Belief in this Carolinian Panama played a central role in leading the English to the Outer Banks sixty years later. You could argue that the American colonies and the United States are based on a single cartographic blunder.

To die is tragic, but to go missing is to become a legend, a mystery. “Wander off the stage of history and leave only a moving target,” writes novelist Charles Frazier. That is why Roanoke exerts such a powerful attraction and why it draws those of us harboring—and who doesn’t?—that quiet fear of getting lost ourselves.

would deliver him safely home; he was never seen by Europeans again. The anxious colonists soon moved south

All this supernatural activity concentrated in one out-of-the-way place is a sure sign that there is something deeper and darker at work than mere historical curiosity or the natural desire to solve a persistent riddle. Our fairy tales are about losing our way in the enchanted forest.

D. H. Lawrence might have been speaking of Roanoke when he wrote that American soil “is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons.” No wonder we’ve turned it into our little island of horrors.

The Lost Colonists seem ordinary in a way that makes them more familiar than the incompetent gold-obsessed gentlemen of Jamestown and the sanctimonious Pilgrims who banned Christmas celebrations.

Myths cast spells that cannot be broken by facts. They operate in the background, like a computer program hidden deep in a hard drive. Their job is to help us get our bearings in each age, as Aeneas did for Rome and King Arthur still does for Britain. That’s why Roanoke does for America what Jamestown and Plymouth cannot. There simply aren’t enough