governed by her grandfather, John White; organized
by Sir Walter Raleigh; and had the blessing of Queen
Elizabeth. Virginia survived long enough to be baptized.
She was likely still alive when John White shipped back
to England for supplies. And, as people around here like
to say, she was never seen again by European eyes.
The colonists arrived in the midst of hurricane season.
It was also one of the worst drought periods in 800
years. Most of the local tribes--Roanoke and Hattorask
on the banks, Chesepiuk and Chowanoc on the
mainland--weren’t feeling very friendly, and they were
hard up for food.
These were not the first English to make it to Roanoke
Island, and they were not the only ones to get lost. In
fact, if you count a boatload of slaves, reports of a
shipwreck, and several explorers left behind in the
woods, the population of lost and abandoned people at
Roanoke by the time Virginia Dare showed up may have
counted well over four hundred.
This colony brought seventeen women to Roanoke Island;
one gave birth shortly after Virginia was born, and one
came with a babe in arms. There were eleven boys on the
ship’s roster. There were eighty-five men. They had come
for the promise of 500 acres each. They were hoping to
find silver and gold. They intended to build America’s
first English city, the Cittie of Raleigh, on the shores
of the Chesapeake Bay.
In short, they had come with the idea of raising
children and improving their fortunes--and they had come
to the wrong place.
***
Speculation about the life of Virginia Dare spins and
glimmers at the nucleus of the mystery of the Lost
Colony. The life of Eleanor Dare, her mother, spins in
close proximity. Politicians and poets once portrayed
Eleanor as the “first mother” of America and Virginia as
the “first daughter.” Scholars attach the charged
particles of Indian politics and Elizabethan economies.
Writers engage in personality studies of characters such
as Raleigh, who has been called, in my hearing, “the
most hated and feared Englishman of his time” and “a
clever poet”--among other things. At least one sculptor
has portrayed Virginia in the form of a Greek goddess.
Folklorists spin out ghosty stories like swamp mist, and
archeologists still sift through dirt and midden for
physical evidence of her fate.
I saw right away that the story of Virginia Dare is a
family story. A child is born; a mother is caught in an
Indian war; a father protects them as best he can; and a
grandfather--grumpy, desperate, and bumbling--spends
years trying to save them, butting his head against
obstacles such as hurricanes, Queen Elizabeth, and the
Spanish Armada. One family record remains: John White’s
journal. While detailing every turn of the 1587 voyage,
Governor White says little about his daughter or
granddaughter other than recording the birth and baptism
of Virginia, and praising God for their safe arrival.
Perhaps he felt it proper to record these things with
restraint; perhaps his mind was occupied with the weight
of all his troubles. Still, White was a father and
grandfather on a dangerous mission, and his journals of
1587 and later years all have a tone of desperation. His
sympathies seem to be with women--settler and Native
alike. He notes dangers Englishwomen encounter at every
turn; he devotes hours to recording the figures of women
and children in Native villages.
White had explored and documented Roanoke Island on at
least one earlier expedition and had intimate knowledge
of the territory. He knew it was not suited for
settlement. His accounts of later rescue attempts are
full of financial frustrations, bad storms, incompetent
captains, and disastrous tangents into piracy. He seems
gripped in a species of madness, to continue to dream of
the success of the colony while his own kin are in peril
for their lives.
As the first official illustrator of the New World,
White was and still is known for his depictions of
Native people and villages, wilderness plants and
animals--an astonishing wealth of images brought back to
England in 1586. But he made no drawings of his later
voyages; many of his books and papers were lost, so we
can’t know all he wrote. Still, White survived for years
after his colonists went missing; he could have written
accounts from memory or attempted to redraw some of his
lost paintings.
If John White ever sketched his granddaughter, no record
remains. For a grandfather who was an artist by
profession, that’s tantamount to throwing away the
camera the day your first grandchild is born.
What was the family story? White’s first child, a son,
was dead. His wife may have died bearing Eleanor; she
did not accompany him to the New World. White may have
brought a brother or other relation to Roanoke in
addition to his son-in-law, Ananias, daughter Eleanor,
and granddaughter Virginia. After several failed
attempts at rescue, White gave up. He kept publishing
accounts of his failures, perhaps for posterity, more
likely for cash. Can you imagine writing the story of
how you lost your family in the wilds of America, and
how it was your fault? He posted one last account to his
publisher in 1593 and remained silent ever after on the
subject of his own griefs and motivations.
There is much more to Virginia’s story than family, of
course. There is the complex web of Elizabethan
politics, piracy, and warfare; there is the spy network
of Spain. There are treasure ships, and slave ships, and
warring tribes of Native Americans; there is murder and
kidnapping and plague. Bizarre, appealing legends
circulate of the colony’s survival among the Indians, in
the swamps, and as far away as Florida. The images in
these stories are compelling: a baby born; a mother,
abandoned in the wilderness; the disappearance, wholly
and utterly, of the colonists; the words carved in
trees--that partial word, CRO, as if a hand was stopped,
mid-stroke. In this story are gold and pearls, Indians
canoeing in the Thames, an enormous grapevine that grows
where the colonists lived. A white doe haunts the shores
of Albemarle Sound, a doe that used to be Virginia Dare.
Virginia is a blank slate people draw upon. We have long
since made up for John White’s silence.
Traveling the legendary path of the colonists, and
looking into the mystery that is Virginia Dare, set my
mind on a parallel journey--an exploration of my own
family story and the myths that govern my own life. Why
does Virginia’s story haunt me? Perhaps because, like my
own, it is marked by loss and blank pages the
imagination loves to fill.
***
My mother and father lived through the Great Depression,
the Second World War, the sixties, and my rocky
adolescence, in that order. I have imagined my mother,
the social worker, sitting in front of a glowing radio
in a dusky room, listening to the news of Pearl Harbor.
I have imagined my father standing before his draft
board, proving he’s a pacifist, in December 1941. I
imagined these things because they didn’t talk about
them. What they did talk about came out in bits and
spurts--one-line assessments that hinted at who they
once were. My father tells the story of his youth:
My father died
when I was five.
I got a paper route.
Mother took in boarders.
Bob and I slept on the back porch in winter.
One day we woke up covered in snow.
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I love those few bright details to
frame the mystery of my father’s life: death; mother;
snow. In them is a beginning, a window to the mystery
that is my family. In recent years I have been asking my
parents for stories of their lives. More and more they
have obliged me. I have learned snippets of tales that
chill my bones, things that are concealed from children.
Again, my father, the preacher:
There was a lady
in the church who had hallucinations.
She thought your mother was controlling her
mind.
She came with a gun late one night and shot
the church.
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Our parsonage was just yards from
that church. But all I remember of that time is being
whisked away for a stay with Grandmother Swanson, who
had a cat named Bootsie, a black cat with little white
paws.
Gaps in the stories still dominate my understanding of
things; the mind moves like water to fill empty places.
In August of 1999, in the midst of my first months of
research on the Lost Colony, I attended a 100th birthday
memorial for my grandmother Rapp, born in 1899, dead for
seven years. Three months later, my husband Sam’s
grandmother Hudson died. She was ninety-nine. Both women
lived for most of the twentieth century. What stories
they could have told. But they didn’t--not much, anyway,
to me. In the aftermath of these deaths, I craved family
stories: keys to unlock the mystery of our lives.
***
Skinner Funeral Home, Dunn, N.C. November 17, 1999.
The casket is open, and to my amazement she is
beautiful, like Sleeping Beauty banked in summer
flowers. She is wearing her customary eyeglasses and
aqua velour robe. People stand and stare, then move away
to visit with the living. I ask a cousin to tell a
family story, preferably one about my husband Sam’s dad,
a preacher’s kid. I like P.K. stories, because I’m one
myself (those preachers’ kids are wild). Next
thing I know, we’re laughing doubled over at the image
of young Daddy up on the roof, smoking cigarettes, the
Reverend throwing rocks at him to make him come down. We
have almost forgotten that death is in the room.
Suddenly it’s just me laughing, my loud Yankee voice
reverbing against the walls and windowpanes. I turn
around. “It’s time for silent prayer,” someone
stage-whispers; just like that, we all bow our heads,
close our eyes, and seal our lips.
At graveside, a daughter reads a tribute:
Mrs. Hudson was a
schoolteacher.
She lived in Red Springs.
On her honeymoon, she went to the Louisville
zoo but she didn’t look at a single animal.
She spent the whole time sitting on the
bench rubbing her feet.
She had worn fancy new shoes.
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***
Even at a funeral you can get the story wrong. The image
of Daddy smoking on the roof is what I remember--but
it’s not what really happened.
Copyright 2002, 2003, 2007 All Rights
Reserved.
Excerpts may be used by permission only.
For permission, contact Marjorie
Hudson
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