A Kingdom Strange

by James Horn

  6.4 John White, detail from A map of that part of America, now called Virginia, 1585-86 (engraving by Theodor de Bry, 1590) showing Albemarle Sound and the towns of Tandaquomuc and Metackwem. White’s settlers may have located themselves somewhere in this area after they left Roanoke Island in the fall of 1587.

  Possibly soon after White left, several of the colonists’ leaders set out with Manteo and a couple of dozen men in the pinnace to make arrangements with the Chowanocs for establishing a temporary settlement at a site near the entrance to the Chowan River. The Chowanocs had been allies of the English in the summer of 1586, and the settlers’ leaders hoped the Indians would see advantages in trading with the English or would view them as potential allies against hostile Iroquoian peoples to the south and west. Whether or not the English and Chowanocs negotiated a formal agreement to allow the settlers to build their settlement is unknown. But if the English did gain permission, they may have chosen a site close to the town of Metackwem, on modern-day Salmon Creek. This location would have offered a superb vantage point for keeping watch down the length of Albemarle Sound and allowed easy access to both the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers.26

  Before the main group left Roanoke Island, approximately two dozen settlers were transported to Croatoan Island. The exact number is uncertain, but it is unlikely that the Croatoans could have supported many more, especially during a time of drought and with winter coming on. The settlers left messages carved on prominent trees and posts at the settlement to tell White where they had gone. They assumed that White would return to Roanoke Island, go on to Croatoan to pick up the settlers there, and then make contact with the main group inland. The pinnace could probably carry up to forty passengers on short journeys without gear, but given that the settlers had to take all their possessions, they probably made two trips from Roanoke Island.

  Who went to Croatoan is also unknown. The group may have included families with young children, possibly Ananias and Eleanor Dare and their daughter, Virginia; Dyonis and Margery Harvey with their baby; and two other families with young children, the Viccars and Archards. Eleanor and Margery had given birth only a couple of months before and may not have welcomed taking part in the arduous work of building a new settlement on the Chowan River. Some single men probably also went to the island. They were probably well armed in case of attack by the Spanish or mainland Indians.

  The main group that went inland was likely made up of between 90 and 100 settlers. The group may have included several couples—Edward and Winifred Powell, Griffin and Jane Jones, Henry and Rose Payne, and Thomas and Audrey Tappan—along with most of the single men and women.

  Moving to the new location inland would have required all the boats as well as the pinnace. Again, several journeys would have been necessary to transport the settlers together with their weapons, equipment, and dismantled houses. Once they had prepared the ground at their settlement at the head of Albemarle Sound, the settlers could begin the job of constructing their new living quarters using the timbers and materials brought from Roanoke Island. With the help of the Chowanocs, they could have had the settlement substantially completed by late December and been able to enjoy their first Christmas in their inland quarters, hopeful that John White would be back in the spring with fresh supplies and settlers.27

  The settlers must have been worried and perplexed by White’s failure to return by the early summer of 1588. He had been gone for nearly a year, and they likely wondered what could have delayed him for so long. It is possible that around this time some of the settlers from the inland group went to Croatoan Island to confer with the settlers there. Some of those living with Manteo’s people may have decided that they would continue to wait and watch in case White returned. Others possibly opted to join the settlers inland.

  As the months turned into years, hope of White returning faded. Most of the settlers had probably resigned themselves to living with the Indians for the rest of their lives. When news reached the Croatoans of two ships (the Hopewell and Moonlight) passing by on their way to Roanoke Island in 1590, the settlers lit fires in a desperate effort to attract White’s attention—this was the “great smoke” seen by the Hopewell’s crew to the southwest of Kenricks Mounts—but White continued on to Roanoke. The settlers must have hoped the ships would return, but bad weather intervened, and White did not come back. Joy at the news of White’s long-awaited return quickly turned to bitter disappointment.

  After a few years the main group of colonists inland probably began to break up. Most of the settlers were single men, or if married to wives in England realized they had little chance of seeing them again. Some may have decided to marry into the Chowanoc people who had befriended them and stay at the head of Albemarle Sound, possibly joining local peoples of Tandaquomuc and Metackwem. Others may have gone upriver closer to the Chowanoc capital. Others still, perhaps dreaming of finding riches in the province of Chaunis Temoatan, may have begun exploring the Roanoke River and eventually settled down at Panawicke near Cashie Creek or moved farther inland to Ocanahonan, a Tuscarora town near the falls of the Roanoke River. Panawicke was known locally for its salt production (“salt stones”), and Ocanahonan was close to an important trading route that led northward and inland to the mountains beyond.

  6.5 Locations of Lost Colonists, 1608. Drawn by Rebecca L. Wrenn.

  The settlers probably dispersed into four main groups: those who went to live on Croatoan Island, those on the west bank of the Chowan River, those near Cashie Creek, and a final group at Ocanahonan. The English heard about all of these locations, initially from John White (Croatoan), and later from Smith and Machumps (the Chowan River, Panawicke, and Ocanahonan). Other than the Croatoan group, the timing of the settlers’ movements is impossible to determine, but it is likely that most of them had joined local Indian communities by the early to mid-1590s.

  The settlers lived peacefully with the Tuscaroras and Chowanocs for nearly two decades. By the early seventeenth century, the majority of settlers had spent the greater part of their adult lives with Indians along the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers. They had not forgotten their English background, but those who survived and lived in Indian communities would have by now thoroughly adapted to Indian ways. They spoke the Indians’ language and dressed like local peoples. The men would have hunted and fought, perhaps using their steel swords and axes, and the women looked after the fields and homes. Using their sharp metal tools they perhaps created copper ornaments, and they showed the Indians how to build houses with walls and an upper floor, like those they had built on Roanoke Island.

  Then a catastrophe overwhelmed them. Machumps had told Strachey early in 1609 that the lost colonists were killed by the Powhatans at the same time that Captain Newport was exploring the lower reaches of the Chesapeake Bay and the James River in April and May 1607. The Indian gave no details of the attack, other than that it occurred in South Virginia. Forty years later, however, a story picked up by a small group of English explorers led by Edward Bland may have stumbled upon what happened.

  In August1650, Bland and five companions, with two Indian guides, made their way into the interior of North Carolina. South of the Meherrin River, one of the major tributaries of the Chowan, the group halted on a path between two remarkable trees. One of the guides told the English that many years before the great chief Opechancanough had come to the region with hundreds of warriors and several chiefs to make war on the Tuscaroras and Chowanocs. Where Bland and his men had halted marked the place where the chief of the Chowanocs had been murdered by Parahunt, one of Opechancanough’s chiefs. Bland’s guide made no comment on whether the Powhatans launched other attacks against the Chowanocs following the chief’s murder, but it is possible that the killing initiated attacks on their settlements.

  Bland and his party then moved on to the falls of the Roanoke River, near Ocanahonan. A local Tuscarora guide who had joined them showed them a field three miles from the river where heaps of bones were piled up. He told Bland that one
morning Opechancanough and 400 warriors had treacherously slaughtered 240 Tuscaroras. The site of the killing, which Bland called “Golgotha,” was sacred to the Indians.

  The date of the raid is not given by Bland, and there are no references in his account to white settlers being killed. The attack on the Tuscaroras and Chowanocs could have been later, possibly in the period between 1616 and 1622, when Opechancanough became de facto chief of the Powhatans. Yet the similarity between the information Bland picked up in 1650 and Machumps’s report of the Powhatan attack is striking. Were the stories recounted by Bland’s Indian guides a distant echo of the tragedy that befell the lost colonists in 1607?28

  The settlers and their Indian kin were victims of fighting along an unstable border zone. In the broad scheme of regional rivalries, Opechancanough’s raid reflected deep-seated antagonisms among three major peoples vying for dominance, the Powhatans, Tuscaroras, and Chowanocs. Over the previous twenty-five years, Wahunsonacock and Opechancanough had aggressively expanded their territories to embrace much of Tidewater Virginia, but they were faced by powerful Iroquoian and Siouan peoples in the west and north beyond the fall line, and to the south their expansion was blocked by the Chowanocs and Tuscaroras.

  In addition, Wahunsonacock was concerned about the arrival of the Jamestown colonists. He may have wondered whether the Roanoke settlers would serve as go-betweens in forging alliances between the new English arrivals and Indian peoples that they (the lost colonists) lived with, potentially threatening his influence in the region and raising the possibility of peoples to the south and west of his territories allying themselves with the English.

  The chief’s power was based primarily on fear and control of prestige goods such as copper and highly prized European commodities. He could not allow the English to establish themselves in (or adjacent to) his dominions, where they might act as protector and benefactor of his own and neighboring peoples. Unwilling to take any chances of the Jamestown colonists joining forces with the Roanoke English, he ordered his warriors to track down as many of White’s colonists as they could find and kill them.29

  THE VIRGINIA COMPANY’S vision of a new colony stretching from the Roanoke to the James River was also a victim of war. Conflict with the Powhatans erupted in the fall of 1609 and occupied the English fully for the next five years, destroying any possibility of establishing settlements in South Virginia as well as the James River Valley. After the war ended in 1614, the discovery of a type of tobacco suited to English tastes that could profitably be cultivated in Virginia led settlers to turn away from stories of gold mines deep in the interior or the elusive passage through the mountains to the South Sea and focus instead on raising a crop that fetched handsome prices on the London market. No further effort was made to expand English settlement to the Chowan or Roanoke Rivers for forty years, and no more search parties were dispatched to look for the lost colonists. In the scramble for profits that characterized Virginia society for a decade and a half after the beginning of large-scale tobacco cultivation in 1616, Roanoke and England’s first colonists were forgotten.30

  THE MEN AND WOMEN of London and other parts of England recruited by John White to establish a colony in Virginia never reached the Chesapeake Bay; they never established a great city in Ralegh’s name or discovered gold mines in the distant province of Chaunis Temoatan. El Dorado did not lie in the mountains to the west any more than it lay in Ralegh’s Guiana, and there was no convenient route that would take the English to the South Sea and Cathay.

  The lost colonists could not have guessed the adversities faced by White that prevented him from returning. When he failed to come back with supplies and reinforcements, they turned to local peoples for help and lived peacefully with them for nearly twenty years. How many survived the calamity of Opechancanough’s attack is unknown. According to Machumps, seven (four Englishmen and three Anglo-Indian children) were protected by a powerful chief, Eyanoco, an “enemy to Powhaton.” They were highly valued workers who beat his copper at Ritanoe, which lay in the mountains deep in the interior. But others, mentioned by Captain John Smith, also escaped and lived with Tuscarora peoples at Panawicke, Ocanahonan, and Pakerakanick, where they had built their “walled” houses like those of the English. They blended into Indian communities, making their homes and raising families with peoples they had found when the English thought them lost.31

  EPILOGUE

  RALEGH’S SHIP

  In 1700 a footloose Londoner, John Lawson, bent on traveling overseas, met by chance a gentleman who had lived many years abroad. The man persuaded him that “Carolina” was the best country in the world to visit, and so, finding a ship in the Thames ready to depart for America, Lawson made arrangements to take passage.

  Following a long voyage that lasted three months, Lawson arrived in New York in August and after a two-week layover boarded his ship to complete the voyage to Charleston. On arrival, he was pleasantly surprised by the city. It was well laid out between two rivers and had fair streets with many sturdy buildings of brick and wood. Trade with Europe and the West Indies was flourishing, and the people were prosperous. The colony, he considered, was probably more valuable to Britain than any of the other mainland provinces, with the exception of Maryland and Virginia.

  How Lawson occupied himself during his first few months in Charleston is unknown, but in December he was appointed by the colony to make a survey of the interior of Carolina. Shortly after Christmas, he embarked on a journey of more than 500 miles with five Englishmen and four Indians to explore the country and gather botanical specimens, which he intended to send back to England. He hoped his exploration and collection of specimens would make him eligible to become a member of the prestigious Royal Society, which was dedicated to the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

  Lawson’s party left Charleston on December 28 and traveled up the Santee River by canoe and on foot, pushing through swamps of cane and cypress until they reached the higher ground of the piedmont. They continued to head north and west, passing through beautiful rolling country where they encountered many different Indian peoples, each with their own distinctive culture: the Santees, Waxhaws, and Catawbas. In the final week of January 1701, they entered North Carolina and headed north and then east, traveling through the fertile lands of the Saponis, Occaneechees, and Tuscaroras. Eventually, toward the end of February, Lawson crossed the Neuse River and completed his journey at the plantation of Richard Smith on the Pamlico River.

  Lawson chose to stay in North Carolina and built a house on the Neuse River, near an Indian town called Chattoka (the future site of New Bern). He continued to undertake surveying work and over the next eight years traveled widely throughout the province. Sometime after 1705 he became deputy to the colony’s Surveyor General, Edward Moseley, and in the spring of 1708 was appointed to succeed Moseley in that position.

  Lawson prospered in North Carolina. He laid out land holdings for the new town of Bath on the Pamlico River, established a grist mill in the town, and became clerk of the Court of Bath County. In 1709 he returned to London to arrange the publication of his description and natural history of the province. Besides his epic journey of 1700-1701, he recounted his recollections of places he had visited and stories he had heard during the previous few years.

  One story in particular stood out in Lawson’s mind. On a visit to Roanoke Island, he had seen the ruins of an old fort as well as “some old English Coins, which have been lately found; and a Brass-Gun, a Powder-Horn, and one small Quarter deck-Gun, made of Iron Staves, and hooped with the same Metal.” More than a hundred years after the English had departed, the site was still littered with debris left behind by Lane and White’s settlers.

  But Lawson had an even more astonishing story to tell. A group of Hatteras Indians (Croatoans), who either lived on Roanoke Island or often visited it, told him “that several of their Ancestors were white People, and could talk in a Book, as we [the English] do. . . . The truth of which,” he added, “is confir
med by gray Eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians, and no others.” The Indians thought highly of themselves because of their kinship with the English.

  Then the Indians recounted a story that had been passed down the generations. They told Lawson “that the Ship which brought the first Colonies [colonists], does often appear amongst them, under Sail, in a gallant Posture, which they call Sir Walter Raleigh’s Ship; And the truth of this has been affirm’d to me, by Men of the best Credit in the Country.”

  Lawson had discovered the great- and great-great-grandchildren of the settlers who had gone to live on Croatoan Island in the fall of 1587. They had waited patiently for John White to come back, keeping watch for English ships on the distant horizon. But no ship came—only Ralegh’s ghost ship, which from time to time could still be seen plying the treacherous waters off the North Carolina coast.1

  Chronology

  1480S Earliest voyages of English mariners to North America.

  1492-1493 Christopher Columbus claims the West Indies for Spain.

  1497 Voyage of John Cabot to Newfoundland in the service of Henry VII of England.

  1502 Large-scale Spanish settlement of Caribbean begins.

  1509 Accession of Henry VIII. Sebastian Cabot’s voyage to North America.

  1513 Ponce de León explores the coast of Florida.

  1517 Martin Luther’s challenge to the Catholic Church heralds the Protestant Reformation.