Lee Miller. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony. New York: Arcade, 2011. E-book.

I had to read this book. About a dozen years ago on a family vacation, we saw The Lost Colony, a historical pageant that has been going on every year in North Carolina since 1937. Like others, Miller claims to have solved the mystery of the disappearance of the first English settlers in what would become the United States.

A fort was established on Roanoke Island in North Carolina in 1585. Two years later 117 people from England settled there to start a colony. Its governor, John White, would return to England the same year, the 115 who remained (one had died) were never heard from by any Europeans again.

So what happened?

There have been a number of theories and various testimonies on the subject over the years. Even John Smith of Jamestown fame was commissioned at one point to investigate their disappearance.

There are really three parts to this story. The first has to do with the circumstances of the original settlement in 1587. Sir Walter Raleigh was its sponsor and had himself been to Virginia and the Carolinas. The original plan was to settle in the Chesapeake Bay area where there was plenty of fresh water, good soil, and fish and game. The voyage had a number of unusual delays, so the settlers ended up by the now abandoned fort on Roanoke Island.

Miller makes a case that the delays were deliberate. Raleigh had plenty of enemies in the court. Even though he was seen as the mastermind behind the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, as soon as Queen Elizabeth died, King James had him put on trial and eventually executed. Miller even shows how the men who spoiled the settlement patterned their plot after a similar one that thwarted an early attempt to settle Newfoundland.

Of course, since nobody ever boasted about making sure the Carolina settlement failed, all we have are inferences. Miller makes a case that seems to make as much sense as any other one. He notes that, like the Plymouth pilgrims, a number of the settlers were probably religious separatists or Dissenters. They did not believe there should be a state church, whether Anglican or Catholic, and may have gone there to practice their religion freely.

Raleigh was not a Dissenter, but he had friends and relatives who were. One of the charges that led to his execution was atheism. He was not so much an atheist as one who expressed skepticism about some things the state churches did.

Miller also makes a pretty good case about who the person was who was behind the sabotage of the settlement. That perhaps brings the reader on a little more solid ground. No spoilers here.

Miller then makes a case that many of the Roanoke settlers survived as slaves or wives to the Indians in the area. He is not the first to make such a claim, but he does bring a lot of evidence to bear and this is probably the most convincing portion of the book.

Numerous accounts tell of encounters with Indians in Virginia or North Carolina where Indians tell Europeans about white people who live in various settlements. One well-known account from the 1600s tells of an Indian boy with blond hair. Another account of Croatoan Indians tell that they saw an Englishman with a book and said that some of their ancestors had books like that. Some of the people in that town had gray eyes. Others reported Indians who had beards.

Miller brings in one account that is often dismissed. A Welsh clergyman and five others were captured by some Indians in 1669. They were told they were going to be executed. This Rev. Jones began to pray in his native Welsh and some of the Indians understood him. I recall reading this years ago in a highly speculative book that was saying that the Tuscaroran language was Celtic and evidence that Europeans had settled North America long ago.

Miller’s explanation is a little more mundane. Several of the Roanoke settlers were Welsh. They could have spoken that language among themselves, especially as it seems that the white people were scattered among various towns and tribes to the south and west of Virginia.

Indeed, we learn that there was a very significant trade route that today’s Interstate 85 follows part of that extended from southern Virginia to Augusta, Georgia. Trade along this route is probably the source of copper that both Roanoke and Jamestown settlers were interested in discovering. However, no Indian guides that the Jamestown people knew were allowed to use the road—or they were afraid to use it—which is why Smith and others never found Roanoke survivors.

The trade route also was used to sell slaves. That would explain why the many tales of white people always are about a small number, one to five, in a certain town or village. In the Indian culture of the region, using and selling captives as slaves was as common as it was in most other places in the world back then.

There are numerous other things that Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony notes. Why did John Smith, for example, change some of his testimony about his experiences in Jamestown in his later writings when compared to his earlier writings? Miller suggest that there may have been another cover-up.

While it is likely true that no Jamestown settler ever came across a Roanoke survivor, it is also true that the story that the colony had been wiped out by Indians did not appear until Virginia settlers were fighting the Native Americans near them.

Truly, there are some speculative things in this book, but one would be hard to put to find a case that makes as much sense or is as widely documented.

One interesting detail that Miller notes has to do with the Indian languages. He attempts to try to figure out the significance of place names to help him locate some of the places the Indians mention to Europeans. He notes that some of the tribal groups spoke Algonquian and some spoke Iroquoian. However, there were also tribes that spoke Sioux languages in the region as well.

We usually think of the Sioux as Plains Indians—Montana and the Little Bighorn is quite a distance from the Carolina Piedmont. But they were a woodland tribe until tribes to the East such as the Cree and Iroquois obtained firearms from Europeans and drove them to the plains.

Although the politics and testimonies surrounding the Lost Colony may seems like a focused topic, the scope of Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony is not at all narrow.

This book has a curious style. It reads like a television documentary. I can almost hear a PBS or History Channel voice-over. That means many sentence fragments. Phrases without both a subject and verb. Most of the time there is not a problem with the effect, but it is distinctive.