John Vytal: A Tale of the Lost Colony

No epoch in American history is more essentially romantic than that in which, for a few years, less than one hundred colonists from England lived on the island of Roanoke, off the coast of old Virginia. Nevertheless, although the history of our continent, from the landing of Columbus to the end of the Spanish-American war, has been exhaustively exploited in fiction, the pages dated 1587-1598 seem to have been left unturned. Yet the life of the Roanoke colony contained not only adventure, hazard, and privation in a far greater degree than the maturer settlements of later years, but also an underlying emblematical element, and in its end an insoluble riddle. In being thus both mystical and mysterious, it paramountly inspires romance.


The mystery has filled many pages of history, but always as an enigma without solution. The fate of the colony is utterly unknown, historians of necessity relegating it to the limbo of oblivion.


Bancroft, for one, concludes his account of the colonization thus:


“The conjecture has been hazarded [by Lawson and others] that the deserted colony, neglected by their own countrymen, were hospitably adopted into the tribe of Hatteras Indians, and became amalgamated with the sons of the forest. This was the tradition of the natives at a later day, and was thought to be confirmed by the physical character of the tribe in which the English and the Indian race seemed to have been blended. Raleigh[vi] long cherished the hope of discovering some vestiges of their existence, and though he had abandoned the design of colonizing Virginia, he yet sent, at his own charge, and, it is said, at five several times, to search for his liege-men. But it was all in vain; imagination received no help in its attempts to trace the fate of the colony of Roanoke.”


Opposing this view, many authorities believe that a massacre occurred by which many of the English suffered at the hands of hostile savages. In the ensuing story, however, I have ventured to explain the oblivion of the colony’s end in a way which I believe has not yet been suggested.


After this preamble I hasten to assure the reader—perhaps already surfeited with historical novels—that he shall find scarce more of history in the whole tale following than in the foreword just concluded. The “manners and customs” also are rigidly suppressed. I have made bold, though, to use several of the colonists’ names which have been preserved, but the conception of character is my own.


W. F. P.