The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [48]
‘Like what – a box of carpet tiles?’ I would reply with practised sarcasm. ‘Oh, please, Dad, just this once don’t be cheap. There’s a two-headed calf in there.’
‘No, son, I’m sorry.’
‘I’ll be good forever. I’ll take out the garbage every day until I get married. Dad, there is a guy in there who can hold three billiard balls in his mouth at once. There is a human unicorn in there. Dad, we could be throwing away the chance of a lifetime here.’
But he would not be moved. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about it. Now let’s all get in the car and drive 175 miles to the Molasses Point Historical Battlefield. You’ll learn lots of worthwhile things about the little-known American war with Ecuador of 1802 and it won’t cost me a penny.’
So I went through the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum and I savoured every artefact and tasteless oddity. It was outstanding. I mean honestly, where else are you going to see a replica of Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, made entirely of chicken bones? And how can you possibly put a price on seeing an eight-foot-long model of the Circus Maximus constructed of sugar cubes, or the death-mask of John Dillinger, or a room made entirely of matchsticks by one Reg Polland of Manchester, England (well done, Reg; Britain is proud of you)? We are talking lasting memories here. I was pleased to note that England was further represented by, of all things, a chimney-pot, circa 1940. Believe it or not. It was all wonderful – clean, nicely presented, sometimes even believable – and I spent a happy hour there.
Afterwards, feeling highly content, I purchased an ice-cream cone the size of a baby’s head and wandered with it through the crowds of people in the afternoon sunshine. I went into a series of gift shops and tried on baseball caps with plastic turds on the brim, but the cheapest one I saw was $7.99 and I decided, out of deference to my father, that that would be just too much extravagance for one afternoon. If it came to it, I could always make my own, I thought as I returned to the car and headed for the dangerous hills of Appalachia.
Chapter ten
IN 1587, A group of 115 English settlers – men, women and children – sailed from Plymouth to set up the first colony in the New World, on Roanoke Island off what is now North Carolina. Shortly after they arrived, a child named Virginia Dare was born and thus became the first white person to arrive in America head first. Two years later, a second expedition set off from England to see how the settlers were getting on and to bring them their mail and tell them that the repairman from British Telecom had finally shown up and that sort of thing. But when the relief party arrived, they found the settlement deserted. There was no message of where the settlers had gone, nor any sign of a struggle, but just one word mysteriously scratched on a wall: ‘Croatoan’. This was the name of a nearby island where the Indians were known to be friendly, but a trip to the island showed that the settlers had never arrived there. So where did they go? Did they leave voluntarily or were they spirited off by Indians? This has long been one of the great mysteries of the colonial period.
I bring this up here because one theory is that the settlers pushed inland, up into the hills of Appalachia, and settled there. No-one knows why they might have done this, but fifty years later, when European explorers arrived in Tennessee, the Cherokee Indians told them that there was a group of pale people living in the hills already, people who wore clothes and had long beards. These people, according to a contemporary account, ‘had a bell which they rang before they ate their meals and had a strange habit of bowing their heads and saying something in a low voice before they ate.’
No-one ever found this mysterious community. But in a remote and neglected corner of the Appalachians, high up in the Clinch Mountains above the town of Sneedville in north-eastern Tennessee, there still live some curious people called Melungeons who have been there for as long as anyone