Historical Narrative - The Lost Colony of Roanoke

Quite frankly, we had little-to-no knowledge of the lost colony of Roanoke until doing some general research about mysterious moments in history.  As it turns out, anytime people go missing, the search and remaining questions are generally very tantalizing—even when it’s only one person. When it’s an entire colony that’s gone missing, the intrigue is even greater. The frustrating thing about Roanoke is that the historical details and answers about the case are relatively minuscule compared to the gravity of the situation.  Understandably, the details are sparse because this happened in 1590; if something like this were to happen in 2017, creating a detailed and accurate narrative around 115 missing people would be perhaps an easier task.  However, a surprising advantage in writing the script with little historical answers is that it left reasonable room for creative liberty with the events.

While liberty was taken with the script, the historical references that were used were extremely helpful in creating more realistic settings, and plausible events for the characters. For example, in the script, Odessa and his teammates are inexplicably attacked by natives. While perhaps seeming dramatic, this is something that actually happened to voyagers trying to find the lost colony (https://books.google.com/books?id=_2Kt4KZIlwIC&pg=PA50#v=onepage&q&f=false) . Furthermore, research helped in writing more plausible outcomes for what happened to the lost colony of Roanoke, and created more compelling motives behind the colonists decision to leave Roanoke. For example, after researching the subject heavily, it’s reasonable to assume that the colonists may have felt that they were “left to the wolves” so to speak; especially as they were left without supplies or support for close to three years—all done in the name of colonialism (https://www.nps.gov/fora/learn/education/the-john-white-colony.htm). Although it’s not indicated anywhere that there was resentment felt by the lost colonists of Roanoke, it becomes a reasonable emotion once we understand the backstory.

In creating this script, we found that collaboration was pretty difficult - we both lead busy lives and the only time we really are able to see each other is on campus during our actual class time, so we put a considerable effort in trying to figure out how to coordinate. Because neither of us knew a lot about the lost colony of Roanoke, our time was spent primarily doing research, but we were eventually able to figure out how to divvy up responsibility. The plot was originally Trevor’s idea, so he wrote much of the dialogue, and Nicole made sure that the details and setting was all realistic to the time. We both worked hard to ensure historical accuracy, both in word and in description, and we feel that the end result was as close to the situation in 1590 as we could get! This project was exciting because while we were able to learn much about history, we also were given much room to provide our own interpretation of the event - allowing for much imagination as we pieced together clues from history and created our own version of what we thought might have happened. Historical fiction is a wonderful genre, and we loved having the opportunity to write a narrative in this fashion. Here is our narrative on the Lost Colony of Roanoke, entitled, “Just a Man.”