Having decided to base my fantasy world, loosely, on Roanoke, I then had to go into the details. First question was, should I actually use Roanoke? There were pros and cons, but ultimately I decided to use an entirely fictional colony. Trouble is we know a little too much about Roanoke. It’s a famous lost colony, sure, but there is a lot of evidence that bad things happened to the real colony.
But I didn’t need the actual Roanoke Colony, just something like it. Was that plausible? Could there have been other lost colonies during the early 1600’s? A little research shows that it is actually quite plausible. The political climate of the day made English colonization of the new world technically illegal, so ‘off the books’ colonization attempts were quite plausible. There’s been some debate about whether the missions we know about, like Frobisher’s journeys, were colonization attempts or not. A few ships getting ‘lost’ back then wouldn’t exactly have been headline news. More like business as usual. Some day I’ll get into the details of the fictional lost colony attempt, but as background it makes perfect sense. We know ships traveled to the new world and not everyone made it. We know ships got ‘lost’ in the Bermuda Triangle along the way. Why not take the next logical step. Some of those ‘lost’ colonists made it to somewhere else.
There are actually a number of interesting stories running around in antiquity about mysterious people going back and forth across the Atlantic. Thor Heyerdahl’s work proved the ancient Egyptians could have made it. There are odd stories about bearded white men arriving in ancient times in South America. And I still don’t think we know exactly where Vineland is.
So when you read “Path of the Magi” you should recognize the (human) cultures that are around. Norse, Elizabethans, Spaniards, Dutch, Roman and even pre-Columbian south American cultures are represented. Could the Magi have made it over as well? Why not. We know they were travelers. Who knows where else they went.