2000, MJF book, NY, pages 30-47

The second half of this excellent 362 page book swings back and forth from North America to England and on the terrible Atlantic in a search for the fate of the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke. This book is so good on its every page and so valuable for people reading on the period, I will go ahead and ruin the mystery for you.

There was no lost colony. They were marooned, “fooked good and proper,” dropped off in a marsh surrounded by Indians that had previously been attacked by a military expedition, all so that their Sponsor, Sir Walter Raleigh would lose his charter to Virginia, and the scumbag Virginia Company [whose investors paid off the navigator who committed this crime] could start its slave plantations on the Chesapeake, instead of Raleigh’s Puritans starting a new life there.

Some of these colonists were among the first interracial slaves in North America, whites held by Indians for life as copper workers and sex slaves. What I would like to focus on in this review of Miller’s book is his depiction of Elizabethean London, a septic tank of human vice that provides the moral compass for the HBO mini-series Game of Thrones and provided the human material for the American Colonies.

Let me limit my coverage of Miller’s work here to a brief selection of some of the quotes that he pulled from the period as to how some of the more thoughtful Londoner’s of the day saw themselves. First, consider that one palace in London consumed more livestock than the entire Portuguese nation, and you might have a clue. It seems like a cross between the worse aspects of industrial China, Manhattan, Washington D.C. and Hollywood, all rolled into one.

“ …from the highest to the lowest, from the priest to the popular sort is caught up in money.”

“Claw a churl by the arse, and he shitteth in thy hand.”

“…lawyers, they go rustling in their silks, velvets and chains of gold…”

“…in most contemptuous manner murmured against Him [God], saying that He did shit saffron, therewith to choke the market.”

Lawyers, stock brokers, scammers, pirates, slavers, beggars, a place called Smart’s Quay where thieving is taught as a course of study, amidst a sea of slums surrounded by a countryside so denuded by ecological strip-mining that barely a cart of wood can be gathered to light fires. A new world to denude is needed, a place to ship the starving and the poor.

Miller says it with just the right touch, “There is widespread belief that the world has gone mad. That the disintegration of English society is at hand. There is a meanness to the times. A self-indulgence. And a corruption. Too much wrong.”

“This is the world the colonists left behind.”

Roanoke is one of the primary sources for Stillbirth of a Nation, a book that superbly sets the stage for the English experience in America.