by Teresa Flavin |John White's map of Roanoke| Over the past
month, two map-related stories caught my attention, partly
because they had the words lost and mystery in their headlines.
I'm fascinated by human settlements described as ghost or
abandoned and have a huge fondness for maps, especially
illustrated ones. As a young schoolgirl growing up in New
England, I spent a lot of time drawing and colouring in maps of
historical colonial territories. My classmates and I made
endless maps of the ever-changing borders, choosing colours for
French, Spanish, Dutch and English possessions. We mapped many
wars and explorers, battlegrounds and Native American tribes.
But colourful as many of these people and events were, none
captured me as much as the story of the lost sixteenth-century
colony of Roanoke Island. In 1587 Sir Walter Raleigh, who had
been granted a charter from Queen Elizabeth I to establish a
permanent North American colony, dispatched a group of settlers
(the first to include wives and children) to Ch