Irina Shapiro - The Lost Colony

Natalie

October

Looking back, we can generally pinpoint the moment when our life took a pivotal and irreversible turn, but when it happens, unless its a jarring event that changes everything overnight, the fateful day is no different from any other. There are no ominous portents, no nagging feeling of unease, no clear warning that something momentous and possibly disastrous is about to occur.

The day I took a critical turn started just like any other Sunday. I got up at my usual time, went for a run in Thompson Park, came back, and took my coffee and bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmonmy Sunday indulgenceto the couch to enjoy while I checked my email and social media. I responded to a few emails, checked my bank balance, and then logged in to Facebook to see what my friends were up to. After ten minutes, I concluded that everyone I knew lived a more exciting life, and was about to log off when a sponsored ad caught my eye.

I never pay attention to ads, and never buy anything off Facebook, but this one piqued my interest. Not only were the graphics eye-catching, the image depicting a stark, almost abstract stretch of coast in shades of muted green, blue, and gray, but the ad seemed to be speaking directly to me.

Love history?

Think you could survive in the 17 th century?

Varlet Entertainment is seeking

15 fearless adventurers to star in a groundbreaking reality series.

First prize $1,000,000

Second prize $750,000

Third prize $500,000

All runners up will receive a cash prize of $50,000 for their participation.

Beneath the ad was a button, urging me to Learn More. I should have just ignored the siren call of that button and carried on with my day, but something inside me responded to the challenge. I had always been a history buff, particularly the colonial period, since my family could not only trace its roots back to the very inception of the Virginia Colony but was in possession of a personal account from an ancestor that detailed his experiences upon arrival in Jamestown in 1620. Captain Thomas Osborne was the romantic hero of my childhood imaginings, a dashing Tudor daredevil who had braved an Atlantic crossing three times on his ship, Bona Nova , before eventually settling in the New World and throwing his lot in with a mail-order bride he had not met until shed set her dainty foot on the jetty of the fledgling colony.

Thomas and Elizabeth Osborne had had half a dozen children, but only two sons had survived into adulthood and went on to establish a branch of the family that had played a part in every significant event in American history. I had pored over Thomass battered, calfskin-bound journal when I had studied the colonial period at school and often wondered if I would have the strength and the courage to survive the harrowing conditions that Thomas had described so matter-of-factlyor to reinvent myself the way the Osbornes had been forced to do when the political and social climate of the country changed every few generations, and viewpoints that had been acceptable only a few years before had become untenable if the family hoped not only to survive but to flourish in the newly emerged landscape.

The Osbornes had gone from struggling settlers to plantation owners to abolitionists, and then later on to wealthy industrialists who had summered in Newport and attended grand balls in the gilded mansions of New York Citys entitled elite. The stock market crash of 29 and the Depression had robbed the family of its generational wealth, and the wars of the twentieth century had thinned the ranks of Osborne males, but the family had survived, and the accounts of those long-ago ancestors had lived on and made for fascinating reading for a girl who was obsessed with history and had developed something of a survival complex as a result.

So, when the ad asked if I thought I could survive in the past, my inner voice cried, You bet!

I should have logged off Facebook, thrown in a load of laundry, and gone to a hot yoga class before meeting my friend Jenny for lunch to discuss her latest romantic disaster and my own lack of promising prospects, but instead, I found myself filling out an application for a reality series aptly titled Jamestown . After all, what was the harm, and what were the chances that I would be selected? Id probably never even hear back, much less make the cut. I completed the application, looked over the information, and clicked Submit.

And that was the day my life changed forever.