June Month of Poetry #2: Roanoke and the Dare Stones

Today in mysteries of history poetry I am tackling Roanoke. This is a famous story, probably the most famous unsolved mystery of the early colonial years in America. It goes like this:

In 1587, a small colony was founded on Roanoke Island off the eastern coast of North America. The settlement would have been the first permanent English colony in the New World, had the settlers not disappeared. What happened is this - the settlement started to flounder quickly, and it looked like starvation was going to be the outcome for the chronically unprepared and under-equipped settlers.

Recognising this, a senior colonist, John White, hightailed it back to England to request resources and manpower. He returned three years later only to find the settlement empty.  Everyone was gone, including White's own wife, child (Eleanor), and grandchild (Virginia), who was the first English child born in the Americas. There was no evidence of mass graves or even any graves at all, which at least implies that everyone left the island alive. The word CROATOAN and the letters CRO, carved into trees within the colony’s borders, were the only signs pointing to an explanation. The returning crew was unable to search for the missing colonists; a storm approached just as they came upon the desolate settlement, forcing them to turn back for England.

On the basis of the mysterious tree carving, the nearby Croatoan Island, now known as Hatteras Island, is the location to which many believe the colonists moved. At the time of the colony’s founding, the Hatteras people occupied the island. The most widely accepted theory that suggests that the colonists joined the group as a survival strategy. Adoption of strangers into communities was a common Native American practice and could have been what happened to the Roanoke colonists, especially the women and children. If that did occur, it is possible (barely) that some of them may have survived for a long time, potentially sharing DNA with their new community.

People who like this idea point to the existence of carvings in stones that were supposedly made by Eleanor Dare, the daughter of John White. The "Dare Stones" contain written stories that tell the fates of the colonists and personal anecdotes from Dare to her father. Most scholars think they are fakes, but some people cling on to the possibility, however slim, that at least the first one found (the only one not conclusively tied to a fraudulent stonecutter in the 1930s) is real.

Other theories, presented in descending order of plausibility, include:

- They all got killed by Spaniards OR Native Americans
- They all died of chronic ineptitude
- They all died of diseases
- They were abducted by aliens
- They fell through a time warp and ended up either in prehistory or 50,000 years in the future

In my poem, I am playing around with one of the more outre theories as well as the more possible ones, just for interest's sake. 

The Second English Child Born in America

what happened is that eight months after the child whose name everyone knows
(Virginia with the washed-blue eyes and the dirt-blonde curls;
a whiny little thing, as I recall, then a dead little thing after)
another of the women screamed the night through and ripped her body inside and out
to push me into the world
chunky and wailing and black-eyed as a pea
full of bile and vinegar
looking like a boiled frog, and one leg shorter than the other one

 is it an omen, whispered the goodwives in their desperately awful huts
shivering against the inadequate fires that the inadequate men had built
does it tell of wickedness to come

and what happened after that is written in the stars as much as on the trees, isn't it
they thought we had picked up our tails and fled to Croatoan
(on what boats?)
when instead they should have looked up into the milky vast sky
(for the ships)

but I am likely telling you a tall tale, isn't it
me, the trickster goblin, born second in America
as scrawny as a peeled rat, but I outlived most of them all the same

does it tell of wickedness to come
well, yes, those stories are there:
like the one about how we were taken away to a secondary location by the ones with their sharp-edged smiles
the men hacked to their deaths, the women too
only we few children taken to become someone else's children
and Virginia dead not a sixmonth later, curled up and gasping

another story: we sickened and we died
crawled away in threes and fours in search of medicine, and found no medicine, only graves

or perhaps, we died because we could not find a way to eat
and so we starved with unpleasant slowness
scattering ourselves across the scrub of the mainland like seed looking for welcoming soil
but finding none
Virginia's mother carving out a last testament in the stone, coursing bright with bitterness

but at the end of the stories is the true thing, isn't it
and I, secondborn English in America, with my Spanish eyes and long thick hair
I know what is true and I know what you have wanted to be true
kneading us like clay to cast the idols that speak to you in hollow voices
of primacy and destiny and the sacrifice of white women
(as if it is only white women whose suffering has existential meaning)

does it tell of wickedness to come:
it depends, in the end, on what it is that you believe wicked
the singing by the rivers and the deer suet we left for Okee
the stories that were told to us and received by us
as we travelled with our new kin 
going with the seasons across the islands and the big lands
the beds we shared and the babes we made 
tangling our lines together until they could never be teased loose again
tangling our voices into the threnody that was to come

and I, the secondborn daughter of England in America
also the first-birthing mother of a brace of freckled children
born looking up at western stars
ending that way, too -
lying quiescent by my fire with my daughters murmuring to me
looking up at the great pearlescent belly of the mother ship
rolling her way through the sky like a vast cream-lit whale
coming to take me home.