From there, however, the Virginia Council’s instructions became indecipherable other than to say that Ocanahonan was south from Manqueock, and that Pakrakanick was beyond Ocanahonan. It is evident from these references, at least, that Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick were south or perhaps south-southwest of Winocke/Oenock and Manqueock/Mongoack respectively. The specific sites of Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick will prove to be less important, however, than the fact that they were located a considerable distance west of the Carolina fall line. The documentary evidence demonstrates that Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick were located somewhere towards the western portion of the North Carolina Piedmont region, and this will be a key factor in identifying the “men cloathed” and the “howses built as ours.”
The location of Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick well into the Carolina Piedmont puts a new light on the information Smith and Strachey obtained from the Powhatans and suggests a very different conclusion about the “men clothed” there: they were not Englishmen.
Long before the first Roanoke voyage in 1584, Spanish and French explorers had been venturing through what is now North and South Carolina. By 1526 Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón had explored the Cape Fear River and established the short-lived settlement of San Miguel de Gualdape, probably at the mouth of the Pee Dee River. In 1540 Hernando de Soto explored present-day Georgia and South Carolina and reached the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. As mentioned earlier, in 1562 Jean Ribault built Charlesfort, named after French King Charles IX, on what is now Parris Island, South Carolina.
The most fascinating expeditions—and the most illuminating for the topic at hand—were led by Spanish explorer Juan Pardo, who led two excursions through the Piedmont of present-day North Carolina to the Appalachian Mountains between December of 1566 and March of 1568. After reinforcing the village of Santa Elena by constructing Fort San Felipe in 1566 (at the site of the abandoned French Charlesfort), Pardo led an expedition of 125 men northward into the Piedmont of present-day North Carolina, stopping at many villages along the way. In January 1567, the Spaniards reached Joara, the thriving Indian center of commerce. With the consent of the principal chief, Joara Mico, they built Fort San Juan, the first European settlement in the interior of North Carolina, predating Raleigh’s first Roanoke voyage by seventeen years. Because of its favorable location at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains and its nearby salt mines, Joara was in its day a major Indian crossroads and trading center. With Pardo’s military backing, Joara Mico extended his regional dominance even further.
Pardo expanded Spanish sovereignty as well, retaining his base at Joara and claiming additional territory for Spain. He constructed several forts in the Piedmont, as well as southward toward Santa Elena, which was hoped at the time would become the capital town of the Spanish territories in La Florida. Pardo’s plan was to establish part of an inland route that would eventually reach Zacatecas, Mexico, by which the Spanish could transport the precious metals they hoped to find, without the threats posed by French and English ships along the coast.
What is particularly revealing is that along his route from Santa Elena into the present-day Carolina Piedmont, Pardo’s men taught the natives how to build wooden houses and grainaries to be used exclusively by the Spanish. Each house was to be kept supplied with corn by the local chiefs or caciques, and the Indians were strictly prohibited from entering these houses without permission from the Spanish. Those villages that could not provide the requisite amount of corn would be obliged to supply deerskins and, lacking that, salt. As directed, the Indians built these houses at various locations, which served as chain of way stations for the Spanish. If necessary, some of the corn could be transported southward to resupply the fort and settlement at Santa Elena.
Another very notable and relevant fact is that the houses built by the Indians for the Spanish were elevated, and the storage rooms for corn were built on the second story.15 The narrator of the Pardo expeditions wrote of “elevated houses” and “two elevated rooms” and “a good new wooden house and inside it an elevated room with a certain quantity of maize” and “a new house of wood with a large elevated room full of maize which the cacique had built by the command of the captain for the service of His Majesty.”16 The diagram below shows the names and approximate locations of the many villages along the route of Pardo’s expeditions17 where houses with elevated rooms were built by the Indians for the Spanish.
What Machumps related regarding the existence of “howses built as ours … and one story above another” at faraway places to the south would have been especially enticing to Strachey. The same kind of two-story houses with corn lofts were built at Jamestown after the arrival of Sir Thomas Gates and his Bermuda castaways, including Strachey, in 1610. Ralph Hamor wrote of Jamestown, “The Towne [Jamestown] it selfe by the care and prouidence of Sir Thomas Gates … is reduced into a hansome forme, and hath in it two faire rowes of howses, all of framed Timber, two stories, and an vpper Garret, or Corne loft high.”18 It is easy to understand how Strachey would have jumped to the hasty conclusion that the clothed people who taught the Indians to build these structures must have been Raleigh’s Lost Colonists. Machumps’ description was quite accurate; the Indians were taught to build two-story buildings with elevated lofts for maize. They were taught, however, by Pardo’s Spaniards and not by any Englishmen.
Locations of the villages where Indians built houses with elevated storerooms for Pardo’s Spaniards (courtesy Michael Gayle).
When word of a possible French attack at Santa Elena reached Pardo at the end of February 1567, he started back to Santa Elena and arrived in early March. Six months later Pardo and a force of about 100 men headed back to the North Carolina Piedmont, and during the journey they were fed from the storehouses the Indians had built for them. Pardo stopped at Tacoe (near present-day Asheville) and at Cauchi (near Marshall) before traveling into East Tennessee, where he found some of his men besieged by Indians. During Pardo’s absence the Indians had turned against the Spanish garrisons, and Pardo eventually returned to Santa Elena. By 1568 the Spanish had vacated the Carolina Piedmont.
Stories about these strange intruders and their activities in the present-day Carolinas spread far and wide over the Indian trading routes and were the source of all the fragments of information told to the Jamestown colonists about “men cloathed,” “howses built as ours,” and “people with short Coates and Sleeves to the Elbowes” at places to the south called Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick. It is now evident that it was the Spanish, not the English, who taught the Indians to build those houses with second-story granaries.
There are other clues as well which demonstrate both the impact of the Spanish on the Siouan Piedmont tribes and the extent to which the Spanish presence had become part of the native oral traditions. In a 1654 letter from Francis Yeardley to John Ferrar of the Virginia Company, Yeardley wrote that a Tuscarora Indian had described “a great nation called the Haynokes (the previously discussed Winocke), who had valiantly resisted the Spaniards‘ further northern progress.”19 Obviously, nearly a century later, memories of Pardo and his men were even known among the Tuscarora, the Iroquoian tribe that dwelt on the inner Coastal Plain east of the fall line.
During Lederer’s visit to Oenock he “took particular notice of small Wheels serving for this purpose [counting] among the Oenocks, because I have heard that the Mexicans use the same,”20 another indication of Spanish influence to the north of the Carolina Piedmont. The Oenocks also planted “an abundance of Grain” according to Lederer, and had storehouses which were large enough to “supply all the adjacent parts.”21 In 1916 Frederick Olds, a colleague of Samuel A’Court Ashe and “father” of the North Carolina Museum of History, wrote that the Eno/Winocke were allied with the Siouan tribes and “had well-built houses and barns, in which they stored grain and other supplies.”22
There is clear evidence of Spanish influence as far north as the Indian village of Sara, perhaps 60 miles from the Virginia border (see Lederer’s map). Upo
n leaving Oenoke, Lederer traveled fifty-four miles to the southwest along the east slope of the mountains, passing Shakor and Watary until he reached Sara. “Sara,” Lederer wrote, “is not far distant from the Mountains, which here lose their height, and change their course and name: for they run due West, and receive from the Spaniards the name of Suala.”23 The historical record is clear: It was these Spaniards—not a handful of imagined Englishmen—whose influence prevailed throughout the Piedmont of North Carolina in the 16th and 17th centuries.
There is one reference in the Jamestown accounts indicating that the English had concluded that Ocanahonan was indeed a Spanish settlement. On page 110 of Smith’s 1624 Generall Historie he made mention of “Ocanahowan … where they report are Spaniards inhabiting.” Smith’s line was borrowed from Hamor’s A True Discourse, which had been published in 1615 and included a report about five Jamestown mutineers who attempted to escape to a “Spanish plantation” at “Ocanahoen.” This may well explain why all of Smith’s references to the “men cloathed” and two-story dwellings at Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick in his True Relation, the source of so much earlier speculation about the Lost Colonists, were completely absent from his later Generall Historie.
All of this points convincingly to the conclusion that Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick are completely irrelevant to the Lost Colony or its fate. The Powhatan Indians were not relating old stories of Englishmen who had gone from Ocanahonan to Pakrakanick, but of Spaniards and their activities through the Carolina Piedmont. And of course they certainly had not originally come “from Roonock” as the author of the Zúñiga Map inaccurately assumed.
Cartographer John Speed’s 1676 map is included below for reference purposes. This map, based heavily on Lederer’s 1669–70 expeditions and Ogilby’s 1674 map, was one of the earliest attempts to map the Carolina interior. While not geographically perfect, Speed’s map was the most accurate to date. Inserts for Jamestown, the fall line of the James River, Oenock, Akanatzy, Sara, and the Cape Fear River have been added to show their relative locations.
As mentioned earlier, Powhatan’s servant “Weinock” often traveled to Oenock, where “howses are built as ours” and which, according to Strachey, was “ten daies distant from us.” According to the map’s legend (not shown here) Weinock’s trip from the falls to Oenock would have covered about 240 miles, or twenty-four miles per day, a seemingly realistic estimate for an Indian travelling over familiar routes. Again, this map uses the contemporary English compass orientation, so Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick would have been located “at the foote of the mountains,” as Strachey noted, some distance to the left of Oenock. Note also the location of Oenock in relation to the Cape Fear River, which was called Clarendon River at that time. Since we know that Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick were south (left) of Oeneok at the foot of the mountains, that would seem to place them some distance west (up) from the Cape Fear River and well into the present-day North-South Carolina Piedmont where Pardo led his expeditions between 1566 and 1568.
The locations of Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick would have been near the foot of the mountains south of Oenock and west of the Cape Fear River on this portion of John Speed’s 1676 “Map of Carolina.”
The Jamestown-era references to Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick had everything to do with the Spanish, and nothing whatsoever to do with the English. Opechancanough, Wahunsunacock, and Machumps told the Jamestown colonists stories they had heard of clothed men and oddly built houses at distant places called Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick. It was only Smith’s imagination that suggested the clothed men were English and remnants of the 1587 Lost Colony. That erroneous conclusion represents the 2nd institutionalized assumption which has impeded Lost Colony theory for more than 400 years. Likewise, Strachey’s claim that it was the Lost Colonists who taught the Indians to build European-style houses was nothing but an extension of Smith’s baseless conjecture. Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick are completely irrelevant to the Lost Colony narrative.
15
The “Men Apparalled” at Pananiock/Panawicke
1607–1608
Although Smith and Strachey misinterpreted the information related to them by the Powhatans about the “cloathed men” at Ocanahonan and Pakrakanick, which had no relevance at all to the 1587 Lost Colonists, the same cannot be said of Pananiock and Panawicke. There is a good chance that the report of “apparelled” men at Pananiock and Panawicke may have been a legitimate reference to the 1587 colonists. Pananiock and Panawicke, it will be seen, were two names for the same place, and its location had been known to the English since 1584.
As previously cited, notations “B” and “C” on the Zúñiga Map both refer to Pananiock. Notation “B,” written next to “Pananiock” was, “Here the King of Paspahegh [Wowinchopunck] reported our men to be and wants to go.” As already mentioned, Notation “B” parallels a passage in Smith’s A True Relation regarding an arrangement made with the Paspahegh chief in January of 1608: “We [Smith and probably Newport] had agreed with the king of Paspahegh to conduct two of our men to a place called Panawicke, beyond Roanoke, where he reported many men to be apparelled.”1 Also mentioned in the previous chapter is the discrepancy between the location of the “appareled” men in A True Relation—Panawicke—and that on the Zúñiga Map—Pananiock. It is clear from the context of these passages that both names refer to the place to which the Paspahegh chief had agreed to guide the English, and therefore “Pananiock” on the Zúñiga Map undoubtedly refers to the same location as Smith’s “Panawicke” in his True Relation.
Notation “C,” written next to “Warraskoyack” reads, “Here [the king of] Paspahegh and 2 of our own men landed to go to Pananiock.” Notation “C” simply identifies the starting point, Warraskoyack bordering the James River, for the planned expedition to Pananiock (or Panawicke). For reasons that are not clear—according to Smith, the Paspahegh king [Wowinchopunck] was a “villaine … deluding us for rewards”—the trip was never completed. As mentioned, Wowinchopunck “returned within three or foure dayes after without going further.” As will be seen below, the failure to complete the trip to Pananiock may have been a missed opportunity to learn about the Lost Colonists.
As to the location of Pananiock, it would seem from Smith’s brief reference alone that Pananiock had to be somewhere to the south of Roanoke. Smith wrote in A True Relation that Pananiock (Panawicke) was located “beyond Roonok, where he [the Paspahegh chief, Wowinchopunck] reported many men to be apparelled.” Since Smith was writing about Pananiock/Panawicke from his location at Jamestown, it would seem that “beyond Roonok” was intended to mean that the location of Pananiock/Panawicke was beyond Roanoke from Jamestown, that is, somewhere to the south of Roanoke. The Zúñiga Map, as confusing as it may be, seems to corroborate that much at least.
Nevertheless, for more than a century various opinions have been put forward asserting other locations for Pananiock. As far back as 1890 Stephen B. Weeks declared in his published paper that Pananiock “is the name given to the territory known to the earlier explorers as Dasamonguepeuk,”2 which was the village on the coastal mainland immediately west of Roanoke.
Samuel A’Court Ashe, in his 1908 History of North Carolina, wrote that Pananiock was located near the mouth of the Moratoc and Chowan Rivers at the western end of present-day Albemarle Sound. Although it is difficult to see how the placement of Pananiock on the Zúñiga Map could support such a location, Ashe wrote, “The Indian account [as he referred to the Zúñiga Map] places Pananiock, where White’s colony settled, between the Moratoc and Chowan Rivers….”3 Ashe’s interpretation seems to have been based largely upon Ralph Lane’s description of the area as “goodly highlands,” and, since it was “substantially ‘fifty miles into the interior,’” Ashe apparently determined that Pananiock must have been located there. It should be noted that Ashe was a proponent of the previously mentioned theory that the 1587 colonists relocated to the Chowan River in present-day Bertie County, which in turn laid the groundwork used to supp
ort the fort symbol theory discussed earlier.
More recently Lee Miller made a similar assertion, claiming that the precise location of Panawioc (Pananiock) “appears on the Zúñiga Map on Cashie Creek, Bertie County.”4 Miller added to this claim by declaring that “Panawioc” is an Algonquian word which translates as “Place of Foreigners, an apt name for a site where they reported our men to be.”5
Each of these assertions about the location of Pananiock conformed to each proponent’s theory about the Lost Colony, but they are challenged by well-established documentary evidence to the contrary. Virginia scholar Lyon Gardiner Tyler, editor of the Narratives of Early Virginia, had noted in 1907 that Panawicke was “The Panauuaioc of Hakluyt and of DeBry’s map.”6 Philip Barbour, in his The Complete Works of John Smith also recognized that “Panawick (‘Panawaioc,’ etc.) appears on Theodore de Bry’s map of North Carolina (based on John White’s map).”7 Tyler’s and Barbour’s references to Hakluyt and de Bry are accurate. Evidence from the White/de Bry map and from a passage in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations make it clear that a) it had been fairly well established that Panawicke and Panauuaioc were names for the same place, b) the English knew of this place as early as 1584, and c) they knew it was located between the Neuse and Pamlico Rivers.
Portion of the 1590 White–de Bry Map showing the location of “Panauuaiock.”
The English first learned of that location during the Amadas/Barlowe reconnaissance voyage in 1584. The account of that voyage was published a few years later by Hakluyt and clearly places Pananuaioc between the Pamlico and Neuse Rivers: “Adioyning to this countrey aforesaid called Secotan beginneth a countrey called Pomouik ‘or Pananuaioc’ … belonging to another king whom they call Piamacum, and this king is in league with the next king adioyning towards the setting of the Sunne, and the countrey Newsiok, situate vpon a goodly riuer called Neus.”8
The Lost Colony of Roanoke Page 20