Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter
Volume 5.2 (May 1998)

Electronic Research Sources
Imaginative Literature and the Roanoke Colonies

“A few months ago,” wrote Edward Ingle in his 1886 “Roanoke: A Tale of Raleigh’s Colony,” “. . . I stumbled upon a dust covered Bible, which, to all appearances, had not been opened for a hundred years or more.” Inside the Bible, “on the margins of the pages and between the widely separated lines of black letter type,” the narrator of Ingle’s story discovers a diary written by Sydney More, the son of a “Lost Colony” survivor.

Imaginative literature about Roanoke colonization on the World Wide Web is much like Ingle’s diary. Hidden in the margins, these works are few and far between. Even so, they are worth seeking out for their insight on how people at different times have used Roanoke colonization symbolically.

Two nineteenth-century short stories fictionalizing the 1587 “Lost Colony” can be found at the Making of America (MOA) site: Louisa Cornelia Tuthill’s 1840 “Virginia Dare” from the Southern Literary Messenger and Ingle’s “Roanoke” from Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine. MOA is a digital collection of assorted nineteenth- and early twentieth-century journals and books made available over the Web by the University of Michigan and Cornell University. Although only the items on the University of Michigan area of the site are indexed, the index makes the site an excellent research tool. It includes fictional pieces, such as Tuthill’s and Ingle’s, as well as histories, both articles and books.

The other work that is available on the Web is the tale of the White Doe, a European folk tradition applied first to the Roanoke colonies by Sally Southall Cotten in 1901. On these sites, however, the tale is repeated as a part of Roanoke legend without specific reference to Cotten’s poem. Short versions of the story can be found at the ICW-Net Web site’s “Tales from the Coast” and on the White Doe Inn’s Web site. The version of the story from Gerald Hausman’s book Tunkashila can be found at two Boy Scouts of America sites, The NetWoods Virtual Campsite and the U.S. Scouting Service Project site.

The fictional accounts of the Roanoke colonies on the Web provide a good introduction to how the Roanoke colonies have been viewed over the past 150 years.

Sources:
Hausman, Gerald. “The Story of the White Deer Named Virginia Dare.” Tunkashila. Gerald Hausman. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1994. The NetWoods Virtual Campsite. By Steve Tobin. 1 Mar. 1997 <http://www.isd.net/srtobin/story/indian3.html>.

---. “The White Deer Named Virginia Dare.” Tunkashila. Gerald Hausman. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1994. U.S. Scouting Service Project. <http://www.usscouts.org/gold/stories/s_deer.html>.

Ingle, Edward. “Roanoke: A Tale of Raleigh’s Colony.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 8.47 (1886): 470-83. Making of America (MOA). 1996 <http//moa.umdl.umich.edu/cgi-bin/moa/sgml/moa-idx?notisid=AHJ14721375OVER-82>.

“The Legend of the White Doe in Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks.” The White Doe Inn. <http://whitedoeinn.com/doe.html>.

Making of America (MOA). 1996 <http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/moa/>.

Tuthill, Louisa Cornelia. “Virginia Dare.” Southern Literary Messenger 6.9 (1840): 585-95. Making of America (MOA). 1996 <http//moa.umdl.umich.edu/cgi bin/moa/sgml/moaidx?notisid=ACF2679-1620SOUT-263>.

“The White Doe.” ICW-NET. <http://www.icw-net.com/tales/mantwdoe.htm>.

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