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So I'm reading this book about Roanoke Island
The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke by Andrew Lawler.
Thing one: I cannot believe that, with a whole entire ocean to get lost in, this many people kept running into each other this many times on the same small stretch of 16th-century North Carolina coastline. I mean, it's not completely random, because a major Spanish shipping lane ran past here, but there is also a lot of "and then the Spanish just happened to drop by; it was inconvenient for everyone" and "Oh hi, Francis Drake here, fresh from pirating in the Caribbean, anyone need anything while I'm around?"
(The Spanish concluded that the British were setting up a pirate base on the North American coast to harass their shipping, which helped matters not at all.)
Thing two: These people were the worst possible people to put in charge of first contact with another continent. THE WORST. FWIW, I didn't feel like the author was condescending towards his subject - I actually hate that in a nonfiction book - it's just that his subject was really, really bad at the whole "competently administering a town in a foreign land" thing.
And then even after they managed to lose a whole entire town, IT JUST DIDN'T IMPROVE.
This book is hilariously full of things like "we sailed across the Atlantic for half a year, spent a couple of days looking for our missing colonists and then sailed back to England because there was a storm." And then I got to the modern-day archaeological parts and IT IS EXACTLY LIKE THAT TOO. Endless iterations of "we thought we'd found Virginia Dare's gravesite so we walked around in the swamp for like an hour and but it was getting dark so we left and never came back"; "follow-up emails were never returned so that's it for THOSE long-lost papers I guess"; "the developers mentioned finding European-style burials while they were digging for the subdivision but then they went ahead and built a subdivision on top of it while everyone stood around doing nothing"; "somewhere around circa 2010 it started to occur to people that maybe it would be a good idea to also search for archaeological traces on Croatoan too, i.e. THE ISLAND WHERE THEY SAID THEY WERE GOING."
I don't know if I've ever seen this many people look this hard and this incompetently for anything. Even the author says at one point, paraphrasing, that he's written several books about archaeological subjects before and What the fuck.
... I really enjoyed it, btw. The book is entertaining written and doesn't soft-pedal the incredibly brutal and bloody colonial history of early European-North American contact (at least I didn't think so), while discussing in a generally non-judgmental way (again, YMMV) how the mythologizing of the island is really more about us - those who came after them - than about the actual historical events, about cultures building their own mythology and the currently vibrant and interesting culture of the modern-day residents of the island chain, and the people here and elsewhere who may or may not be the much-changed descendants of the original colonists. Also, the entire surrounding context was really interesting and something I didn't know very much about, ranging from the sheer number of Europeans running around with their own agendas on the Atlantic-to-Caribbean coast at this point in time, to the not-unrelated British war with Ireland going on concurrently. (Basically, some of the very same people who were involved in that went on to similar actions in the Americas. I mean, if you hire a guy who is known for massacreing villages and staking out heads on pikes in Ireland, it's all going to end up heads on pikes eventually. I summarized some of this for Orion and he said, "So they put Murtry [from Expanse] in charge of the colony?" .... yes. Yes, they did, at least in Roanoke 1.0, the previous but no less disastrous version of the "lost" colony. It worked out about like you'd expect.)
Roanoke and Jamestown are both often talked about in an American political context as isolated incidents, first of their kind, rather than being indelibly embedded in a cultural and political milieu that was incredibly complex and full of self-directed iconoclasts on both sides of the Atlantic, and I think for a standalone book dealing with one small slice of the conflict, this book does a pretty good job of getting across a general snapshot of the bigger context, as well as the way it's still echoing down today in various ways.
Plus swamp-dwelling treasure hunters stuffing possibly priceless artifacts in the trunks of their cars and suburban developers burying trash bags of 400-year-old bones. I would say that some of the sheer bonkers-ness of all of this makes me believe the island is cursed, except the book makes a pretty good case for "curses" being simply the guilt and history we drag behind us.
Also, looking up more information on all of this led me to my new favorite Wikipedia caption.
Thing one: I cannot believe that, with a whole entire ocean to get lost in, this many people kept running into each other this many times on the same small stretch of 16th-century North Carolina coastline. I mean, it's not completely random, because a major Spanish shipping lane ran past here, but there is also a lot of "and then the Spanish just happened to drop by; it was inconvenient for everyone" and "Oh hi, Francis Drake here, fresh from pirating in the Caribbean, anyone need anything while I'm around?"
(The Spanish concluded that the British were setting up a pirate base on the North American coast to harass their shipping, which helped matters not at all.)
Thing two: These people were the worst possible people to put in charge of first contact with another continent. THE WORST. FWIW, I didn't feel like the author was condescending towards his subject - I actually hate that in a nonfiction book - it's just that his subject was really, really bad at the whole "competently administering a town in a foreign land" thing.
And then even after they managed to lose a whole entire town, IT JUST DIDN'T IMPROVE.
This book is hilariously full of things like "we sailed across the Atlantic for half a year, spent a couple of days looking for our missing colonists and then sailed back to England because there was a storm." And then I got to the modern-day archaeological parts and IT IS EXACTLY LIKE THAT TOO. Endless iterations of "we thought we'd found Virginia Dare's gravesite so we walked around in the swamp for like an hour and but it was getting dark so we left and never came back"; "follow-up emails were never returned so that's it for THOSE long-lost papers I guess"; "the developers mentioned finding European-style burials while they were digging for the subdivision but then they went ahead and built a subdivision on top of it while everyone stood around doing nothing"; "somewhere around circa 2010 it started to occur to people that maybe it would be a good idea to also search for archaeological traces on Croatoan too, i.e. THE ISLAND WHERE THEY SAID THEY WERE GOING."
I don't know if I've ever seen this many people look this hard and this incompetently for anything. Even the author says at one point, paraphrasing, that he's written several books about archaeological subjects before and What the fuck.
... I really enjoyed it, btw. The book is entertaining written and doesn't soft-pedal the incredibly brutal and bloody colonial history of early European-North American contact (at least I didn't think so), while discussing in a generally non-judgmental way (again, YMMV) how the mythologizing of the island is really more about us - those who came after them - than about the actual historical events, about cultures building their own mythology and the currently vibrant and interesting culture of the modern-day residents of the island chain, and the people here and elsewhere who may or may not be the much-changed descendants of the original colonists. Also, the entire surrounding context was really interesting and something I didn't know very much about, ranging from the sheer number of Europeans running around with their own agendas on the Atlantic-to-Caribbean coast at this point in time, to the not-unrelated British war with Ireland going on concurrently. (Basically, some of the very same people who were involved in that went on to similar actions in the Americas. I mean, if you hire a guy who is known for massacreing villages and staking out heads on pikes in Ireland, it's all going to end up heads on pikes eventually. I summarized some of this for Orion and he said, "So they put Murtry [from Expanse] in charge of the colony?" .... yes. Yes, they did, at least in Roanoke 1.0, the previous but no less disastrous version of the "lost" colony. It worked out about like you'd expect.)
Roanoke and Jamestown are both often talked about in an American political context as isolated incidents, first of their kind, rather than being indelibly embedded in a cultural and political milieu that was incredibly complex and full of self-directed iconoclasts on both sides of the Atlantic, and I think for a standalone book dealing with one small slice of the conflict, this book does a pretty good job of getting across a general snapshot of the bigger context, as well as the way it's still echoing down today in various ways.
Plus swamp-dwelling treasure hunters stuffing possibly priceless artifacts in the trunks of their cars and suburban developers burying trash bags of 400-year-old bones. I would say that some of the sheer bonkers-ness of all of this makes me believe the island is cursed, except the book makes a pretty good case for "curses" being simply the guilt and history we drag behind us.
Also, looking up more information on all of this led me to my new favorite Wikipedia caption.
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That sounds simultaneously hilarious and incredibly frustrating!
Also, looking up more information on all of this led me to my new favorite Wikipedia caption
Ah, that is delightful! :D
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*blink blink*
I am reminded of David Grann's The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (2009), which begins as a biography of Percy Fawcett and a mythography of the eponymous city for which he spend most of his life searching, turns into a study of the media sensation and inevitable legend that sprang up around Fawcett after his disappearance in the course of the search, and winds up as a document of the author's own growing obsession with the complete WTF value of the entire story to the point where the Royal Geographical Society does not want to take his calls because they have been fending off Fawcett nutters since 1930 and his attempts to reasure them that he's just writing a book about the phenomenon convince them that he is merely a more meta form of nutter than the usual and they still don't want to let him into their archives; essentially it is one of the historical vanishings that becomes its own event horizon, but I hadn't realized Roanoke was one, too.
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It is ABSOLUTELY this. In fact, the author starts out early on by mentioning that people kept warning him about the tendency of anyone investigating Roanoke to go off the deep end about it, and then chronicles his own descent into madness with self-aware bemusement about it.
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Okay, now I must point you to
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Honestly a lot about the colonial age started making sense to me when I really firmly reoriented it as "a way to get rid of surplus population that were causing trouble" and that this really wasn't actually limited to the commoners, it was also genuinely at play with the rich explorers. These were, especially at this stage, NOT the creme de la creme, nobody in power THOUGHT they were, they were literally the people that for the most part the originating-society really didn't care that much if they came back alive or were, in fact, all lost!
They had more disposable people to send, after all.
. . . omg that caption. XD XD XD
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That tweet went viral! aaaaaa what. XD
But yeah, I never thought about it quite that way before, but it is EXACTLY this, and I think this book really nails that particular dynamic. Maybe it's not quite that conscious, but it is definitely the case that, if you have bored and dangerous plotters hanging around court, sending them halfway around the world where hopefully they'll be too busy thinking about survival to plot at all is definitely a selling point of the entire venture.
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That's the impression I got from a Tumblr post on the subject, but given it's Tumblr I just assumed it was heavily exaggerated. Apparently not xD
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Oh no.
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Ahaha XD
The Wikipedia caption is also pretty great -- thank you for sharing :D
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(That tweet has gone viral since I posted this - lololol. I mean, in a relatively small way THANK GOODNESS, but that's never happened to me before. xD)
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From the blurb:
England's first attempt at colonizing the New World was not at Roanoke or Jamestown but on a mostly frozen, pocket-sized island in the Canadian Arctic. Queen Elizabeth I called that place Meta Incognita -- the Unknown Shore. Backed by Elizabeth I and her key advisors, including the legendary spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and the shadowy Dr. John Dee, the erstwhile pirate Sir Martin Frobisher set out three times across the North Atlantic, in the process leading what is still the largest Arctic expedition in history.
It's a great book and if you enjoyed this one, you might enjoy Unknown Shore--I'd never had any idea that England had tried a colony before Roanoke or Jamestown, and it was fascinating both in terms of how doomed it was but also that these guys were freaking con artists.
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