Searching for Virginia Dare

In 1587 America's first English child was born in a remote island wilderness. They named her Virginia Dare. Soon after her birth, Virginia and more than a hundred men, women, and children disappeared, leaving a cryptic message carved on a tree. What became of that infant girl and her people, now known as the Lost Colony? In search of an answer, Marjorie Hudson wanders the back roads of North Carolina and Virginia in an aging Dodge Caravan with a satchel of research notes and a head full of memory and imagining. Amazed by abandoned farmhouses wrapped in kudzu, the Great Dismal Swamp "dripping with spotted snakes," the bones of the Jamestown colony, and the living nation of the Lumbee, Hudson discovers an epic story more complex and more deeply moving than she ever imagined. Weaving research and interview, memory and imagination, Hudson's tale is a spellbinding journey, an invitation to deep mysteries that lurk in the history of America and in ourselves.