At least with The Lost Colony play, I can (or should) lay aside historical scruples and enjoy the damn show. More on that later, but I should have no trouble anticipating that Roanoke Island Festival Park will deliver competent historical interpretation and visitor services to support the story of Walter Raleigh’s 1580s voyages to Virginia. You know that since I’m blogging this, I was sorely disappointed.
I am at the beach with thirteen of my family and we went out to Roanoke Island Festival Park last Tuesday. Full disclosure requires that I tell you that I worked at the Elizabeth II for a summer in 1995 and subsequently for North Carolina Historic Sites for two years. But this critique is through the eyes of a visitor accompanying a large family from out-of-state who basically know nothing about the history involved.
The Roanoke ventures are important in early America for they marked the beginnings of English expansion into the western world. The geopolitical context—Spanish dominance of the Atlantic world and Native Indian political strategy—shaped the experience of the colony, meant to be a military outpost on the periphery of the Spanish Main. The failure of the Roanoke colony (and the previous failure of the Frobisher Colony in the Northwest Passage) ended official English royal attempts to establish a North American presence. Only a generation later and under the auspices of private companies did permanent settlements take hold in Virginia, Massachusetts Bay, and Barbados. The point here is that the Roanoke voyages are an exceedingly interesting historical story
But they have an even larger appeal as a highly attractive part of the national memory. The Lost Colony aspect is romantic, and appeals to the history as mystery mindset that feeds on basic cable’s exploitation of oddball and unsubstantiated stories as true history. Virginia Dare as the alleged first English child born in the future United States also contributes to the romance.
Anyhow, we arrive and purchase tickets at eight dollars a head. The ticket seller provided no information on what to do next. Was there an orientation film? Where do we enter? Should we visit the museum first? What else do we need to know? Because I am most familiar with the living history side of the site, I dragged the family there first. We walked through an unattended gate. Seriously, what is the point of paying an entrance fee if we could wander in and out at will? This frustration was enhanced by the fact that it turned out to not be worth the price of admission. We walked down the path and passed two unattended and worn out looking displays—one of a partially worked dugout canoe, and the other a set up of Sixteenth Century “games” consisting solely of the same hoop-and-stick you see at every other historic site no matter what the time period.
Finally wandered into the settlement site and were approached by an interpreter who seemed more interested in making us laugh than in explaining what was actually going on. The youngest in our group, a nine year old, was thrown into a foot-operated lathe and a wood workers bench with a spoke shave. When done, I asked him what he was making and he just said, “I don’t know.” The rest of us were similarly regailed with half-interested stories of food trenchers and bowling games.
On to the ship! Two or three lethargic interpreters aboard the ship, one wearing modern glasses, wearily informed us of the quartermaster’s room and the captain’s room. One of them (and some of you may know him) made a rather caustic remark about the nine year old that was really rather funny but rubbed the mother the wrong way. We left the living history area utterly uninformed about the three expeditions that made up the Roanoke colony. One member of my group remarked how it all seemed rather unserious.
This all, I think, violated every rule of effective first person interpretation. Orientation from the very beginning is necessary, especially when entering a first-person interpretive area. Tell us that we are about to enter 1586 and this is how the interpreters will be acting/reacting. The interpreters have to take care that their lessons about lathing wood or stoking coal eventually relate to the larger story of the site. And interpretation shouldn’t be based on making humor out of the time-period differences between the visitor and the interpreter. I think this was the worst living history interpretation I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot. This is in part because I should expect better from North Carolina Historic Sites. I was embarrassed to bring my family there after representing RIFP as a quality historical experience. It was a joke.
Back at the entrance, a ticket taker had appeared but was busy texting. I took the admission sticker off my shirt and walked in and out of the entrance just to see if she noticed. She didn’t. Anyhow, we went into the museum exhibit. I’ve had problems with them before so I’ll spare you. But I did notice one or two additional label misidentifications and whatnot. This would be the ideal place for explaining the broad outlines of the Roanoke colonies, the dubious Virginia Dare claim (and her subsequent veneration by generations of white supremacists), and confronting the often wild speculation on the fate of the Lost Colony. But, no. It is a history of Roanoke Island, which is entirely warranted and necessary, but at a site dedicated to the Roanoke voyages, leaving the larger and more popular questions unaddressed is breach of good museum practice.
You can pass this off as my usual critical crankiness, but I’m not the only one who has had this experience.
The Lost Colony production, while fraught with historical goofiness and fiction, is a good application of visitor services, including appropriate orientation, and interested and engaging interpreters, all well before the play actually began. The Lost Colony itself is an interesting cultural artifact. First produced in 1937, it encapsulates a folk vision of early America as a place of renewal and the dreamscape of democracy and manifest destiny. Whatever. The part that really got to me is the interpretation of Native Americans. Scenes of their ritual ceremonies contained quite a bit of modern dance and the Indian dialogue amounted to “White Man. Must. Leave.” Some of the costuming for the Natives is admirably based on the John White drawings and Powhatan’s mantle, but they have larger issues they need to deal with.
