The Lost Colony of Roanoke

by Fullam, Brandon

  There is also a potential mathematical reference in the same excerpt to demonstrate that Strachey was describing the 1585–86 colony. Strachey wrote that “the men, women, and childrene of the first plantation at Roanoak were … miserably slaughtered, (who twenty and od yeares had peaceably lyved intermixt with those salvages, and were out of his territory)…” (italics added). “Twenty and od” could be read as “twenty-one” years, but certainly no fewer. Since it was reported that the slaughter took place about the same time that Newport arrived at the Chesapeake in April 1607, simple subtraction would indicate that the victims of the 1607 slaughter had been living with the Indians since 1586, making them likely survivors of Grenville’s 1586 contingent, and clearly not White’s 1587 colony.

  The reference to “men, women, and childrene of the first plantation” is easily explained by the fact that the men from the 1586 contingent had “lyved intermixt with those salvages” for twenty-one years and would have had admixed offspring by then. Their offspring, “miserably slaughtered” in 1607 along with their English fathers and Indian mothers as well as the rest of the tribe, would correctly be called “childrene of the first plantation at Roanoak.” If any of the admixed children were preserved, as was customary, one of these could very well have been the young boy seen by George Percy along the James River in 1607: “At Port Cotage in our Voyage up the River, we saw a Savage Boy about the age of ten yeeres, who had a head of haire of a perfect yellow and a reasonable white skinne, which is a Miracle amongst all Savages.”6

  In any case, Smith’s report of Powhatan’s slaughter was not entirely wrong. There certainly could have been a slaughter conducted by Powhatan, and a few Englishmen may have been victims, but they were not Lost Colonists. Quinn’s Chesapeake theory may also have been partially accurate. Roanoke colonists were possibly killed along with the Chesapeakes in 1607, but they would have been survivors of Grenville’s 1586 garrison, not White’s 1587 colonists. What, then, is known of Grenville’s garrison?

  As noted earlier, the actual number of men left by Grenville is disputed. Hakluyt’s account said fifteen, but the deposition of Pedro Diaz, the Spanish pilot captured by Richard Grenville in 1585 and pilot for Grenville’s relief expedition to Roanoke in 1586, claimed that Grenville left eighteen men on the island. Smith wrote in his Generall Historie “that the fiftie men left by Sir Richard Grenvill, were suddainly set vpon by three hundred of Secotan, Aquascogoc, and Dassamonpeack.”7 Beverely would also write in 1705 that Grenville “left Fifty Men in the same Island of Roenoke, built them Houses necessary, gave them Two Years Provision, and return’d.”8 Beverely’s account, however, was probably taken from Smith, who, as noted previously, had a natural tendency to exaggerate. It is probably safe to say that the actual number was somewhere between the fifteen and eighteen indicated by Hakluyt and Diaz.

  According to the Croatoan account related to Master Stafford in July of 1587 and recorded by John White, eleven of the fifteen men were at the settlement when the Indians attacked. Two of the Englishmen were killed in the ensuing battle, with a few others wounded, and the men gradually retreated to the water’s edge where they managed to escape in a boat and row towards the barrier islands. On the way they picked up the other four men who had been gathering oysters, and they “landed on a little Island on the right hand of our entrance into the harbour of Hatorask, where they remayned a while, but afterward departed, whither as yet we know not.”9

  They must have paused on one of the small islands adjacent to Roanoke, immediately west of the barrier islands, and carefully considered their options. The thirteen remaining men had escaped with their lives, but little else. Several were wounded. They had a few weapons and little food other than the oysters collected by the four who were not present during the attack.

  According to author Giles Milton, these fifteen men were soldiers, probably battle-tested in Ireland or in the Netherlands against the Spanish,10 and this seems to be an accurate assessment. White’s account relates how the Indians, pretending friendship, attacked the eleven Englishmen using to “great aduantage” the elements of surprise and the familiar, thickly treed terrain. Outnumbered nearly three to one, the men “were forced to take vp such weapons as came first to hand, and without order to runne forth among the Sauages, with whom they skirmished aboue an howre.”11

  During the course of the battle these thirteen men were driven to the shoreline where they managed to escape in a small boat. As mentioned, the group eventually rowed to a small island and, as the Croatoans reported, “afterward departed, whither as yet we know not.” It is possible, however, to reconstruct a plausible destination: It obviously would have made no sense to row eastward into the Atlantic in a small open boat without provisions. They would not have risked going west, back within reach of the same Indians bent on their destruction. F. Roy Johnson thought they could have traveled some thirty to forty miles south to the village of Pomeiock and eventually integrated with the Indians there.12 That decision would have been highly unlikely, since they would have chosen to go to a village occupied by Indians who were allied with those who had just attacked them at Roanoke. It was also in an area unlikely to be visited by English ships. If they had gone farther south, they would have approached Croatoan, in which case the Croatoans would surely have been able to report their whereabouts to Stafford.

  It is far more likely that they ventured north along the leeward side of the barrier islands, stopping when necessary to rest, tend to the wounded, re-supply fresh water, and gather crabs, oysters, or any other of the available indigenous shellfish. The thirteen may have understood, perhaps from Grenville, that future colonization plans would probably be pointed northward to the Chesapeake Bay area, and concluded that the odds for making contact with English ships were better there. Ironically, White was instructed to stop at Roanoke in 1587 and “take in the aforesaid fifteen men left there by Sir Richard Grenville the yeare before, and so to alter their seat unto the Chesapeake Bay.”13

  A northward journey would take the thirteen survivors up Currituck Sound perhaps to the present Virginia Beach area. They may also have veered to the northwest, avoiding Back Bay, and navigated the interconnected waterways leading to the present Norfolk area and the Elizabeth River. Either route would have enabled them to reach one of the several Chesapeake villages, where they may have been welcomed and assisted, just as Lane’s exploratory group had been the previous winter. It is most likely that it was this band of Englishmen who, for “twenty and od yeares had peaceably lyved intermixt with those salvages.”

  It is essential to note once again that Strachey’s sources were Powhatan Algonquians, because it means that their information must be viewed from a Native American perspective and with an understanding of Indian tradition. Algonquian Indian boys learned at an early age that there were few acceptable alternatives to becoming a warrior. Success in war was publicly acclaimed and richly rewarded. “Powhatan men were encouraged to recite accounts of their exploits as hunters and warriors, especially on public occasions with ‘royalty’ present.”14 At such occasions a line of young warriors formed, and each stepped forward in turn and related stories of the great feats he had performed in battle. Hyperbole was a common thread interwoven in such accounts.15 The important point here is that, lacking a written language, tribal history and great deeds were transmitted by oral tradition, which—however exaggerated—contained an essential truth.

  It is reasonable, then, to see Strachey’s account of the “slaughter at Roanoak” as a somewhat exaggerated event containing a core truth, related to him directly by Indians immersed in that same oral tradition. As indicated above, the only known sizable attack involving the killing of colonists at Roanoke took place after the departure of Grenville’s re-supply fleet in the summer of 1586 and before the arrival of John White and his colonists in July of 1587. That attack would not have been seen as a minor encounter by the native tribesmen.

  The events leading up to this attack apparently involved the
largest, most coordinated, well-planned Indian offensive against the English to that point in time. Upon the death of his brother Granganimeo and his father Ensenore, two steady allies of the English, the Indian Wingina changed his name to Pemisapan and set in motion a plan for a major assault against the English at Roanoke Island. According to Ralph Lane, Pemisapan’s strategy called for uniting all the tribes in the surrounding area and even the Moratocks and Mongoaks far to the west in a massive armed coalition aimed at destroying the English at Roanoke.16

  As outlined earlier, on June 1, 1586, Lane’s men preempted the Indian assault, attacked the village at Dasamonguepeuk, and killed and beheaded Pemisapan. About two weeks later Sir Frances Drake, following his successful raids on Santo Domingo, Cartagena, and St. Augustine, arrived unexpectedly at Roanoke. At this point Grenville’s re-supply ships were overdue; therefore, after consultations with his men and the onset of stormy weather, Lane accepted Drake’s offer of transportation back to England. On June 18 Lane and the rest of the first colony left Roanoke with Sir Francis Drake. Nothing is known of the Indian reaction to Lane’s attack and the gruesome killing of Pemisapan, but it can be safely surmised that their hatred of the English had reached a boiling point. Lane’s men, in fact, were “well aware of the possible results … were they to remain.”17 That hatred would still have been simmering when Grenville’s re-supply finally arrived a short time later, and it would have culminated in the successful attack and rout of the garrison left by Grenville at Roanoke.

  From the Indian perspective the assault against the contingent at Roanoke would have represented an important victory as well as retribution, a common and primary motivation for the native Indians, for the killing of their leader Pemisapan. The friendly Croatoans described the encounter: The Englishmen had been attacked “by 30 of the men of Secota, Aquascogoc, and Dasamonguepeuk.” This was a well-planned and coordinated attack. The Indians battled bravely, killed two in the process while wounding others, and finally drove the English completely from the island. It was the first and only decisive victory against the English up to that time. It would not take much embellishment to see this event as a major triumph and a complete rout of the English, subsequently taking its appropriate place in native oral tradition, and becoming, as it would be related to Strachey almost a quarter century later, the “slaughter at Roanoak.”

  All things considered, it seems likely that during his interviews with the Powhatans, Strachey intertwined information, some of it perhaps exaggerated, about two different “slaughters.” The first of these took place in 1586 at Roanoke Island and involved the fifteen-man garrison left by Grenville in order to retain territorial possession for Raleigh. Survivors of this assault made their way north and settled among the Chesapeake Indians at one of their villages. The second slaughter occurred twenty-one years later when Chief Powhatan, upon the advice of his priests, attacked and slaughtered the “Chessiopeians” along with the few surviving men from Grenville’s garrison and perhaps some of their mixed offspring. The 1587 Lost Colony was not involved in either of these events.

  This scenario, supported by the evidence supplied above, also satisfies the objections cited by Strachey’s critics earlier. Parramore’s doubt about Strachey’s statement that the Chesapeake Indians were “extinct” is answered by the somewhat exaggerated, but essentially true, nature of Indian oral tradition. A near, but not complete, eradication of several Chesapeake villages could easily be retold as “extinction.” According to Hakluyt there were thirteen initial survivors of the 1586 assault at Roanoke Island. If a few of them were still alive in 1607 and living among the Indians with their admixed offspring, their demise along with the tribe of Chesapeakes would not have been viewed by the Powhatan Indians as the catastrophic event Parramore imagined. His “massive cover-up” argument was based on the assumed presence of the majority of White’s colonists, not two or three of the thirteen Roanoke garrison survivors.

  Parramore found Powhatan’s evidence, “a few pieces of iron … unimpressive,” but Powhatan’s limited evidence could be explained by the small number of Englishmen who escaped the 1586 attack with the few implements they were able to salvage during their hasty retreat. This scenario would also explain the fact that no 16th-century English artifacts have been discovered in the present-day Norfolk, Virginia, area. The group was simply too small and too ill-equipped to have left enough archeological evidence besides the few items Powhatan had removed.

  The arguments proposed here and in the previous chapter dispute the flawed but often repeated assertion—the fourth institutionalized assumption—that Strachey’s use of “Roanoke” referred to a “vague vast country to the south” of Jamestown. A textual examination of the late 16th and early 17th century writers confirms the fact that their use of “Roanoke” invariably meant Roanoke Island. Strachey himself left conclusive evidence in his specific notation that the “slaughter at Roanoke” mentioned on page twenty-six of his Historie occurred at Roanoke Island. The only assault conducted by native tribesmen at Roanoke was the successful attack and defeat of the contingent of men left there by Grenville in 1586. The Lost Colony was in no way implicated in either “the slaughter at Roanoke” in 1586 or Powhatan’s slaughter of the Chesapeakes in 1607.

  20

  Lost Colony Clues and Powhatan Oral Tradition

  1611–1612

  By 1612 William Strachey was back in England putting the finishing touches on his Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia. John Smith had returned to England in late 1609 and his Proceedings of the English Colony of Virginia, an expanded version of his earlier A True Relation, was about to be published. The final chapter of the fate of the Lost Colony had also been written, at least in the minds of England’s officialdom. Smith’s alarming report about the colony’s slaughter at the hands of Powhatan had been accepted as gospel by the Virginia Council, although the Virginia Company of London made no mention of it for obvious reasons in its promotional literature. Strachey had followed up with a few more confusing details about the slaughter, but they would not be widely known until 1849, and it did not alter the basic slaughter story. The focus at Jamestown had now turned toward expansion, with new settlements having been established at Henrico and Kecoughtan. By 1612 the book on the 1587 colony was officially closed.

  The Powhatan-slaughter report had been adopted by the Council as the official explanation for the fate of the Lost Colony in part because it was provided by Smith, in whose leadership abilities the Council members had previously expressed confidence. The ultimate credibility of the slaughter account, however, was derived largely from the belief that it was based on the testimony of the perpetrators themselves—the Powhatans—but, of course, that was not the case. The myth of the slaughter of the Lost Colony was a consequence of the erroneous assumptions made by Smith and Strachey about the information the Powhatans provided to them.

  In retrospect, however, the Powhatans’ information per se was actually quite accurate. It is fair to say that native oral traditions, histories, and collective memories contain essential truths. While it is also true that some memories—particularly those that recount great deeds or important events—may be exaggerated, they still contain a basically accurate framework upon which certain adornments may subsequently be attached. This seems to have been the case, for example, with the Powhatans’ understanding of the Indian assault and route of the contingent of Englishmen at Roanoke in 1586. The Powhatans were in no way involved with that event, and so the victory could easily have been embellished in the several retellings as a “slaughter” by the time the news reached them.

  The Powhatans responded truthfully and accurately to the questions put to them by Smith and Strachey. Opechancanough was correct when he told Smith “of certaine men cloathed at a place called Ocanahonan, cloathed like me.” So was Wahunsunacock, Chief Powhatan, when he told Smith about distant places where “there were people with short Coates, and Sleeves to the Elbowes, that passed that way in Shippes like ours
…. The people cloathed at Ocamahowan, he also confirmed…. He described a countrie called Anone, where they have abundance of Brasse, and houses walled as ours.” This was all accurate information drawn from the collective oral traditions of the tribe.

  Opechancanough and Wahunsunacock related exactly what they had heard about strangely apparelled men at distant places far from their domain. As already seen, these references were actually shared memories of stories which were passed on, via Indian trading routes, to the Algonquian tribes about events that had occurred four decades earlier to the south and southwest of Powhatan territory. The Powhatans had no way of further identifying the strange people, but, as already seen, the clothed men were Juan Pardo’s Spaniards, whose expeditions in 1566–68 had a lasting and significant impact on the tribes of the western Carolina Piedmont. What Machumps told Strachey about “howses built as ours … and one story above another” was also accurate, and documented in the Pardo account of the two-story granaries the Spanish taught the Indians to build. So too was what Smith was told about the “abundance of Brasse” at Anone, which Strachey recorded as Anoeg, “whose howses are built as ours.” All of this information was true and accurate. The error was in Smith’s and Strachey’s assumption that the clothed men and other references were related to the Lost Colony.

  What Smith heard from Powhatan about a “slaughter” he conducted was also true. It apparently did happen in 1607 at about the same time as the arrival of the Jamestown colonists, and the victims were the Chesapeake Indians and perhaps a few Englishmen who had dwelt among them for two decades. Likewise, what Machumps told Strachey about a slaughter at Roanoke was equally true, and it can now be said with confidence that the slaughter did occur at no other place than Roanoke Island. The few English victims of Powhatan’s 1607 slaughter, as discussed, were not Lost Colonists as Smith erroneously reported to the Virginia Council in 1609, but rather survivors of the contingent left at Roanoke by Grenville in 1586. By the time Strachey arrived at Jamestown in 1610, the Powhatan–Lost Colony slaughter myth had already been officially accepted by the English court. Strachey built on that established slaughter fiction with the few additional details provided by Machumps.