“…[It] pleased Almighty God to send unusual sickness among them, as the smallpox, etc. to lessen their numbers.”

-John Archdale, South Carolina

In his investigation into the particulars and personalities of the doomed Roanoke Colony, Lee Miller surpasses his brilliant expose on the gutter of European morality that was London England, the rancid womb from which the pirates of West Indies legend and the slave masters and human cattle of the American Colonies issued forth in all of their fecund misery and moral savagery.

A favorite of The Queen, Sir Walter Raleigh, explored the Carolina coast and planted a small military mission on the barrier island of Roanoke, which was never intended to be more than a listening post on the Spanish. He then got a charter to plant a colony in the Chesapeake Bay.

Enter two characters right out of a Robert E. Howard story, Lord Richard Grenville, who was made to sit out the defeat of the Spanish Armada due to a slight. One of the things about Lee’s story is that it focuses on the era of the Armada and shows that the vaunted fleet never had a prayer. The Spanish really could not deal with English squadrons at sea. Now, when they got a small ship on its own, then you end up with characters that have back stories like Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane, surviving the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition, being a galley slave, etc. Such a character was, like Solomon Kane, one of Lord Grenville’s men, an Irish POW named Darby Glande who was captured and forced to serve as a soldier twice by the English, was enslaved as a galley slave by the Spanish for seven years and eventually, winning his freedom somehow, went to work for the Spanish as a soldier in Cuba and Florida. There was another tragic adventurer, a poor English sailor who was marooned after a sea battle off the Mexican coast and walked to the Atlantic in the Virginia country, being well-treated by the Indians.

Fortunately, this fellow did not have the misfortune of running into the Indians that Grenville’s captain of soldiers, Lane, a savage survivor of the Irish wars, had terrorized the year before the doomed colonists where marooned at the very place where he had murdered an Indian chief, and left 10 men to spend the winter, ten men who got in a small boat and made their way to England.

There is so much adventure and so many clues to what was, what was buried, what truths were lied about, what might have been, and what had to come to pass to found the reeking pit of moral dismay that was Virginia—the meanest use for an unspoiled place and of luckless men ever conceived.

From the joy of infecting helpful natives with disease so that they may be punished for not being Christian, to the marooning of an innocent band of puritan families and a few luckless Irishmen forced to soldier for the materialistic ambitions of the Whore of Nations in the same wilderness where innocent Native women and children where once slaughtered to satisfy one obscure mercenary’s mania, only to have Captain John Smith discover the whereabouts of the survivors and declare them dead so as not to discourage investment in the Virginia Company, Roanoke is a jaw-dropping look at a 400 year old lie finally exposed to the uncaring light of day. For the world that looks on now, after Lee Miller finally got to the truth, is every bit as vile and repugnant and uncaring of the truth as the wicked men who first claimed these shores in the name of a diseased nation whose only virtue was that the rancid cleft of its virgin queen had not been further infected toward the cause of regal procreation.

I cannot recommend Lee Miller’s Roanoke highly enough. Reading the end notes alone are a genuine pleasure.