Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter
Volume 2.1 (November 1994)

Popular Culture and the “Lost Colony”

In addition to the highway marker dedicated to the bestselling historical novelist Inglis Fletcher noted below, a few other interesting sightings of popular culture with Roanoke Island colonization and “Lost Colony” connections have recently appeared.

The British Broadcasting Company’s mystery series Lovejoy produced an episode entitled “The Lost Colony” which aired in the United States on the Arts and Entertainment cable channel September 11. The episode revolves around documents and artifacts in both England and America supposedly connected with Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1580s exploration and colonization expeditions.

Also of note in popular culture, the 1995 Sprint/Carolina and Sprint/Centel-North Carolina telephone books will feature a photograph from the 1994 production of Paul Green’s The Lost Colony on its cover. Inside the directory will be a cover story on the play. One of the largest in-kind donations ever given to the Lost Colony, the marketing value of the cover and story is estimated at $370,000. Sprint/Carolina and Sprint/Centel-North publish 41 phone directories that are circulated in 71 North Carolina counties.

In a different vein, the Elizabeth II, the replica of a late sixteenth-century sailing vessel which is normally docked at the Elizabeth II State Historic Site in Manteo, was taken up the Albermarle Sound and the Scuppernong River to be part of the Columbia, North Carolina, Scuppernong Festival. In its third year, the Scuppernong Festival furthered its Roanoke colonization connections by having Barbara Hird present Ira D. Wood and Lebame Houston’s one-woman show about Queen Elizabeth I, Elizabeth R, which was also presented as part of the 1993 Roanoke Decoded symposium.

In fact, Hird’s production of Elizabeth R (directed by Houston) has had quite a run lately. The show was brought to the Chowan College campus in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, during November, and is scheduled to be presented on the East Carolina University campus December 7.

Finally, the myth of the White Doe, a Native American legend about Virginia Dare, the first child born to English parents in the North America, is retold as part of Gerald Hausman’s Tunkashila: From the Birth of Turtle Island to the Blood of Wounded Knee (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1993). The myth has been retold before, the best known rendition being Sallie Southall Cotten’s The White Doe: The Fate of Virginia Dare, an Indian Legend (1901), but mainly from a European American perspective. Hausman uses a distinctly Native American point of view. He tells the Chesapeake people’s story of how Virginia Dare, having been turned into a white fawn, is hunted by the Hatteras people with a silver tipped arrow left behind by the English colonists.

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