Following the June publication of Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001), writer, anthropologist and ethnohistorian Lee Miller was sent by Arcade Publishing on a book tour of the southeastern United States. She was amazed at her first lecture to be asked, "How did you hear about this story anyway?" Thinking that the story of the lost colony of Roanoke, N.C., was rather like the story of Amelia Earhart—one just knew it as part of American consciousness—Ms. Miller continued to be surprised by the same question at each program.
Author Lee Miller and her new book were featured in a Books & Beyond program at the Library Nov. 5.
In fact, the lost colony of Roanoke appears in virtually all elementary school textbooks in America. The standard story includes the dashing Sir Walter Raleigh sending a colony of 115 men, women and children to North America under the leadership of John White in 1587. A staple item on U.S. history quizzes is the name of the first child born of British parents in North America at Roanoke, Virginia Dare. John White was forced to return to England immediately for additional supplies, as the colony was dangerously low. As the standard story goes, White was unable to return for three years, due to the threat of the Spanish Armada. When he finally returned, there was absolutely no sign of the colony—no people, no dwellings, not a single nail, board or possession. The only clue was the single word "Croatoan" carved into a tree, the name of a nearby island with potentially friendly Indians where the colonists may have gone for aid. A hurricane prevented White from pursuing this lead, and the colonists were never found.
For 400 years, scholars have puzzled over the complete disappearance of the English colonists. On Nov. 5, Ms. Miller spoke at the Library of Congress and suggested a solution to this intriguing mystery. The Humanities and Social Sciences Division and the Center for the Book sponsored her talk.
For Ms. Miller, her return to the Library was a kind of homecoming. She served as a consultant to the Library for its Columbus quincentenary exhibition, "1492: An Ongoing Voyage," and the associated Educators Institute. She was a contributor to Many Nations: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Indian and Alaska Native Peoples and has used many of the Library's reading rooms and collections in the course of her research. The overflow audience was filled with former colleagues and others fascinated by the age-old puzzle of Roanoke.
Ms. Miller's own fascination began in 1988 when she traveled to Roanoke Island on a grant to study the Secotan Indians. As she walked around a reconstructed fort from an earlier Roanoke military expedition in 1585-1586, she "became obsessed not only with the Indians but with the colonists." This obsession did not come to fruition for more than a decade as she pursued a master's degree in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and other projects.
From initial work reorganizing the American Indian collection at the Smithsonian Institution, Ms. Miller went on to become a nationally known expert in the history and cultures of American Indian nations, advising groups such as the British Broadcasting Corp., British National Public Radio, the Florida Museum of Natural History, the New York State Department of Rural Economic and Community Development and various American Indian tribal governments. From 1991 to 1995, Ms. Miller worked in Hollywood as a writer and head of research for Kevin Costner's 1995 CBS miniseries, 500 Nations. Her research for that project convinced her of the need to write From the Heart: Voices of the American Indian, featuring 350 nations, so "far more Indian kids would know their own heroes, other than Geronimo or Crazy Horse. It takes up where Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee leaves off."
In Roanoke, she proposes a new theory as to what happened to the colony and, more important, why. Previous studies of the Roanoke colony have all approached it from the British perspective. "Once the colonists left the island, they were in Indian territory. You need to study it from that [the Indians'] perspective as well." A reading of the primary documents, such as letters by John White, expedition accounts and letters and records from the earlier expeditions to Roanoke, convinced Ms. Miller that the colonists' voyage had been sabotaged from the start. The ship's captain, Simon Fernandez, prevented White and the colonists from obtaining precious water, food and salt at resupply stops in the Caribbean prior to landing them on Roanoke Island. In fact, the ultimate destination for the colony was farther to the north, in the Chesapeake region, but Fernandez refused to transport them according to plan.
Once this sabotage became clear to Ms. Miller, she decided to approach the story as a detective studying a mystery for motives and methods. "Along with sabotage, I found espionage, mutiny and murder. I tried to put the whole thing together as a puzzle, fitting it together piece by piece. I kept expecting to find holes in the puzzle, a missing piece or a piece that wouldn't fit, but it never happened." Her exhaustive research took her from North Carolina and Virginia to the Library of Congress and England and even to Canada to consult with Indian linguists.
Although Roanoke is thoroughly scholarly, with more than 75 pages of notes, references and bibliography, Ms. Miller chose to write it as a fast-paced mystery. She is pleased when she visits bookstores to find it displayed in the mystery section as often as it is found in the "dusty history section in the dingy back of the store." Although Ms. Miller chose not to reveal her "solution" to the mystery during her presentation, she concluded that both the "Secotan Indians and the lost colonists were innocent people ground down by big government. They were all caught up in the quest for power in England, as well as by powerful Indian nations in the interior of North Carolina with their own agendas and political maneuvering."
Researching and writing Roanoke took more than three years, and Ms. Miller has just completed a book on a slave revolt in Suriname in 1772. Although she hopes to publish fiction someday, she has begun work on an unsolved murder in the 19th century in Maine. In addition to writing, she is currently focused on purchasing a farm of more than 600 acres in upstate New York for a nature preserve, ardent in her work to safeguard land from development.
