A Kingdom Strange

by James Horn

  33 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 187-189; and Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 63.

  34 Quinn, The Roanoke Voyages, 1: 416-417, 422-23, 428; and Sloan, New World, 112-113.

  35 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 189-191, 416; and Quinn, New American World, 3: 330.

  36 For the fortifications and earthworks on Puerto Rico, see Sloan, New World, 100-103; and Morison, European Discovery, 633-636, 655. The design of the fort and layout of the settlement on Roanoke Island are conjectural. See Ivor Noel Hume, The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Towne: An Archaeological Odyssey (New York, 1994), 30-33, 37-43; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 57- 61, 75-82, 379-412; and Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 210; 2: 790-791, 903-910. Pedro Diaz, a Spanish pilot captured by Grenville on the Santa Maria de San Vicente in September 1586 and taken back to England, provides the only description of the fort: “a wooden fort of little strength.” Its exact location is unknown. Traditionally, it has been associated with the National Park Service site at Fort Raleigh, near the northeastern tip of the Island. The First Colony Foundation, a private not-for-profit organization, is currently conducting archaeological investigations on Roanoke Island to locate the original fort and the settlement of the lost colonists.

  37 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 263-264; Quinn, New American World, 3: 330; and Wright, Further English Voyages, 175.

  38 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 197-210.

  39 My assumptions about what Manteo and Wanchese might have seen during their stay in London in 1584-1585 are based on Alden T. Vaughan, “Sir Walter Ralegh’s Indian Interpreters, 1584-1618,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 59 (2002): 346-348; and Oberg, Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, 51-55. The attitudes and opinions attributed to Manteo, Wanchese, and Wingina are speculative.

  3. “Chaunis Temoatan”

  1 David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1584-1590, 2 vols. (London, 1955), 1: 169-170; and Irene A. Wright, ed., Further English Voyages to Spanish America, 1583-1594 (London, 1951), 12-14. A ducat is here valued at roughly 6s. 4d. See John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600- 1775 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978), 99. Susan Ronald estimates that £1 in 1599 would be worth approximately £130 today (which suggests 40,000 ducats represented more than £1.6 million or $3 million). The Pirate Queen: Queen Elizabeth I, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire (New York, 2007), xviii.

  2 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 217-222; and David B. Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, 5 vols. (New York, 1979), vol. 3, English Plans for North America, The Roanoke Voyages, New England Ventures, 294. Much of the gold, silver, and pearls probably ended up in the hands of Ralegh, Grenville, the queen, and high-ranking ministers and investors.

  3 Whether or not John White returned to England in August 1585 is a matter of debate. Most historians have assumed he remained in the colony, but there is no evidence that he did. His name is not included in the list of colonists who stayed after Grenville’s fleet left, and he does not appear in any of the existing documents for the period down to June 1586, when Lane abandoned the colony. The theory that he had to be in the colony to draw the map of the region, including the entrance to Chesapeake Bay, on the expedition of 1585-1586 is mistaken. Any competent surveyor or his assistant could have made the necessary measurements and sketches, and White, it should be remembered, was a painter, not a surveyor. The absence of any paintings of Indian peoples or towns by White after the initial exploration of July and August 1585 implies that he was not present for the entire year. Kim Sloan, A New World: England’s First View of America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 44; and Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 2: 515. For White’s paintings, see Paul Hulton, America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984); and Sloan, New World, passim.

  4 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, vol. 1, 108. Eleanor White was married to Ananias Dare at St. Clement Danes on June 24, 1583.

  5 David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), 106-108; and Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 257-258, 286-287. The leader of the expedition is identified subsequently only as “the Colonel of the Chesepians.” It is assumed the expedition sailed on the pinnace and probably included a couple of dozen men. Given Amadas’s experience of sailing the pinnace during the earlier exploration of the Albemarle, he would have been Lane’s likeliest choice for command. While staying near Skicóak the Englishmen were visited by several chiefs of adjoining territories, the Mangoaks, “Tripanicks, and Opossians” (the latter possibly the Nansemonds and Warrascoyacks), which suggests a good deal of interest in the strangers. Thomas Hariot may have acted as an interpreter, taken measurements along the way, and recorded information about their discoveries. Much of this material was lost when the colonists abandoned Roanoke Island in June 1586.

  6 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 278, 378-381; Michael Leroy Oberg, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians (Philadelphia, 2007), 79- 80. A comet passed over the Outer Banks sometime between mid-October and mid-November 1585.

  7 Oberg, Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, 78-83.

  8 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 265-266. The linguistic and cultural affiliation of the Moratucs, a lesser people inhabiting the lower reaches of the Roanoke River, cannot be determined with certainty; they may have been Algonquian or Iroquoian. See Quinn, The Roanoke Voyages, 2: 871-872.

  9 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 259-261.

  10 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 263-264, 268-270.

  11 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 264-272. The approximate extent of the Tuscaroras’ territory is described in Douglas W. Boyce, “Iroquoian Tribes of the Virginia-North Carolina Coastal Plain,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger, 282 (Washington, D.C., 1978).

  12 Pemisapan/Wingina’s “conspiracy” is described at length by Lane, perhaps in an attempt to justify his actions. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 275-288. Michael Oberg suggests that the plot was probably more imagined than real, arguing that Skiko was the source of much of the intelligence about Pemisapan’s plans, and he may have been settling an old score with the Secotan chief for trying to turn the English against his father and the Chowanocs. See Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, 81-100.

  13 Whether or not the Mangoaks were involved in the conspiracy is open to question. See Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 125.

  14 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 288. Lane says Stafford was on Croatoan Island, but almost certainly he was stationed at the southern end of Hatarask, or possibly on the high dune at Kenricks Mounts about midway along the Island. See Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 133-134.

  15 The classic English account of the West Indies voyage is Walter Bigges, A summarie and true discourse of Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian voyage (London, 1589), in Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage, ed. Mary Frear Keeler, 210-277 (London, 1981). For Spanish accounts, see Irene A. Wright, ed., Further English Voyages to Spanish America, 1583-1594 (London, 1951), xxxiii, 16-202. An excellent recent history is Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (New Haven and London, 1998), 240-249. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 294-306; and Paul E. Hoffman, A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century (Baton Rouge, LA, 2004), 256 (orig. pub. 1990).

  16 Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 136.

  17 Keeler, Drake’s West Indian Voyage, 272-273; William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth Late Queen of England, ed. Wallace T. MacCaffrey (Chicago, 1970), 210; and Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 291-292, 308.

  18 Three men who were inland were left behind. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 289-294, 307; and Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 138.

  19 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 312-313; Keeler, Drake’s West Indian Voyage, 41-44; and Kelsey, Drake, 278-279.

  20 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 465-480, 494; 2: 787-792; and Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 140-147. Pedro Diaz, a Spanish pilot captured by Grenville, later testified before Spanish authorities that he had been forced to acco
mpany Grenville on the abortive voyage of 1586. He said the reason the English had settled on Roanoke Island was “because on the mainland there is much gold and so that they may pass from the North to the South Sea, which they say and understand is nearby; thus making themselves strong through the discovery of great wealth.”

  21 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 273-275.

  22 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 2: 761-765. Jean Ribault established Charlesfort on Parris Island, South Carolina, in 1562, but the site was abandoned by the French two years later in favor of a new location farther south on the St. Johns River, which was named Fort Caroline. Santa Elena was established by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1566.

  23 Zacatecas, Mexico, was in fact some 1,800 miles overland from Santa Elena. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North American History (New Haven and London, 1992), 70-71. Charles Hudson, The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-1568 (Washington, D.C., 1990); David B. Quinn, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements: The Norse Voyages to 1612 (New York, 1975), 271-275; David B. Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, 5 vols. (New York, 1979), vol. 2, Major Spanish Searches in Eastern North America. Franco-Spanish Clash in Florida. The Beginnings of Spanish Florida, 543-544, 546, 548; and Georgia Archives, Mary L. Ross Papers, folder 44, item 16, ff. 12-15. Tales from previous Spanish expeditions, notably those of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Hernando de Soto, also contributed to the rumors about gold and precious gems in Florida’s interior that circulated in Europe, but Pardo’s expedition was the last significant Spanish effort to penetrate inland and offered specific details about the location of mines.

  24 William P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 121 and map 8.

  25 Cumming, Southeast in Early Maps, 118-120 and map 7; Paul Hulton, “Images of the New World: Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues and John White,” in The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480-1650, ed. K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, 209, 213-214 (Liverpool, 1978); and R. A. Skelton, “The Le Moyne-De Bry Map,” in The Work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, a Huguenot Artist in France, Florida, and England, ed. Paul Hulton, 1: 45-54 (London, 1977). English maps from the early 1670s are more explicit and show the southwestern course of the Roanoke River that Lane and Hariot described; see, for example, the maps of John Locke (1671), John Lederer (1672), John Ogilby and James Moxon (ca. 1672), and John Speed (1676) in Cumming, Southeast in Early Maps 159, 161-163, 166-167; maps 65, 68, 70, and 77.

  26 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 317-337, 382-383. Hariot mentioned that Indians had told him about grains of silver found in rivers in the mountains but was careful to avoid sensationalism. He made no reference to gold or gems.

  27 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 273; and Hoffman, New Andalucia, 299.

  4. A City on the Bay

  1 David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1584-1590, 2 vols. (London, 1955), 1: 204, 322-323, 381, 493-494; and David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), 243-245, 250. The Spanish did not acknowledge English claims to Chesapeake Bay or any other part of North America. Espejo’s expedition explored New Mexico and Arizona and returned with exaggerated claims about the region’s potential. See David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, 1992), 79.

  2 Raleigh Trevelyan, Sir Walter Raleigh (New York, 2002), 100-102; and Robert Lacey, Sir Walter Ralegh (New York, 1973), 104-107. Nicholas Canny, “Raleigh’s Ireland,” in Raleigh and Quinn: The Explorer and His Boswell, ed. H. G. Jones, 91-97 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987).

  3 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, vol. 1, 387; vol. 2, 835. Hariot also planned to prepare a “Chronicle,” a chronological sequence of events, but it was never published and subsequently disappeared.

  4 Liza Picard, Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London (New York, 2003), 148-155, 230-243; Jeremy Boulton, “London 1540-1700,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 1540-1840, ed. Peter Clark, 315-346 (Cambridge, 2000); A. L. Beier, “Engine of Manufacture: The Trades of London,” in The Making of the Metropolis: London, 1500-1700, ed. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay), 153-159 (London, 1986); Susan Ronald, The Pirate Queen: Queen Elizabeth, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire (New York, 2007), 38- 45; Adrian Prockter and Robert Taylor, The A to Z of Elizabethan London (London, 1979), viii-ix; Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 46-51; Rosemary Weinstein, Tudor London (London, 1994), 36-49; Penryn Williams, The Later Tudors, England 1547-1603 (Oxford, 1995), 162-175; Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), 69; A. L Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London, 1985), 40-47; and John Stowe, The Survey of London (New York, 1956), 374-381, for the spread of suburbs.

  5 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 494; vol. 2, 506-512, 539-540, 571; William S. Powell, “The Search for Ananias Dare,” in Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection, ed. E. Thomson Shields and Charles R. Ewen, 62-65 (Raleigh, NC, 2003); and Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 262-264.

  6 Anyone researching the English backgrounds of the lost colonies owes an enormous debt to the pioneering work of William S. Powell, and more recently to lebame houston and Olivia A. Isil. I am grateful to Ms. houston for generously sharing her unpublished research with me and to Dr. Susan Shames of the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for her invaluable research and advice. Colonists’ places of origin were derived from the online International Genealogical Index of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They were cross-checked against parish records and printed sources such as the Harleian Society, volumes 1-81, and Joseph Lemuel Chester, ed., Allegations for Marriage Licenses Issued by the Bishop of London, 1520 to 1610 (London, 1887). Manuscript parish records were checked at the London Metropolitan Archives, the Guildhall Library, and the City of Westminster Archives in London. At the Outer Banks History Center (OBHC), Manteo, North Carolina, are several dozen boxes of materials relating to research undertaken in London archives by houston and Isil as well as unpublished materials by Powell. See also William S. Powell, “Who Were the Roanoke Colonists?” in Raleigh and Quinn, ed. Jones, 51-67; Powell, “Who Came to Roanoke?” in Searching for the Roanoke Colonies, ed. Thomson Shields and Ewen, 50-61; and Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 2, 533, 539- 543, 793. The findings put forward here, however, are tentative and should be treated with caution.

  7 William S. Powell, “The Search for Ananias Dare,” in Searching for the Roanoke Colonies, ed. Shields and Ewen, 62-65. John Dare was born to Ananias and Eleanor sometime between 1584 and mid-1586. Thomasine Dare, “the daughter of Ananias,” was buried at St. Clement Danes on March 13, 1588/1589. See St. Clement Danes Parish Register, burials, 1558-1638/39, OBHC, microfilm. She is assumed to have been their child. In the same register were the baptisms of John and Elizabeth Whyte in 1584 and 1585, son and daughter of John. It is uncertain whether they were children of John White, the artist.

  8 Powell, “Who Were the Roanoke Colonists?” in Raleigh and Quinn, ed. Jones, 55, 57-58, 61, 63-64; and Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, vol. 2, 539, 541. An Anthony Cage, of Grays Inn, gentleman, married Dorothy Rudstone, spinster, on April 17, 1572. See Chester, Allegations.

  9 Mary Frear Keeler, ed., Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage (London, 1981), 16-17, 69, 269; and Powell, “Who Were the Roanoke Colonists?” in Raleigh and Quinn, ed. Jones, 55.

  10 David Quinn first raised the possibility that some of White’s colonists may have been Puritans more than twenty years ago, but historians have generally ignored the suggestion. See Set Fair for Roanoke, 260-261. For the Puritan movement in London from the 1550s through the early 1580s, see Patrick Collinson, “The Puritan Classical Movement in the Reign of Elizabeth I” (PhD diss., University of London, 1957), 34-169; and his subsequent The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), 84-85, 113-121, 152; H. Gareth Owen, “The London
Parish Clergy in the Reign of Elizabeth I” (PhD diss., University of London, 1957), 471-549; and Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), 407, 462, 635, 637, and passim. J. G. Nichols, ed., The Chronicles of the Grey Friars of London, Camden Society, o.s., 53 (1852), 54-57; John V. Kitto, ed., St. Martins in the Fields: The Accounts of the Churchwardens, 1525-1603 (London, 1901), 177-178, 298; and William Henry Overall, ed., The Accounts of the Churchwardens of the Parish St. Michael Cornhill in the City of London from 1456-1608 (London, 1871), 150-152, 170. “St. Clement Danes, Churchwarden Accounts, 1557-1575,” 3 vols., City of Westminster Archives, London, microfilm 370.

  11 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 159-316; Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (London, 2003), 382-389; and Penryn Williams, The Later Tudors, England 1547-1603 (Oxford, 1995), 476-481.

  12 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1: 490-491; 2: 513-515; E. G. R. Taylor, ed., The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 2 vols. (London, 1935), 2: 214, 216; David Harris Sacks, “Discourses of Western Planting: Richard Hakluyt and the Making of the Atlantic World,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624, ed. Peter C. Mancall), 446-452 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007; and Trevelyan, Raleigh, 5, 9-15,166-167.

  13 Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 2: 516; John L. Humber, Backgrounds and Preparations for the Roanoke Voyages, 1584-1590 (Raleigh, NC, 1986), 38-39; and Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 264-268. The Lion may have been the same ship that accompanied Grenville on the 1585 expedition. It was the same size as the Susan Constant, which carried seventy-one passengers and crew on the 1607 Jamestown voyage. The numbers of settlers on the three ships is speculative, but given the size and purpose of the vessels, it is unlikely to be far off the mark.

  14 Williams, The Later Tudors, 252-258; and Alison Plowden, Elizabeth I (Sparkford, UK, 2004), 363. The Babbington plot is described by William Camden in The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth Late Queen of England, ed. Wallace T. MacCaffrey (Chicago, 1970), 226-237. In recognition of his services in uncovering the plot, Ralegh was rewarded with Babbington’s extensive estates throughout the Midlands and Lincolnshire.