When I was around five years old, my great Uncle Vic and Aunt Sue (my mother’s aunt) moved back from Florida to live in a house next door to ours. Though he was only related to us by marriage, Uncle Vic quickly became a family favorite.
Born in 1908 in Buxton, NC, he was a charming man with a dirty mouth and a century’s worth of stories to tell.
My favorite stories were those of his time in the US Coast Guard. As I grew older, I became more interested in my family’s connection with the Coast Guard and more intensely with its predecessor, the United States Life Saving Service.
This organization consisted of men in stations up and down the coastline who would row out into storms in the pitch black of night, among two-story swells, to save people in sinking ships. Uncle Vic’s father, Urias B. Williams, was in the USLSS and even awarded with the Silver Life Saving Medal for rescuing the crew from the German steamer, Brewster.
These amazing rescues have largely been forgotten. I made it one of my life’s goals to tell the untold story, in film or television format, of the real life superheroes that made up the United States Life Saving Service.
Even though that project is still far off in the future for me, last year I began shooting a documentary that is partially scratching that itch.
North Carolina is not only home to heroic stories in history, legends like Blackbeard the pirate, and ghost stories galore. It’s also home to America’s oldest mystery — the “The Lost Colony” of Roanoke Island.
A few years ago, I started following the work of Hatteras-based author and historian, Scott Dawson. Scott and I made fast friends after I reached out on Facebook and I saw he was filled with a similar passion to tell his family’s story. Scott, like many Hatteras Island natives, is from Croatoan descent — a Native American tribe from the island of Croatoan, or modern-day Hatteras. The story that I (as well as any other North Carolinian) always heard was that this first attempt at an English colony in the “New World” vanished and were never found.
In 1587, when they were in at risk of starvation, Governor John White sailed back to England to restock supplies. Because of politics, war, and storms, White was not able to get back to Roanoke Island until three years later. He instructed his colony of over 100 people, including his daughter and newborn granddaughter, to leave a note carved in a tree of the place they relocated, if they found themselves having to, and to leave a symbol of a cross if they left under attack.
When White returned in 1590, the colony was indeed gone and the word “CROATOAN” was carved into a tree, with no symbol of a cross. He wrote in his log that he was happy they made it safely to Croatoan, where the tribe of their friend Manteo lived. John White’s ship almost wrecked on an attempt to make it to Croatoan and the pirate captaining it refused another attempt, forcing them back to England. No English came back to this area for another 100 years and history holds the colony and its whereabouts as lost forever.
Scott Dawson, as well as almost every Hatteras Islander, knows that isn’t true. They see the Native American features in their faces; they hear the stories passed down through the generations about their Croatoan grandparents.
Like me, Scott set out to tell an untold story of American history. He and a group of local archaeologists, along with a team from the University of Bristol, have been digging near Buxton, NC, over the past eight years. They invited me down last year to document their annual dig. My team had exclusive behind-the-scenes access that previously had only been granted to the likes of Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic.
What they are finding down there is beyond exciting. I’m not allowed to completely say, because they haven’t published their findings yet. But I can say that they are finding 16th Century English artifacts among Native American artifacts in the right layers of earth for the time period of the Lost Colony.
Something hit me when I was down there. We all know about Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, but if we prove that the English colony went to Croatoan (Hatteras), settled and assimilated with the natives, then we have the chance to prove that there wasn’t a mystery after all. This could actually change early American history as we know it. That would be pretty amazing for two country boys from eastern North Carolina.
I didn’t know what I was getting into following Scott. I just knew it was a unique opportunity for a filmmaker and I had to follow my gut. I found myself in a position to really uncover some truth — not just about history, but about people and culture.
I thought about my family growing up on that island 100 years earlier. I thought about if they knew Scott’s family, or even if they were part Croatoan themselves. This wasn’t the story I set out to tell, but it might be the one I was meant to.
One day, running out to get some food at Conner’s Supermarket in Buxton, I drove past a road sign that caught my eye so much I had to turn around. When I pulled back up to it, I parked on the side of the road and looked at a sign that read “Urias B. Williams Rd.”
I knew right then I was in the right place and on the right journey.
Picture via Rain Bennett
Rain Bennett is a two time Emmy-nominated filmmaker, fitness professional, public speaker, and writer. His mission is simple: to help people realize that they too can be great, no matter where they come from or what they start with. It just takes passion, persistence, and a plan.
Bennett directed and produced his first feature length documentary in true indie fashion by traveling the world with only a backpack and a Canon DSLR camera. That film, Raise Up: The World is Our Gym won “Best of the Fest” at the Hip Hop Film Festival NYC and received global distribution through Red Bull Media House. He’s been featured in publications like Men’s Health and Sports Business Global and is a regular contributor to Breaking Muscle. When he’s not making movies or training clients at Sync Studio in Durham, he’s hosting a new webseries called The Perfect Workout Show.
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