For over 400 years a simple patch hid a very important detail on John White’s “Virginae Pars” map, and some historians are now hopeful that it could provide valuable clues to the whereabouts of the “Lost Colony,” a 16th-century settlement that disappeared without a trace. The story of the map’s hidden fort quickly spread past the scholarly arena and was picked up by  the mainstream news. We asked William C. Wooldridge, author of our forthcoming Mapping Virginia: From the Age of Exploration to the Civil War, to share his thoughts on this discovery and what it might mean.