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JOHN VYTAL
John Vytal
A Tale of
The Lost Colony
BY
WILLIAM FARQUHAR PAYSON
New York and London
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1901
Copyright, 1901, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
“He was one of a lean body and visage, as ifhis eager soul, biting for anger at the clog of hisbody, desired to fret a passage through it.”
Thomas Fuller
Foreword
No epoch in American history is more essentiallyromantic than that in which, for a few years, lessthan one hundred colonists from England lived onthe island of Roanoke, off the coast of old Virginia.Nevertheless, although the history of our continent,from the landing of Columbus to the end of the Spanish-Americanwar, has been exhaustively exploitedin fiction, the pages dated 1587-1598 seem to havebeen left unturned. Yet the life of the Roanokecolony contained not only adventure, hazard, andprivation in a far greater degree than the maturersettlements of later years, but also an underlyingemblematical element, and in its end an insolubleriddle. In being thus both mystical and mysterious,it paramountly inspires romance.
The mystery has filled many pages of history, butalways as an enigma without solution. The fate ofthe colony is utterly unknown, historians of necessityrelegating it to the limbo of oblivion.
Bancroft, for one, concludes his account of thecolonization thus:
“The conjecture has been hazarded [by Lawson and others]that the deserted colony, neglected by their own countrymen,were hospitably adopted into the tribe of Hatteras Indians, andbecame amalgamated with the sons of the forest. This was thetraditi