[Gutenberg 58403] • John Vytal · A Tale of the Lost Colony

Excerpt from John Vytal a Tale of the Lost Colony

NO epoch in American history is more essentially romantic than that in which, for a few years, less than one hundred colonists from England lived on the island of Roanoke, off the coast of old Virginia. Nevertheless, although the history of our continent, from the landing of Columbus to the end of the Span ish-american war, has been exhaustively exploited in fiction, the pages dated 1587 - 1598 seem to have been left unturned. Yet the life of the Roanoke colony contained not only adventure, hazard, and privation in a far greater degree than the maturer settlements of later years, but also an underlying emblematical element, and in its end an insoluble riddle. In being thus both mystical and mysterious, it paramountly inspires romance.

The mystery has filled many pages of history, but always as an enigma without solution. The fate of the colony is utterly unknown, historians of necessity relegating it to the limbo of oblivion.

Bancroft, for one, concludes his account of the colonization thus.

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