Cate of the Lost Colony - Lisa Klein [114]
Poem
Sir W. R. to himself:
Away my thoughts; give no more rein to mem’ry;
Be silent, voice of woe and sorrow’s sound!
Complaints cure not, and tears do but allay
Griefs for a time, which after more abound.
Cate’s gone, she is lost, she is found, she is ever fair!
Sorrow draws naught, where love draws not too.
Woe’s cries sound nothing in her closed ear.
Do then by leaving, what loving cannot do.
Behold her standing on that distant strand
My thoughts, and nobler mercy take your part;
Sorrow, complaints, griefs—thee I reprimand:
Mar not what true love seeks: her content heart.
Author’s Note
The fate of the 117 men, women, and children who landed on Roanoke Island in 1587 is perhaps the greatest unsolved mystery in American history. Before Plymouth, before Jamestown, was Roanoke Island, now known as the “Lost Colony.” It takes up a few paragraphs in history books, but stays in the imagination long after school lets out. Stories about the struggle to survive in a hostile and unfamiliar wilderness deeply appeal to us, a nation of immigrants and pioneers. Witness the popularity of shows like Lost and Survivor. The Roanoke colony was our first reality show. But it was real. And no one knows what happened to its inhabitants.
Cate of the Lost Colony is fiction intertwined with history. With a few exceptions I follow the historical record, as far as it goes. No records survive from the colony itself. The voyages of 1584, 1585, 1587, and 1590 are extensively chronicled, and there is even a list of those who made the voyage in 1587. All my characters who go to Virginia are given the names of actual colonists, but their backgrounds are wholly invented. My protagonist is an exception, for Elizabeth never had a maid named Catherine Archer, nor did any of the colonists bear that name.
If you like your history to come alive, visit Roanoke Island, which is now part of North Carolina. There you can see a performance of an outdoor pageant, The Lost Colony, written by Paul Green in 1937. It sacrifices historical nuance for high drama but is still fun. Go to Festival Park and see the replica of the sixteenth-century ship and the settlement site. There I met Dr. Jack Jones, in the role of Darby the Irish seaman, and Lindsay Kitchen, who answered all my questions and gave me new ones to pursue. Sarah Downing and Tama Creef of the Outer Banks History Center pulled books off their shelves I couldn’t find anywhere else. Alicia McGraw of the National Park Service, whom I found with Oberg’s book in her hands, was a fount of information about Fort Raleigh. And closer to home, Clare Simmons helped me get titles and forms of address right. Archaeologist Paul Gardner shared his knowledge of native culture and helped me to think about the practical details of life on Roanoke Island. A visit to Jamestown is also a must, for its Powhatan village, the museum, and especially the ships; the Susan Constant is the same size as the Lion that bore my Catherine to Roanoke Island. No wonder everyone was seasick!
In doing research I relied primarily on David Beers Quinn’s comprehensive Set Fair for Roanoke. An excellent, and shorter, narrative is the one by David Stick. Lee Miller’s Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony is nonfiction but reads like fiction, with first-person narration and (unattributed) quotations woven in. In it I found the suggestion that Sir Francis Walsingham tried to sabotage Ralegh’s colony.
The Library of America edition of the writings of John Smith, soldier and Jamestown founder, is a valuable resource. It contains Barlowe’s Discourse of the First Voyage (1584) and all the existing writings of Ralph Lane, John White, and Thomas Harriot regarding the Roanoke voyages, reproductions of John White’s drawings, and William Strachey’s account of the Virginia Indians (1612). These were my main sources for the customs of Virginia’s native inhabitants. Accurate or not, the writings do represent how the English saw the Indians. The terms