Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter
Volume 6.2 (May 1999)

From The Editor…

After the last issue of the Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter went to press, we learned of the death of Elizabeth Chandler Cumming. Mrs. Cumming was a former English professor at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the wife of the late William P. Cumming, author of The Southeast in Early Maps, which just appeared in a newly revised and expanded edition. In the process of putting together that book, the Cummings traveled widely and gathered a premier map collection-the William Patterson Cumming Map Collection housed at Davidson College, where Mr. Cumming taught. Mrs. Cumming was able to attend the 1993 Roanoke Decoded Symposium at the age of 87 and wrote a piece on the symposium for her retirement community newsletter that the Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter republished in its first issue. More recently, Mrs. Cumming published a memoir of her travels with her husband to collect maps throughout Europe, “Annus Mirabilis: A Year’s Adventure Searching Europe for American Maps and History,” as part of William P. Cumming and the Study of Cartography: Two Brief Memoirs and a Bibliography, edited by their son, Robert Cumming (pp. 1–11), and excerpted as “Travels with a Cartophile” in a recent issue of Mercator’s World (see “Bibliographic Checklist” in this issue). Our condolences to her family.

The Elizabeth II, the fifteen-year-old replica of a sixteenth-century sailing ship at Roanoke Island Festival park in Manteo, North Carolina, will be undergoing an extensive overhaul beginning this November. Present plans are for the work to be done in Manteo where visitors can observe the repairs, a flashback to when the ship was originally built in Manteo. The shorter maintenance overhauls of the ship have usually been done at the North Carolina Department of Ferry Maintenance Facility in Manns Harbor. This year’s overhaul is expected to take until March 2000 and may need to continue the following winter.

One of the more humorous newsclippings of the past few months was in the “Daily Break” section of the Virginian-Pilot, where matters such as music, movies, and television are the main staples. In his regular column on March 4, 1999, television critic Larry Bonko noted that in the ABC miniseries Storm of the Century, by the horror writer Stephen King, a fictional reporter makes the mistake of referring to Roanoke, Virginia, as the site of the Lost Colony. A Roanoke is not a Roanoke is not a Roanoke. . . .

Aside from the two pieces that have Roanoke-colonization connections noted on the “Bibliographic Checklist,” another article in the special issue of the World Wide Web-based journal Early Modern Literary Studies on Literature and Geography needs mention. Rhonda Sanford’s “Early Modern Cartographic Resources on the World Wide Web” is a useful general resource. It can be found at <http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/04-2/sanfinte.htm>.

A new World Wide Web journal on historic cartography has appeared. Mapforum.com comes out monthly and can be found at <http://www.mapforum.com>.

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