Book review: 'A Kingdom Strange,' by James Horn

A KINGDOM STRANGE

The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke

By James Horn

Basic. 296 pp. $26

In 1587, 20 years before Jamestown, English settlers founded a colony on Roanoke Island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This wasn't some hardened outpost of soldiers. It was families, husbands with pregnant wives, fathers with young sons -- 118 people in all. They built a fort, befriended some of the natives and produced the first English baby born in the New World: Virginia Dare. And within three years, they all disappeared. The fate of the Lost Colony is a mystery at the heart of the nation's founding, chock full of odd characters, conspiracy theories, strange turns of events -- even enigmatic carvings left behind on tree trunks.

James Horn resists the temptation to sensationalize any of that in his new book, "A Kingdom Strange." Instead, Horn, a historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, has written a lucid and readable account of the Roanoke colony and the forces that created it. He makes a persuasive case for what must have happened to the settlers. Without giving too much away, let's just say most of them probably didn't live happily ever after.

The central figures are Sir Walter Ralegh, the patron who funded the expedition, and John White, the artist who served as the colony's somewhat bewildered and overmatched governor. White had accompanied a few earlier English expeditions to the New World and had created some sympathetic paintings of the native peoples and their towns and customs. But until the Roanoke colony, he was a minor figure in the outer orbits of the English court. Ralegh, meanwhile, was a dashing striver making his way into the graces of Queen Elizabeth. He and his cronies cooked up a scheme to plant the English flag in America at a time when Spain seemed to have an almost uncatchable head start. While Ralegh sponsored several exploratory missions, he never went himself; the queen wouldn't let her favorite boy toy undertake anything so risky.

Horn does a fascinating job of tracing where in London many of the settlers originated, suggesting that several might have been Puritans looking to escape persecution and highlighting possible family and social connections among them. The expedition was troubled almost from the beginning. One ship got separated from the others just out of Plymouth. When the two remaining ships reached the Caribbean, they dawdled along looking for water, salt and provisions without much luck. Aiming for the Chesapeake Bay, the mission's pilot, Simon Fernandes, instead dumped the settlers at Roanoke Island and refused to carry them farther.

Horn doesn't spend much time in his fast-moving narrative on the experiences of the settlers. But anyone who has spent time among the beaches and gnarled oaks of the Outer Banks, or the Mayberry-like charm of the town of Manteo on modern-day Roanoke Island, might long for a little sense of what this landscape was like when it was exotic and dangerous. Horn supplies only a taste of that, at one point describing the beauty of the shore as compared to the stench of London, just before one skinny-dipping settler gets perforated with Indian arrows.

That event helped the colonists realize they were not in a prime spot. Within about a month of their July arrival, the settlers sent White, the governor, back to England to ask Ralegh for more supplies. White bade his daughter and just-born granddaughter an emotional farewell, and promised to return as quickly as possible. He didn't make it back for three years. Horn depicts White wandering around England, trying to generate interest in a rescue expedition at a time when Ralegh and everyone else were caught up in fighting the Spanish Armada. It's hard to imagine now that such an urgent mission could take so long.

Even harder to grasp is what happened when White finally did get back to Roanoke Island. He found the settlement abandoned and mostly empty, except for his own possessions moldering in a ditch. There were signs carved on a tree and a log in the palisades -- the word "Croatoan," which White took to mean that the settlers had decamped to a friendly Indian settlement a few miles away on another barrier island. But this is the weird part: White and his ships headed toward the other island, encountered some bad weather and, instead of riding it out, headed home. As in, all the way back across the ocean. White never returned to the New World, never found out what became of his family. And the settlers presumably never knew what happened to their supposed rescuers.

There is a boatload of questions here: Why did White leave the colony? Why did Ralegh hire Fernandes, a Spanish pirate with shady connections, to pilot the expedition? Why did Fernandes dump them in Carolina? Horn steers a straight line through these and other puzzles, glossing over some real head-scratchers as he keeps his focus on the ultimate question of what happened to the colonists. This directness builds a sense of trust. As Horn examines the claims of later explorers and settlers in piecing together the probable fate of the lost colonists, you can be fairly confident that he is not falling for crazy ideas. But you can't help but wish for a little more drama, a little more sense of mystery.

Greg Schneider is The Post's National Economy & Business editor.