Reverie on Roanoke Island

credit: Ray Matthews & Jeff Lewis

There's an island in North Carolina where, on a midsummer’s eve, you can wander a pine straw path under the shade of live oaks, hear the calls and drumming of Indians through the woods, and end up in an Italian sunken garden with pagan statuary and a cloister walk. The genius of this place begins on that pine straw path, where the gloom of a maritime forest is lit by enormous white blossoms of oakleaf hydrangea. Formal plantings have gone native, illumining the wild.

Twenty years ago, my husband brought me to this place, known as the Elizabethan Gardens, on a tour of the Outer Banks. He led me through formal gardens to the foot of a white marble Venus designed as an Indian princess. Overhead, Spanish moss wafted in a sound-side breeze. I remember thinking, “This is very strange.”

If you visit on a summer night, the Indian drumming is not
your imagination. It’s from the Waterside Theatre, just a short walk on a twisty path through the woods, where summer stock actors are practicing for their big Harvest Dance, Act One, The Lost Colony, under the evening sky. The play has been the centerpiece of summer culture on Roanoke Island since 1937, and the story it tells inspired the creation of this ten-acre memorial garden with all its fanciful parts.

The Lost Colony, by Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Green, tells the story of Queen Elizabeth I’s major foray into colonizing the New World. In 1584, desperate to fend off Spain’s empire-building and threats of an armada, the Queen gave virtually all of North America to her courtly advisor Sir Walter Raleigh, on the condition that he give her one-fifth of the gold he found and “plant” families there within six years. He never found any gold, but he did plant families — one hundred and sixteen English men, women, and children — on Roanoke Island. On August 18, 1587, the first English baby was born in America; she was named Virginia Dare, for the Virgin Queen.

Within months, however, harassed by dangers on all sides, the colonists abandoned the island and disappeared, leaving behind a clue carved on a post: the word CROATOAN. What became of the Lost Colony remains one of America’s greatest unsolved mysteries, but this much we know:

Shortly after Virginia was born, the members of the colony begged the Roanoke governor, John White, who was also Virginia Dare’s grandfather, to return to England for help. By the time White reached England, the Spanish Armada was approaching, and the Queen had placed a moratorium on ships leaving port for any reason other than defense of the country. When John White was finally able to return to Roanoke Island in August of 1590, it was Virginia Dare’s third birthday. His personal log of the expedition shows he was relieved that the carving he found, CROATOAN, was not accompanied by a Maltese cross, which would have signaled distress. The colonists had probably gone to Croatoan Village on Hatteras Island, the home of Manteo, their Indian ally. Before White’s ship could reach Hatteras, a storm blew up, anchors were lost, and the ship had to head to open ocean for safety. He had missed his chance to find his family, and he would never return.

Most historians agree that at least some of the colonists went to Croatoan. Some may have gone north, to the Chesapeake Bay, where they originally meant to settle. Jamestown colonists would hear reports of Englishmen living south of the James River. John Smith reported that Powhatan, Pocahontas’s father, claimed to have killed them all.

A hundred years later, English explorer John Lawson would find Hatteras Indians with gray eyes, speaking English and claiming descent from the Roanoke Colony. In the next hundred years, descendants may have headed south or west, part of the great Native diaspora that carried the remnants of tribal peoples to places of safety.

Reports and oral history link descendants to people of the Eno, Chowanoc, and Lumbee tribes. One thing is clear: the English would not have survived long without joining forces with Native people. In any case, Virginia Dare and her people vanished.

In the four hundred and twenty years since the Lost Colony disappeared, people have been trying to make sense of the story in poetry, song, art, and legend. Virginia Dare has starred as a demon’s adopted child in a Stephen King fantasy novel, a white doe in a Victorian-era epic poem, and a shape-shifting superhero in a Marvel Comic. In Green’s play, the final scene shows heroic moms and dads carrying bundles of belongings and sleeping children into the dark wilderness, never to be seen again. Rumor has it that Nicolas Cage and Helen Mirren will finally reveal what happened to the Lost Colony in a new National Treasure movie set for release at Christmas.

But in 1950, some folks decided to make sense of the story by making a garden.