Lawler came to his interest in Roanoke the same way so many in the outer reaches of historiography come to their obsessive interests: Childhood. Lawler grew up in the area and attended the annual performance of the play The Lost Colony and visited historic sites associated with Roanoke. He says that the story had become the greatest mystery of his childhood and one that has haunted him ever since.
The first few chapters of The Secret Token provide a straightforward account of the Roanoke settlement, in most respects little different from any other volume on the subject, save the author's talent for casting events in a dramatic yet factual light. But I am not as comfortable with his effort to diversify Roanoke and absolve himself of criticism that he is interested only in "white" history by accepting (with only minimal qualifications) the allegation popular on the internet and in lost colony mystery literature that Sir Francis Drake left hundreds of Black and Turkish slaves near Roanoke to form a second, larger, and stronger colony.
After giving an account of the fall of the Roanoke colony. Lawler begins describing centuries of efforts to find it, beginning with the first forays in the 1500s. Thankfully, he chooses to take a skeptical approach to the many claims made for the attempted rediscovery of the lost colony, beginning with his conclusion that a supposedly blond-haired boy seen in 1607 was actually an albino Native American and not the genetic legacy of the colony, a conclusion he deems probable based on Native American albinism rates, which are roughly a hundred times higher than for Europeans. He also correctly notes that underneath centuries of searching for a lost white colony, Native Americans of the region told a consistent truth: That the colonists who survived joined their ranks, lived out their lives, and died among them.
I'll be dead honest, here. As an amateur historian, it angers me a little to find a major new release from an award-winning author and one of the largest publishers in the world so riddled with obvious errors and evidence that the writer skimmed over the surface of the literature without tracing ideas back to their sources.
The book, though, does best when it returns to the author's strenth: Reporting. A long middle section explores the history of archaeological research in and around the Roanoke colony site, primarily from the 1980s onward. Here Lawler is working with material he is more comfortable with, including interviews, field trips to sites, and research in modern reports. In his element, he crafts a vivid and interesting account of the exploration and excavation of various features and elements in the Roanoke area.
The final section of the book was both the most interesting -- and makes the book worth the price. To be honest, I think this section should actually be its own book. In it, Lawler explores the intersection of racism and the Lost Colony story, particularly how elements of the story have been used to craft a narrative of whiteness and white Americans' right to control former Native American lands. Lawler finds fascinating evidence of how Virginia Dare, the first European born in Virginia, became a symbol of the whitening of America and of European-American hegemony -- basically a more genteel form of "white power".
The book concludes, as all twenty-first century historical investigations must, with DNA and the attempt to find the Lost Colony living on in the genomes of Native Americans and Englishmen. His ultimate conclusions about where the Lost Colony ended up I will leave for you to discover for yourselves, but don't expect either great revelations or shocking surprises.
Overall, The Secret Token is an engaging, readable survey of the Roanoke mythology and its modern use. Even if it's a bit dodgy in places on its historical research.
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I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.