A LOST COLONY.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXV, Issue LXV, 15 November 1913, Page 9

A LOST COLONY.

"So far as I can make out/ writes Mr Cunningham Terry, -in Blackwood's : Magazine for September, "there is only one place in our . civilised Englishspe^ 7 ing world where the old Saxon eroi. . r 13 in daily, if not hourly, use. The n!v;d;;l is as old ac—nay, identical with —that used in the Battle fof Hastings; arid the queer people who use i# are most expert bowmen, being able tot split a grain of ccni at a distance of thirty feet. Can any modern archer© beat such -a record as this? —one to which the writer personally bears witness." The people who are able to perform this-almost incredible feat are the Croatian Indians of North Carolina, described by the author as pure Indians in color and bearing, numbering some four thousand in all, tall and straight as lances-, Chaucerian in speech (saying; "hit" for "it," and "hqsen" 'for "hose"); grey-eyed sometimes, but oftener having the flaxen hair and azure eyes of their remote Saxon ancestry. Sometimes a flaming red shock of hair is seen, reminding one irresistibly of Kipling's Najfigay Doola and1 his "Wearing of the Green. " What makes them especially interesting, however, is the suggestion, supported on some strong evidences of language and tradition that "They are \ the descendants 'of Raleigh's 'Lost Colony of Roanoke, 3 intermarried and intermingled / with the .purebred Indians of Roanoke, * yet • after an epoch of nearly 350 years so Saxon in many of their ways, speech, and bearing, as to 'confound and dismay' the rare visitor adventuring into- , Robeson County of North Carolina,, where they live, move, and have their proudly-isolated being." It will be remembered" that a group of white Eskimos in the Polar regions have lately been identified as the descendants of Scandinavian adventurers who disappeared in Viking time*, and' if Mr Cunningham Terry is right he has added still another "lost tribe to* the abundant romances of history..