Fantastic Metropolis

Which is exactly what Raleigh wants to give them. After all, while it’s easier to attract flies with honey than vinegar, if you want the flies out of your way afterwards you poison the honey. The Roanoke colonists rescued by Drake are the bait, but the ones deposited under White’s command are the trap. Raleigh knows the Spanish want the colony to fail, of course, and that all the armed conflict in search of the fabled copper mines, the possible treachery of Fernandez in encompassing the accidental attack on the Croatoan, it’s all part of the plan. Raleigh intends full well for the colony to be destroyed, its people absorbed by local tribes or enslaved by the Mandoag. Oh, he wants the lore of the tobacco plant, yes. But he also wants to break the hold the natives have on their own territory… in effect, to change the name of the land by the introduction of a new, foreign element. The land absorbs the colony as though it were never there. And the colony is now an ineffable part of the land itself. The myth begins, the kernel of Gloriana/Avalon planted by calling this new land Virginia now begins to germinate. And all Raleigh had to do was yield five score Englishmen and women into death or slavery at the hands of the Mandoag.

It seems likely that the mistaken attack on the Croatoan was intended to rile them up enough so that, when the colonists vanished, suspicion would travel there way. Indeed, the Mandoag may well have attacked in the guise of the Croatoan themselves, to shift the blame away and divert any searches for the lost colonists… never realizing that what they’d made away with was poison sugar, and while this colony did not thrive, others were coming… and the spirits of the earth and sky and water would now be deceived into thinking that English men and women and children belonged on this soil, and would not oppose them. In one shot, Raleigh found the magical power of the nature spirits once known by the cocaine mummies to oppose the Spanish Armada and cleared the way for the new Avalon to be erected on new soil. Fertile soil where grew the trees that gave power. The School of Night dreamed the land. Spenser and Raleigh gave the dream form. Hariot mapped the dream’s contours. And the Mandoag bit deep into the poison apple of Roanoke Island, and spit the tainted seeds onto the Croatoan, twice betrayed.

Betrayed by the Shepherd of the Ocean, who abandoned his sheep to ravening wolves.

Discuss this and other heresies at Matthew Rossi’s message board.

Matthew Rossi is the author of Things That Never Were (MonkeyBrain, 2003). He has work forthcoming in Peter Crowther’s Postscripts magazine, and a new collection of essays, titled Bottled Demons, will be out next summer from Prime Books.