Book review: The Secret Token

The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of RoanokeThe Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke by Andrew Lawler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My sister knows me well. About a month ago she sent me a news article about the possibility that at least one of the controversial Dare stones might be real. If so it would solve one of the oldest mysteries of American history: what became of the famed Lost Colonists?

Lawler’s book is the clearinghouse for all of the recent Roanoke Colony research and lore, including the most recent archaeological efforts and the discovery of a hidden inland fort on one of the 16th century maps of the region. He also doesn’t shy away from the more controversial items like the Dare stones.

I learned some new things as well, most intriguingly that in addition to the famous 115 colonists (possibly) lost to Croatoan, another wave of inadvertent colonists may have been lost as well. After a 1585 raid on the Spanish colony of Cartagena, Sir Francis Drake made for the new Roanoke colony with African, South American, and Ottoman Turkish captives. The Turks were likely repatriated but it’s suspected that the Africans and South Americans were simply left to fend for themselves in what became North Carolina. The origins of immigration to what became the United States were evidently multicultural from the beginning.

Which is where the most interesting part of Lawler’s book comes in: modern fascination with the fate of the lost colonists (and which colonists count as “lost” and why) speaks to the very definition of who we think of as “American”. Highly recommended.

View all my reviews

fairies don’t exist…or do they?

The Cottingley SecretThe Cottingley Secret by Hazel Gaynor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Apropos that 1) this should come out on in the centennial of the hoax* and 2) that I should be reading it this year as well (I’ve been on the library wait list for a while and my turn finally came around).

I first learned of the Cottingley Fairies through “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World”. This book is a delightful speculation about how the hoax came to be and a study of how a seemingly innocuous prank can go wildly out of control.

The two timelines are easy to follow – I admit I preferred the historical one to the present day one, but they intersected nicely. (view spoiler)

*Frances Griffiths really did maintain to the end that “…there were fairies up there, or there were then. There aren’t now.” (ACCMW [YouTube] 19:17)

View all my reviews