Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony

I read Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony by Lee G. Miller and loved it. It’s the story of, (surprise surprise), the lost first colony of America at Roanoke Virginia. Because Lee Miller is an historian and a clever person she postulates very convincingly a political motivation for the colony’s demise, turning America’s first European adventure and tragedy into an historical whodunnit. It’s a wonderful book and led me to write three outlines for possible novels based on the ideas, characters and situations she introduced me to. Yeah, I like it.
Miller’s book is not perfect, people who approach it after reading a romance might be disappointed. Readers who just put down a history textbook might also wonder what’s going on. It’s non-fiction written to entertain and I think it succeeds. Miller sifts through thousands of historical sources I doubt the average reader would ever get around to. She adds a bit of logical conjecture, makes her arguments and leaves you knowing more about the time and place than you did before reading her book. It is an enriching book that stays with you.
If you’re interested in history, early American colonization in particular, this book should already be on your list. If you’re one of those people who think that things just don’t happen in a vacuum, if you’ve ever fashioned a hat out of tin-foil or questioned the official story or lack thereof of anything, you’ll like Miller’s book. If you didn’t know that the Indians cut the underbrush of the forest, leaving only the oldest trees in a shady canopy so high and so nurtured that the first Europeans said they could gallop a horse through it, you’ll like Miller’s book.

Some very interesting information and a very sound theory, but way to many difficult names to keep track of. I enjoyed discovering the apparent truth about this great mystery, but had to Wade through some seemingly extra minutiae to get there.

INteresting descriptions of England in the 16th century, social and political.
I found the book difficult to follow with all the letters and manuscripts written in the style of the times.
I could not keep track of the various Indian tribes discussed.
THe bottom line appears to be that no one really knows what happened to the colonists!

Interesting and original research, but the writer's style is distracting, almost amateurish. Too many sentence fragments, exclamation points, and aha! constructions. One has to pause over these fragments to suss what she's trying to say. There's a reason why this kind of writing belongs in certain types of fiction, and not in historical writing--it's for effect, not for clear, straightforward and expeditious communication. She clearly has the scholarly background to develop her theories and to present a convincing case -- but one wishes a good editor could have gotten hold of this manuscript and put it to rights before publication.

What happened to the Roanoke colony is one of the great mysteries. Unfortunately the mystery was not solved for me in this book. In fact I gave up on this book half way through. Because every time it look liked the author would answer what happened at Roanoke. They would get sidetracked into pages and chapters on Elizabethan court intrigue or life in sixteenth century london. In fact the author would write about anything but what his theory on what happened at Roanoke.

What really happened to those English settlers who so mysteriously disappeared from Roanoke? That is the puzzle the author attempts to unravel through an impressively thorough research on the politics, pirates, and perceptions of the years before and after their attempt at settlement. The author sheds new light on the reasons these settlers were left on such an uninhabitable spot, and why their rescue never happened. The detail and breadth of the research is very thorough although the writing style is somewhat choppy, and the book would be improved with good editing. Altogether a good read if you've always wondered, "Whatever happened to those first settlers, anyway?"

Uneven writing, but very interesting subject. Some recent discoveries indicate a new edition should be written.

The New York Times has an intriguing report recently: nytimes.com/2015/08/11/science/the-roanoke-colonists-lost-and-found.html?_r=0

MERRY HILL, N.C. — Under a blistering sun, Nicholas M. Luccketti swatted at mosquitoes as he watched his archaeology team at work in a shallow pit on a hillside above the shimmering waters of Albemarle Sound. On a table in the shade, a pile of plastic bags filled with artifacts was growing. Fragments of earthenware and pottery. A mashed metal rivet. A piece of a hand-wrought nail.

They call the spot Site X. Down a dusty road winding through soybean fields, the clearing lies between two cypress swamps teeming with venomous snakes. It is a suitably mysterious name for a location that may shed light on an enigma at the heart of America’s founding: the fate of the “lost colonists” who vanished from a sandy outpost on Roanoke Island, about 60 miles east, in the late 16th century.

On and off for three years, Mr. Luccketti and colleagues with the First Colony Foundation have been excavating parts of the hillside, hoping to find traces of the colonists. As if clues in a latter-day treasure hunt, hidden markings on a 16th-century map led them to the spot on the sound’s western shore, which Mr. Luccketti had previously surveyed.

Mr. Luccketti, 66, chose his words carefully as he described the fruits of their latest work. “I’m trying to make sure that I say this correctly,” he said. “We have evidence from this site that strongly indicates that there were Roanoke colonists here.”

In Chapel Hill, N.C., on Tuesday, the foundation will reveal its findings, which have been submitted for peer review, and the theory that at least a few of the settlers moved inland to Site X.

The announcement, along with separate findings from another excavation on a coastal island, is sure to stir excitement. Some scholars who have seen the evidence are supportive of the findings, but at least one sees the evidence as too slight to draw firm conclusions. All agree that more digging is needed. The new findings are likely to set off a new round of questions: Why would some of the settlers have split off to the inland site? Where did they go after that? And what became of the rest of the Roanoke colonists?

Robert C. Ross
August 2015

This is an overblown magazine article. Maybe at 3,000 words, it would be an interesting argument. But at book length, the argument is severely padded with all sorts of extraneous information about court intrigues, trading routes of Indians, and the possible wanderings of Spanish sailors.

The book's key point -- and this isn't a spoiler -- is that infighting among politicians and courtiers in England might have led to the landing of the colonists in a tough place on the North Carolina barrier islands and then interfered with several rescue efforts in the next few years. In other words, the situation didn't arise from lack of time to get the colonists to the Chesapeake Bay, where they had expected to go. Instead, they were essentially shipwrecked on purpose by a duplicitous captain in the pay or under some type of obligation to British nobles who were enemies of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was the sponsor of the expedition.

Unfortunately,the author overheats this thesis (which surely has been advanced by others) into literally calling it murder of the colonists. While that isn't an impossible scenario, given the ethics of the age, the author provide even a shred of convincing evidence. He tops it off by recycling silly stories about white men being seen by colonizers 30 years later who ventured deeper into the mainland, claiming that some Roanoke colonists survived as slaves for decades. Again, he throws down these claims with basically no evidence and then adds that reports of these slaves were suppressed by opponents of Raleigh (who was dead by this time anyway).

One of the most irritating things about this book is that the author picks and chooses which actual information he will keep and which he will throw out or claim is a lie. So while he has zero information about John White, the governor of the planned colony, he says that the lack of information means that records about White were deliberately destroyed or hidden. And while he has almost no information about the 117 colonists who were left on the shore (and then White didn't stay), he again says that the lack of information means that they surely were religious separatists (i.e., Pilgrims) that England wanted to get rid of. The author does not present one shred of evidence for this claim. Nor does it have anything to do with his thesis that the fight the led to abandoning the colonists was about court politics.

I'll credit the author with a good review of existing literature on the colony and on others' analysis of what happened. However, he crams in far too much of it, and in distracting and gossipy ways. One problem, which other reviewers have noted, is that the author sprinkles in direct quotes from original source documents as italics. Nothing wrong with this when done judiciously. But in this book, it's in almost every paragraph, as a way to show detailed research. We don't need to have a name or a random phrase like "set sail on a fair day" put into italics. It adds absolutely nothing.

Same goes with the middle section of the book in which the author wastes 50 pages on court intrigues in the second half of the 16th century, and then goes through mini-biographies of the four men who he thinks could have wanted to sabotage the trip. He's building up to this big disclosure by discussing and then discarding the first three. Waste of time. And without having tons of knowledge about the era, the average reader wouldn't be able to argue with the premise anyway -- how would I know if the discussion in this part of the book is remotely accurate, given the author's actions in other parts to discard information that doesn't fit his thesis?

In short, read a different book about the Lost Colony. It's a gripping story, and it has important lessons about early interactions with natives. But this book doesn't provide the insights.

Lee Miller's "Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony" answers the question of one of the greatest mysteries of the 16th century - what happened to the colonists who landed on Roanoke island in 1587. Across 200+ pages, Miller takes us on a fascinating & yet in depth look at the back story behind the Lost Colony & explains that when details are examined further things aren't always what they seem. In a way that is a bit too simplified & reads almost like a textbook at times, the book breaks down step by step each of the players involved in history at the time & spells out the evidence that this is in fact a mass murder on a scale not yet encountered in the New World. Despite the choppiness of the story, this book is a fascinating read for anyone who has an interest in this footnote in the history of colonial America.

For South Carolinians this may be a "must read" book; for others I think not.It is a tale badly and confusingly told with a large cast of characters. There is no chronological table of years and events which would have made the story much easier to follow.The two maps that are supplied are inadequate to show the entire sphere of action where the action takes place, the Caribbean. In addition, the story of the Roanoke colony has lost its cache and is no longer of much interest to most readers. The episodic narrative style of the story so bored me that I could not finish the book.

Having visited Roanoke and having read many books on the colonization effort there, on the life of Sir Walter Raleigh, and on Elizabethan England over the past decades, I was intrigued to see what new insights might emerge from this book.

The Good: The author has evidently done extensive research on all these subjects and has supported the text with voluminous notes and references.

The Bad: Nothing much new here.

The big mystery offered to the reader is, "What happened to the Lost Colony? "

That query belongs in the same category as "What happened to the Neanderthals?"

Answer: Their descendents are sitting across the kitchen table from you.

So, "What happened to the Lost Colony?"

This book, like many others before it, provides most of the answer by quoting John Lawson's observations in 1701. After leaving Roanoke, the colonists interbred with the Indians on Croatan and were genetically swamped by them.

It is quite possible that various other colonists ended up with different Indian groups and were either killed or assimilated in the process.

This book, verbose and wandering, does nothing to alter those well-established facts and possibilities.

Much of the text is devoted to flimsy speculation about domestic intrigues in the court of Queen Elizabeth. This ground has been well-plowed for decades. Elizabethan England was a snakepit of those vying for power. Nothing new here.

There is simply not enough factual basis to support the conclusions offered by the author. What was the real relationship between John White and Sir Walter? Don't know. What was the real relationship between Simon Fernandez and Sir Walter? Don't know. What was the relationship between John White and Simon Fernandez? Don't know. What were the real motivations of Walsingham? Don't know. How reliable is the sole account given by John White to Hakluyt, years after the events described? Don't know.

The factual data is sparse and will likely remain so. The occasionally breathless writing style of the author, together with numerous grammatical atrocities, make this painful reading at best.

For the general reader, there are many fine biographies available of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was a truly remarkable man. Authors such as David Beers Quinn and David Stick have produced far more readable accounts of colonization efforts at Roanoke.

Save your money.

Lee Miller presents a great deal of fascinating detail about the Lost Colony of Roanoke as well as the politics of Elizabethan England and the seafaring of the era. The world of the Indians of the Carolinas and Virginia at the time was much more complex than I was ever taught in school, and I was happy to be educated. She relies mostly on primary sources, and lays out a grand puzzle. Essentially, there are many mysteries surrounding the colony- what happened to the colonists, why the desperately needed relief was never sent, why they were even there in the first place.

Sadly, Miller goes off into unfounded speculation to solve these mysteries. She constructs a grand and (to my mind) unfounded conspiracy with Walsingham as the evil genius at its heart, portrayed by her as some kind of Tudor Blofeld, only missing the scar and the white cat. Essex is made out to be his cats-paw, with Raleigh his victim and the colonists collateral damage in his schemes. It would make for a compelling period spy thriller/mystery in the style of P.F. Chisholm's "Robert Carey" mysteries, but as history it doesn't hold water.

Aside from that, the writing style is... peculiar. Miller made the decision to use copious quotes from her original sources (good!) but interleave them into the sentences she wrote (jarring). It seems a dubious sort of shortcut at best. Her own writing is full of sentence fragments and other grammatical errors, as well as a great deal of repetition. The Kindle version (which I read) is a really bad text conversion- the footnotes aren't linked, there are a huge number of spelling and word errors, and the formatting is often skewed. I did *not* factor this into my rating of the book- I just wanted to give purchasers fair warning.

So, an interesting and informative read but I wouldn't take the conclusions seriously...

This is an amazing story and a remarkable piece of research! If I had had the physical stamina, I would have read it in one sitting. Obviously, the facts and research materials are four hundred-plus years old, and the truth is that we will probably never be one hundred percent sure of the true facts surrounding the Roanoke. Yet, Ms. Miller has done an incredible job of bringing to light the historical context as well as the principle characters involved. She shows quite accurately, I think, how the political turmoil and conflict in the New World went about shaping the events of European colonization. This is a fascinating picture. Ms Miller crafts her story in the style of a mystery novel. Those who were put off by the amount of detail may forget that there are those of us history buffs out there who thrive on knowing all of the minute facts which may be available. To read through the end notes and the bibliography is an education in itself. I highly recommend it and will read it again in the near future.

I think it was at times too technical and carried explanations too far people studying history want facts and stories to back it up I love history but I do not want to read 1000 pages that could have been explained in 500

The interesting subject matter is what kept me reading. Unfortunately the book is dismally disorganized and poorly written. There are entirely too many sentence fragments and unnecessary paragraph headings. The narrative does not follow chronological order. It was well-researched, evidenced by the fact that the last quarter of the text is notes and a bibliography. Less than one chapter is spent detailing White's time at Roanoke. I didn't dislike the book entirely, but it left me wanting a better book on the same subject.

Lee Miller integrates linguistics and historical documents to make a case for what happened to the Roanoke colony. Were they doomed from the beginning? Sabotaged? Murdered as revenge? Sold as slaves?

More maps would have been helpful.