The famous "lost colony" of Roanoke Island, North Carolina, has a lot of myths built up around it. How could a colony of 115 people just disappear?
Much of our thinking about this 16th-century event comes from 19th-century accounts. Science writer Andrew Lawler brings 21st-century analysis to the vanished English colony... and explores the possibility that the colonists just took up with local natives and never looked back.
That's the thrust of The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. The author pays a visit to The Exchange.