The Head in Edward Nugent's Hand: Roanoke's Forgotten Indians 9780812203417

Citation preview

T HEAD in

Edward Nugent’s HAND

E    A        S        .    . ,   Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about  to , the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

T HEAD in

Edward Nugent’s HAND Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians

Michael Leroy Oberg

                                   

Copyright ©  University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper           A cataloging-in-publication record is available from the Library of Congress -: ---- -: ---

 

Mary and Peter

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     

Prologue / ix  

Ossomocomuck / 

        

Granganimeo / 

               

Wingina /  A Killing and Its Consequences /  Vengeance /  Lost Colonists, Lost Indians /  Epilogue /  Notes /  Index /  Acknowledgments / 

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       In the end an Irish man serving me, one Nugent . . . undertooke him, and following him in the woods overtooke him, and I in some doubt least we had lost both the king, and my man by our own negligence to have been intercepted by the savages, we met him returning out of the woods with Pemisapan’s head in his hand. —              

D

rive onto Roanoke Island. Whether you take the bridge from Nag’s Head or come from the mainland by way of Mann’s Harbor, you will be greeted with a road sign bearing the same message. Roanoke Island, the sign reads, was the “birthplace of America’s First English Child, .” And so one story has been privileged and remembered above all others. It has been that way for a long time. North Carolina’s Edward Graham Daves, the first president of the Roanoke Island Memorial Association, resented what he considered the unwarranted historical attention lavished on the English settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth Plantation to his north, the respective stomping grounds of flamboyant Cavaliers and stern Calvinists. So what if those colonization efforts produced permanent settlements? Daves argued in  that the attempts at Roanoke and the birth of Virginia Dare were events “of supreme importance in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race in America.” On this island, Daves asserted, “the seed was sown which was eventually to yield the richest harvest: the direct fruit of these efforts was the colony of Jamestown, and Raleigh is the real pioneer of American civilization.” Another North Carolinian, O. R. Mangum, wrote in  that to Roanoke Island “belongs a unique honor for all ages to come.” It was “the birthplace of the first girl of English parents in America, for shortly after the arrival of the colonists Virginia Dare was born.” ix

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With this, “North Carolina won the distinction of being the mother of the first white child born of Anglo-Saxon blood on the continent of America.” The nation was thus founded on the Carolina Sounds, and not in Virginia or Massachusetts. And so it went. Roanoke, wrote one historian, was “the first stone laid in the great structure of English colonization and expansion.” It was, another argued, the first home for “the first fore runners of the English-speaking millions now in America,” where “was turned the first spade of earth to receive English seed.” At Roanoke, as well, began “the life of the English church in the new world.”1 But what of the Indians who greeted these colonists and ultimately decided their fate? They were here first, but their stories were considered irrelevant by Daves, Mangum, and scores of other early historians. History and memory, it is clear, often walk hand in hand. Certain stories become part of the record. They are meaningful, significant, and resonant. They provide important answers to what we consider the important questions. They help us make sense of ourselves, or they educate or entertain us. Other stories we cast aside. They are uninteresting and trivial, it seems, so we forget them. We must be honest about this. We make choices about the stories we want to tell. We can continue to cast the story of Roanoke in mythic terms, if we choose, and view it as the opening act in the great drama of English colonization in America. This is what the Roanoke Island Memorial Association did when, in , it erected a monument at the site of “Fort Raleigh,” on the northern tip of the island, commemorating the birth of Virginia Dare and the baptism of England’s first Christian Indian convert, Manteo. Or we can follow in the footsteps of the Memorial Association’s successor, the Roanoke Island Historical Association, whose efforts to retrieve the island’s past from historical oblivion culminated in the commissioning of the “Lost Colony” pageant and efforts to reconstruct a fort at what is now the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.2 Efforts such as these can shape how we remember historical events and help define the record and the significance of the past. Many who know anything at all about Sir Walter Ralegh’s colonizing ventures, for instance, learn it from Paul Green’s “symphonic drama,” The Lost Colony, staged at the Waterside Theater on the Fort Raleigh site for the first time in  and, with a few exceptions, every summer since then. Green made his choices about the stories he wanted to tell. In the opening act, an announcer tells the audience, in case they do not already know, that “we are gathered here this evening to honor the spiritual birthplace of our nation and to

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memorialize those heroic men and women who made it so.” Ralegh and his circle of supporters, Green’s announcer continues, conceived the idea of building a new nation in the new world, and on this very site was laid the first foundation for it. Here these pioneers of a new order, of a new form of government, lived and struggled, suffered and died. And in the symbol of their endurance and their sacrifice let us renew our courage and our hope, and by doing so prove to ourselves and to the world that they did not die in vain. For as we keep faith with them, so shall we keep faith with ourselves and with future generations who demand of us that a nation of liberty and free men shall continue on the earth.3

This was inspiring stuff at the time, and Green’s audiences, viewing his play as the menace of totalitarianism and the fear of war tightened its grip on Europe, perhaps did not mind that he chose to depict the island’s natives as benighted cretins, superstitious and violent, who utter their lines in monosyllabic “Indian-speak.” This was, after all, an American, and not an American Indian, drama.4 The knowledgeable National Park Service rangers at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, just outside the theater where Paul Green’s play is staged, still describe the Roanoke ventures as the first chapter in the story of how this continent came to be occupied by English-speaking peoples. We can tell this story, too, but we must remember that there is more than one way to look at the past.5 We can, for instance, view Roanoke and the attempt to settle there not as a heroic beginning, but as an English failure and an Indian victory, even if the fruits of that victory were decidedly ambivalent. The story can be turned around, if we choose, and told from the Indians’ perspective. All too often, Indians, like those who greeted Ralegh’s colonists, have been viewed as part of the past, as noble relics doomed to extinction. This belief has informed much of the writing of American history, and it always has been part of the story of Roanoke. Walter Clark, for instance, who spoke at Roanoke Island in , seemed to believe that all Indians had become extinct. “Where the smoke of a lonely wigwam rose,” Clark asserted, “now the roar of great cities fills the ear and the blaze of electric lights reddens the sky.” Where then amid vast solitudes the war-whoop resounded, boding death and torture, now rise a thousand steeples and anthems to the Prince of Peace

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Prologue float on the air. Where the plumed and painted warrior stealthily trod the narrow war-path, mighty engines rush. Where a few thousand naked savages miserably starved and fought and perished, now one hundred millions of the foremost people of all the world live and prosper.6

In  North Carolina’s lieutenant governor Francis Winston exhibited a more direct variant of this historical amnesia that has cast native peoples upon the dustbin of history. “The Indian is gone,” Winston said, a conclusion that for him followed logically from his belief that “there is no room on earth today for vicious, incompetent, and immoral races. White civilization is triumphant because it is best.”7 Settlers move in and Indians retire, a story that seemed to repeat itself consistently as the American frontier advanced westward across the continent. For these North Carolinians the process bore a certain inevitability. The frontier was, as Frederick Jackson Turner described it, the “outer edge of the wave” and “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”8 Except that here, at Roanoke Island, it does not seem to have happened that way. The Indians did not retire, at least at the outset. White civilization was not triumphant, at least at the beginning. The colonists did not advance: they went home, or they disappeared. Here, at Roanoke, the Indians may have won. This, in itself, makes Roanoke a unique story. The Indians stayed and the colonists disappeared, but with enormous and shattering consequences for all, including ourselves, for this particular story of Roanoke might help us understand our history differently. Indeed, the attitudes that cast native peoples as relics, as doomed warriors fighting the forces of time and modernity, endure. Many Americans continue to believe that native peoples, defeated and on the path to extinction, disappeared in the face of European invaders who are too often described as being more sophisticated, developed, modern, or advanced. Perhaps, by looking at this familiar and foundational story anew, we can challenge these colonial assumptions. The following is an attempt to tell the story of the Roanoke ventures from the perspective of the Indians who confronted and attempted to make sense of Sir Walter’s colonists. At Roanoke, we can tell this story of encounter free from the tragic burden of subsequent events. We can view the relations that developed between native peoples and English men and women at Roanoke in terms other than of inevitable decline. Roanoke

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provides us with a perfect opportunity to examine, in close compass, what happened when natives and newcomers first encountered each other, in one of the few recorded settings where Indians were not defeated and driven off.9 The challenge in telling this story in this fashion comes from trying to view the English as the Indians understood them, and reconstructing, as much as the scant source material allows, the debates, discussions, and divisions that developed in Indian village communities as they struggled to make sense of the newcomers. To reverse the focus of the Roanoke story we must emphasize events different from those that have concerned previous historians. In particular, we shall look at the killing of one Indian, and its consequences, in early America.10 The story you are about to read is that of a human head or, more precisely, how the head of an Algonquian leader named Wingina came to be held by a young colonist one summer day in . Wingina’s murder and decapitation is a story of violence and encounter; of living and dying; of philanthropy and racism; of gloriously idealistic hopes for a new world and, ultimately, of lost colonies and lost tribes. It is a story that encompasses the British Isles and the Carolina coast, English manor houses and Indian longhouses, fortified outposts and palisaded Indian villages. For while the story of the head in Edward Nugent’s hand is intensely local, tightly focused in terms of both time and space, it is also transatlantic, involving the movement and interaction of peoples, European and Native American, along the margins of the Atlantic world. It lies at the heart of the story of Sir Walter Ralegh’s dream to create an Anglo-American, Christian, New World empire, but also of the attempts of native peoples who lived in dozens of politically autonomous native village communities to make sense of the newcomers who threatened, even in very small numbers, to transform their world in dark and frightening ways. The story of the head in Edward Nugent’s hand, however, is significant for reasons beyond what it tells us about how Indians understood their early contact with Europeans. Telling this story forces us to consider the question of just what constitutes a historically significant event, and who decides and why. The brutal act of violence executed by Edward Nugent is almost never specifically mentioned in history textbooks. His name, and that of the weroance he beheaded, are not commonly known. The crime, it seems, has been erased and silenced and forgotten, deemed not relevant to the larger narrative of American history. But the killing of this Algonquian leader had important consequences for the native peoples of

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the Carolina Sounds, and the short-lived English attempts at settlement brought misery and suffering that are difficult to imagine. But we must imagine. Telling the tale of the head in Edward Nugent’s hand is not an easy task. Historians agree only on the basic outlines of the story. Armed with a patent from Queen Elizabeth I, Ralegh sent two members of his household, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, to search out the site for a potential colony. In the summer of  they “discovered” Roanoke Island, a location off the coast of present-day North Carolina that they described as a New World Eden. Ralegh fitted out a larger expedition the following year. A total of  men, among them scientist Thomas Harriot, artist John White, and military governor Ralph Lane, would remain on the island from August  until June . By that time, Lane and his men had alienated the Indians in the area and, fearing a possible conspiracy, attacked the native village of Dasemunkepeuc, not far from today’s Mann’s Harbor. One of Lane’s servants, an Irish “boy” named Edward Nugent, beheaded Wingina, the weroance, or leader, of several Algonquian communities in the vicinity of the English outpost. Fearing the possibility of Indian retaliation, Lane’s colonists returned to England aboard a fleet commanded by Sir Francis Drake, which earlier that spring and summer had terrorized Spanish outposts in the Caribbean and along the Florida coast. A relief expedition commanded by Sir Richard Grenville, and carrying supplies for Lane’s company, arrived shortly thereafter. Grenville left fifteen men on the island to hold the fort, but they quickly disappeared. In  another group of colonists, this time under the leadership of John White, left England. Made up of families rather than solitary soldiers, the group intended to settle on Chesapeake Bay, to the north of Roanoke Island. The expedition’s pilot, however, a Portuguese mariner named Simon Ferdinando, deposited the colonists once again on Roanoke. After the birth and christening of his granddaughter, Virginia Dare, in August , White went home for additional supplies. He was delayed in his return by the crisis of the Spanish Armada and a string of rotten luck. By the time he finally returned in , the colonists had disappeared, becoming the “Lost Colonists” of American myth and memory.11 These events form the building blocks for an Anglo-centric narrative focusing on the attempts by a small group of Englishmen to settle on North American shores. Indians are pushed to the margins, at best playing bit parts in a story centered on the English. Yet the English may not

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be the appropriate focus, for Roanoke is as much a Native American story as an English one. If the English colonists came to what they considered a “new found land,” they created a new world for the Indians.12 We should take a close look at the Indians who greeted and confronted Ralegh’s colonists. The English intruded into a Native American world at Roanoke. They stayed only a short while before they “disappeared.” Because Wingina’s people, and his allies and enemies, in the end determined so much of the fate of the Roanoke ventures, it seems only fair that we concentrate upon them, and how they understood the arrival of the English. And if we recast the story in an effort to understand how and why an Indian weroance was murdered, and with what consequences, we can arrive at a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of what happened during this, the dawn of English settlement in America. To tell the story in this way, we must look with a fresh and creative eye at the extant sources. Only a handful of first-hand written accounts remain from the Roanoke ventures, all of them in one way or another terribly incomplete. The colonists who left us these accounts—Harriot, Lane, White, Barlowe, and a small number of others—did not write down everything they experienced. A variety of influences informed what they decided to include or exclude. The elements of native society that they did describe—religion, ritual, and belief, especially—they did not entirely comprehend. They observed, and attempted at times to describe what they saw, but they also judged and, in places, condemned. And they give us only one side of the story. No Indian voices appear unfiltered in the English documents. No Algonquian tells us directly what he or she thought of the changes that began to occur after the English arrived. We face a significant challenge, then, in trying to extract from a handful of English documents the Indians’ understanding of historical developments that brought dramatic and heart-breaking changes to native communities along the Carolina coast. We must read carefully English descriptions of the Indians’ actions, and attempt to interpret their meaning. Not only is the historical evidence less than we should wish for, but archaeologists have also been unable to answer many of the questions about the Roanoke colonies. No one, for instance, has found the site of the settlement occupied by the “Lost Colonists” in . It could be underwater now, a victim of the shifting geography of the Carolina Outer Banks. It could be buried, undiscovered as yet, somewhere on the grounds of the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, or beneath the present-day town

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of Manteo, on the island’s eastern shore.13 Nor has the site of Wingina’s village on the island been thoroughly excavated, though the historical sources and some archaeological evidence suggest that it was on the northern tip of the island, not far from the fort the colonists erected.14 More than , tourists visit the mid-twentieth-century reconstruction of the earthwork at Fort Raleigh. Experts do not agree about the nature of this earthwork. A sign at the fort site identifies the structure as “Lane’s Fort,” but it obviously could not have provided protection for the hundred men in Lane’s charge. It may have been a stronghold, or it may have been erected by the small holding party Grenville left on the island in . The few artifacts that have been recovered do not allow for a positive determination.15 We can move past the limitations and biases inherent in these scattered and difficult sources; indeed, we must if we are to understand the story of the head in Edward Nugent’s hand. By critically reading these accounts, comparing their contents carefully with what we know about other Algonquian peoples in other times and places, we can begin to piece together how Wingina’s people saw themselves, their place on the land and in the cosmos, and how they saw the English newcomers who, though few in number, began to effect immediate transformations in their world.16 From these sources, we do know some things, but with imagination and creativity we can learn more. Writing history, after all, is fundamentally an act of imagination. We know that an English colony was planted, and that this colony failed to take root. But we know as well that an Indian leader was killed and beheaded, which sent shock waves throughout Indian country. If we recast this as an Indian story, an Algonquian story, we shall see that the English men and women who vanished are only one part of a broader story of lost colonies and lost tribes in early America.

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O

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n the summer of  Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, soldiers and sailors both in the service of Sir Walter Ralegh, first reached the Outer Banks of what is today the state of North Carolina. The new land, the home of Wingina and his people, impressed Barlowe. “The soile,” he wrote, “is the most plentifull, sweete, fruitfull, and wholesome of all the world.” The Indians welcomed the English, Barlowe noted. They entertained the explorers “with all love, and kindnes, and with as much bountie, after their manner, as they could possibly devise.” Barlowe “found the people most gentle, loving, and faithfull, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age.”1 And so it is here, in this New World Eden, where most stories of English colonization begin. History, in this sense, is all too often depicted as commencing with the arrival of the newcomers on American shores. But we are interested in a different story. In order to understand the murder of Wingina and its consequences, we must recognize that the peoples Barlowe and the sailors who accompanied him encountered had long histories of their own on this continent. Wingina’s story begins well before Ralegh’s ocean-weary settlers clambered out of their ships’ boats onto the sands of the Carolina Sounds. It is time for us to establish the setting, and the scene of the crime. In order to understand why a young colonist beheaded Wingina and why this act of violence mattered, we must understand something of the beliefs and values Wingina and his people carried into their encounter with the English newcomers. The Indians of the Carolina Outer Banks, these peoples of rivers, sounds, and sea, did not 

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consider the place they lived a new world, and the English explorers intruded into an environment where Indian rules prevailed. At first, the English thought that the Indians called this new land Wingandacoa. The newcomers placed that name proudly in patents and documents and proclamations once they returned home, until they learned that it did not refer to a place at all. As Sir Walter Ralegh remembered later, “when some of my people asked the name of that Countrie, one of the Salvages answered Wingandacon which is to say, as you weare good clothes, or gay clothes.” The natives’ own name for the region into which these oddly-attired Englishmen had intruded was Ossomocomuck, a term that cannot be translated with certainty, but may mean something as appropriate and simple as the land that we inhabit, the dwelling house, or the house site.2 Ossomocomuck consisted of the coastal region of the North Carolina mainland, from the Virginia boundary south to today’s Bogue Inlet. Its limits to the east included the thin barrier islands of the Outer Banks and a number of larger islands located on the sounds between the two. Roanoke was one of these sheltered islands. It extended westward along a line that ran with the Chowan River south through the present-day locations of Plymouth, Washington, and New Bern.3 The geography of this region shifts constantly. Grasses cover the islands. In places there is soil suitable for agriculture, as well as stands of timber for housing and fuel. Still, wave and wind continually reshape the Carolina Sounds; they always will. Rain in the Carolina interior can swell rivers, and as these waters flow out to sea they deposit sand and sediment that close old inlets between the barrier islands and open new ones. Severe storms, the famous Atlantic hurricanes, only intensify the mutability of the Outer Banks. According to one study, Roanoke Island has seen its northern shoreline recede nearly a quarter of a mile since the late s, and the federal government today devotes significant resources to preserving and maintaining the basic geographic shape of the Carolina Outer Banks. It is and was a world of water, and the relationship of the people who lived there to estuary, sound, and shore played a critical role in shaping their identity. The names of places all bore the mark of their relationship to water: Secotan, the town at the bend of the river; Aquascogoc, the place for disembarking; Weapemeoc, where shelter from the wind is sought; Dasemunkepeuc, where there is an extended land surface separated by water. Roanoke was named for the people who

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rub, abrade, smooth, or polish by hand, a reference, most likely, to the shell beads produced by the island’s inhabitants.4 Wingina’s people lived in some of the dozens of autonomous Indian communities lining the waters of Ossomocomuck. They were Algonquians, in that they spoke a language and practiced cultural forms related to those of other Indian communities along the Atlantic coast from Maine to the Carolinas. All the Indians in Ossomocomuck spoke closely related languages, a factor that facilitated exchange and interaction between the region’s peoples.5 At the time he first encountered the English, Wingina was a man of middle age. Indian leaders on the Carolina Sounds and elsewhere denoted their high status through clothing, body ornamentation, and manner. Some of the neighboring weroances went to elaborate lengths, the English reported. “They cutt the top of their heades from the forehead to the nape of the necke in manner of a cokscombe,” wrote the scientist Thomas Harriot, with a long feather “att the Beginninge of the creste uppon their fore heads, and another short one on bothe seides about the eares.” They wore in their ears “either thicke pearles, or somewhat else, as the clawe of some great birde, as cometh in to their fansye.” Some wore, as well, “a chaine about their necks of pearles or beades of copper, which they most esteeme.” They tattooed their bodies, face, chest, arms, and legs, and painted themselves in patterns of red and silver and white. These images probably represented clan affiliations, and the close relationship in the Algonquian cosmos between human and other-than-human beings. William Strachey, a secretary for the Virginia Company of London who arrived at Jamestown in , observed a similar practice among the culturally analogous Powhatans of Virginia. These Indians made paint from a root they called “Puccoon,” which they “brayed to poulder mixed with oyle of the walnut, or Beares grease.” Strachey thought that this paint “in Summer doth check the heat, and in winter armes them (in some measure) against the Cold.” This may have been the case, but the painting probably had a ritualistic function as well. Harriot suggested that the individual he described dressed in so elaborate a manner for war, or for “their solemne feastes and banquetts.”6 Wingina’s wives and other elite women dressed up as well. They covered their lower torsos with “skyn mantels, finely drest, shagged and frindged at the skirt, carved or coloured, with some pretty worke or the proportion of beasts, fowle, tortoises, or other such like imagery as shall best please

 . John White, Indian in body paint. White’s caption reads, “The manner of their attire and painting them selves when they goe to their generall huntings or at theire Solemne feasts.”     .

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or expresse the fancy of the wearer.” High-status women engaged in elaborate displays of body ornamentation. The women, William Strachey recalled, “have their armes, breasts, thighs, showlders, and faces, cunningly imbroydered with divers workes, for pouncing and searing their skyns with a kind of Instrument (heated in the fire, they figure therein flowers and fruicts of sundry lively kyndes, as also Snakes, Serpents, Efts, etc.,) and this they doe by dropping upon the seared flesh, sundry Colours, which rub’d into the stampe will never be taken away agayne because it will not only be dried into the flesh, but grow therein.” Women wore their hair short in front, long in the back, and gathered up at the back of the neck.7 Viewed in the context of these descriptions of the Indians on the Carolina Sounds, the artist John White’s painting of Wingina stands apart. As White depicted him, he was a muscular man, with large eyes and full lips, and appears comparatively unadorned. Perhaps White depicted him without his ceremonial attire. Or perhaps the simplicity of his dress was a matter of style. According to Harriot, Wingina and his advisors cut the hair “like a cokes combe,” with the longer hair in the back gathered at the base of the neck. Wingina and his close advisers also hung stringed pearls and copper beads from their ears, and wore “bracelets on their armes of pearles or small beades of copper or of smooth bone called minsal.” Wingina did not paint or tattoo his body. Rather, he and his advisers “weare a chaine of great pearles, or copper beades or smooth bones abowt their necks, and a plate of copper hinge upon a stringe.” They wore “from the navel unto the midds of their thighs as the women doe . . . a deereskynne handsomely dressed, and fringed.” His manner was grave; leaders like Wingina “fold their armes together as they walke, or as they talke one with another in signe of wisdome.” His followers wore a tattoo on their left shoulder, four vertical arrows, signifying that they were Wingina’s men.8 Wingina spent most of his time at the village of Dasemunkepeuc, on the mainland shore of Roanoke Sound opposite the island, not far from present-day Mann’s Harbor. Here there was access to the great variety of resources in the area, including fertile soil for maize agriculture. Wingina and his people could have moved easily back and forth from Dasemunkepeuc to the village on the northern shore of Roanoke Island. Though its location has not been thoroughly excavated, a consensus exists that the palisaded village of nine houses that Barlowe would visit stood near what is now known as the Dough Farmstead. If so, the village was slightly more than a half-mile from the site of the English fort. The late nineteenth-century

 . John White, Wingina. White’s caption reads “A cheife Herowan.”     .

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archaeologist Talcott Williams found a number of skeletons in a group burial there, and the respected historical archaeologist Jean C. Harrington recovered additional evidence pointing to an Indian town at Dough’s Point. It is unlikely that the island’s thin soil could have supported a large population, and the majority of Wingina’s people must have spent most of their time across the sound on the mainland. Wingina’s followers also interacted closely with Indians from a village farther south on Croatoan Island. Croatoans appear frequently at Dasemunkepeuc, and the evidence suggests that the Indians of Roanoke, Croatoan, and Dasemunkepeuc were unified in some sort of greater community under Wingina’s authority.9 But what to call this community? I shall use Roanokes in this book, but any name is rife with problems and obscures perhaps as much as it clarifies. We still must ask how these Indians saw themselves. How did they perceive the community or communities to which they belonged? For generations,

 . Theodor De Bry, “A cheiff Lorde of Roanoac” (detail), engraving from the  edition of Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.       .

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historians and archaeologists have rather cavalierly identified the Algonquian communities of the Carolina coastal region as belonging to different tribes, but we need not feel bound by these descriptions. Tribe, after all, is an English word, one that native peoples could not possibly have used to describe any part of the reality of their lived experience. This much seems obvious. A look at the surviving evidence from the region suggests that if we are to understand the world in which Wingina lived, and how his head came to be held one day by Edward Nugent, we must look at the level of the village. It was here that Wingina’s people discussed how to react to the newcomers, and how to make sense of the dramatic changes produced by their intrusion into Ossomocomuck. In these villages, the critical events that led to the killing of Wingina took place. Archaeologists tell us that human beings have lived in the coastal region of the Carolinas for many thousands of years. The peoples these archaeologists classify as “archaic” lived along the region’s waterways, hunting and gathering, not planting crops. We know little about them. Most scholars believe that they moved into the Carolina Sounds as long as , years ago, the southern extension of a broader movement of Algonquian peoples into the Chesapeake region and the Carolinas. For what is called the Mount Pleasant phase of the Middle Woodland Period, an archaeological epoch that ran from roughly  .. to  .., more abundant evidence is available. Like their ancestors, Mount Pleasant peoples lived by the waterside. They hunted deer, raccoons, rabbits, turkeys, and turtles. They harvested and processed hickory nuts as well. These activities, however, always remained secondary to shellfish collecting and fishing.10 Yet if archaeologists describe the Indians of the region as the descendants of migrants who entered Ossomocomuck many thousand years ago, and debate among themselves how long ago this movement occurred, we must keep in mind that Wingina’s people had their own understanding of their origins. These explanations—these “creation myths”—made as much sense to the Indians who passed them down from one generation to another as did the Book of Genesis to the English. One of Wingina’s followers described his people’s origins to Thomas Harriot. “For mankinde,” Harriot learned, the Indians of Ossomocomuck “say a woman was made first, which by the working of one of their goddes, conceived and brought fourth children.” In this, Harriot wrote, “they say they had their beginning, but how many yeeres or ages have passed since, they say they can make no relation, having

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no letters nor other such meanes as we to keep recordes of the particularities of time past, but onely tradition from father to sonne.”11 This is all Harriot wrote on the subject, at best a tantalizing glimpse into the worldview of Algonquian peoples who lived in the Carolina Sounds region. Harriot generally sought parallels between his own beliefs and those of the Indians. Perhaps because the Indians’ ideas about their origins rested on premises so different from his own, he said less about them than he did about other subjects. Still, it is possible to move beyond Harriot’s brief description and develop the story more fully. One evening in , for instance, William Strachey sat aboard a boat in the Potomac River, listening to an elderly Patawomeck weroance, Iopassus, describe how the world came to be. Virginia Algonquians, like the Patawomecks, shared many well-documented cultural practices with Wingina’s people. It is at least possible that Wingina and Iopassus agreed at a fundamental level about how the world began. Iopassus told Strachey that his people “had five gods: four of them were invisible and represented the four winds and the four courners of the earth. The fifth took the form of a Great Hare.” So the dawn of history for the Powhatans began not with a masculine god in man’s image singlehandedly creating all of the cosmos, but with a rabbit, a testament to the closeness of the bond between Algonquian human and other-than-human beings. The Great Hare, Strachey learned, “conceaved with himself how to people this great world, and with what kind of Creatures.” After a time, the Great Hare “made divers men and women and made provision for them to be kept up yet for a while in a great bag.” Doing so was not easy, and the Great Hare had to protect his men and women from gigantic “Caniball Spirits” who sought to eat them. Their safety assured, at last the Great Hare “made the water and the fish therein and the land and a great deare which should feed upon the land.” At this, the four other gods grew envious. They gathered together, killed the deer, and then “drest him and after they had feasted with him departed againe east west north and sowth.” The Great Hare, in spite of the malice of the other gods, “tooke all the haires of the slayne deare and spredd them upon the earth with many powerfull wordes and charmes whereby every haire became a deare.” Then the Great Hare “opened the great bag, wherein the men and women were, and placed them upon the earth, a man and a woman in one Country and a man and a woman in another country, and so the worlde tooke first beginning of mankynd.”12

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The Great Hare, using “powerfull wordes and charmes,” provided humankind with animals to hunt, but after about  or  .. the peoples of the Carolina Sounds increasingly devoted themselves to a form of agriculture based on the “Three Sisters” corn, beans, and squash. How this transition to agriculture began is a subject of debate among archaeologists and anthropologists. The heart of the matter is the relationship between what scholars call “sedentism” and maize agriculture. The term is, perhaps, misleading. Groups of Algonquians probably continued to travel through Ossomocomuck to exploit seasonal resources at specific sites, but there is little debate that the archaeological evidence from sites built between roughly  and  .. reveals that Indians in the coastal region spent increasingly significant periods of time at specific places. Archaeologists, excavating these sites, find large shell middens, or refuse heaps, indicative of growing populations and relatively permanent settlement. But the question remains: why did the people settle down?13 There are a number of possibilities. The Late Woodland Indians of the coastal Carolina region located their growing settlements along the waters of the Carolina Sounds, sites suited for a variety of subsistence activities. At these locations, people gathered to harvest a diverse array of resources. But did the people gradually become sedentary, as they spent more time at locations best suited for harvesting estuarine and marine resources? Indeed, could sedentism have resulted from the desire to protect these resources—these strategically critical territories—from competing groups? And did maize agriculture, which the English tell us by the sixteenth century had become extremely productive, facilitate the growth of population at these town sites? And, if so, how? Did native peoples turn to corn to feed the growing numbers of people settled to harvest important marine and estuarine resources, or did people become sedentary because they increasingly tied themselves to an agricultural crop that required their attention?14 For us, the precise sequence of events is less important than the result. During the centuries prior to the arrival of the English, changes occurred in subsistence and settlement regimes so that native peoples in the region spent more of their time at settled villages. The contours of Wingina’s world formed during these centuries. We know that Wingina moved between Dasemunkepeuc and the smaller village on Roanoke Island as occasion required. Dasemunkepeuc, in this sense, served as something of a capital, while the village on the northern tip of Roanoke Island served as a satellite,

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useful primarily for access to maritime resources. In addition to these two towns, other villages in the coastal region owed subjection to Wingina, or were allied closely to him. We already have mentioned the Croatoans. Along or near the northern bank of today’s Pamlico River stood the town of Secotan. In general, Carolina Algonquians tended to favor the northern shores of the region’s sounds and rivers. In summer, the prevailing breezes came out of the south, blowing the northern shores free of mosquitoes. Winter storms originated in the Northeast, with the southern shores lying much more exposed. The Algonquians who lived there did not build palisades around Secotan. Rather, Harriot reported, “the Howses are Scattered heer and ther.”15 John White’s watercolor of Secotan reveals a bustling community. Hunters move through the woods on the town’s margins in pursuit of game. Three crops of corn grow in fields adjoining the village— “corne newly sprung,” “their greene corne,” and “their rype corne”—testament to an agricultural productivity that impressed the English. A boy sits in a hut among the ripening corn to ward off crows and other animals that might threaten the crop. In addition to the mechanics of how the people of Secotan lived, White provides hints about the contours of community life: a ceremony in progress, he tells us, “with strange gestures and songs dancing abowt posts carved on the topps lyke mens faces.” We see the Indians of Secotan gathered for their meals: “they are very sober in their eatinge, and drinkinge, and consequentlye verye longe lived because they doe not oppress nature.” White shows us “the place of solemne prayer,” and the temple “wherein the Tombe of the Herounds,” or weroances, “standeth.”16 Though the town had no palisade, Secotan knew well the horrors of war. At the time the English first visited in , Barlowe learned “that there remaineth a mortall malice in the Sequotanes, for many injuries and slaughters done uppon them by” Piemacum, the leading weroance at Pomeiooc, a town that stood not far from the sound near today’s Mattamuskeet Lake (the Algonquians called it Paquippe, or “shallow lake”). Indians from Secotan, some time before the English arrived, had traveled to Pomeiooc on Piemacum’s invitation for a feast to celebrate a peace agreement between the two towns. When the Secotans arrived, and “were altogether merrie, and praying before their Idoll,” Piemacum and his warriors “came suddenly upon them, and slew them every one, reserving the women and children,” who probably became either slaves or adoptees. This story, recorded

 . John White, painting of the Algonquian village of Secotan.     .

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ambiguously in Barlowe’s account and repeated with no more clarity by John Smith nearly half a century later, raises difficult questions about the relationship between Secotan and Pomeiooc, and of both with Wingina and his people at Dasemunkepeuc and on Roanoke Island. The source of the conflict is difficult to discern, but it is clear that Algonquian communities in Ossomocomuck had long histories of conflict, diplomacy, exchange, and interaction that predated the arrival of the English, and that would ultimately inform their relations with the newcomers.17 Archaeologists have not found Piemacum’s town, but from the maps and artwork left by White we have a reasonably good picture of what it looked like, and how its people lived.18 A palisade of “smale poles stuck thick together” and, in Harriot’s view, “not verye stronge,” surrounded the core of Pomeiooc, providing a shelter and refuge for villagers who must have feared outside attackers. Seventeen houses of varying sizes stood within the palisade. These houses, Harriot believed, belonged to the weroance and “his nobles.” Other houses must have stood outside the palisade, closer to the agricultural fields that existed nearby to feed the people.19 Harriot wrote that the houses of Pomeiooc “are made of small poles made fast at the tops in rounde forme after the maner as is used in many arbories in our gardens of England.” As Harriot worked to describe the Indians to those who read his work, he compared them, here as elsewhere, to the familiar, to what people knew back home in England. In most of the Indian towns of the region, Harriot noted, they covered the houses with bark, but in others they used “artificiall mattes made of long rushes, from the tops of the houses down to the ground.” They raised or lowered the mats that covered the houses as necessary to provide ventilation. Doors stood at each end of the house. These, too, the Indians “hung with matts, never locked nor bolted.” Along the interior walls, William Strachey noted, “are their bedsteads, which are thick short posts, stak’t into the grownd, a foote highe and somewhat more, and for the sides smale poles layd along, with a hurdell of reedes cast over, whereon they rowle downe a fine white Matt or twoo (as for beddes) when they goe to sleepe the which they fould up agayne inn the Morning when they rise, as we do our Pallatts, and upon these, rownd about the howse, they lye, heades and points one by the other, especially making a fier before them in the middest of the howse, as they doe usually every night, and some one of them by agreement maynteynes the fier for all that night long.” Strachey thought these houses uncomfortable and unappealing, noting with some contempt that the Indians slept

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“as do the Irish,” a sure statement on how far he felt the Indians had to go before they could be considered “civilized.”20 White avoided this judgmental tone, providing us in his painting of Pomeiooc with a fleeting glimpse into Algonquian village life. A miniaturist by training, White had traveled to America previously with Martin Frobisher. He made no attempt to Europeanize the appearance of his subjects and appears to have attempted to provide as lifelike a depiction of the peoples of Ossomocomuck as possible. The paintings are truly stunning, unlike anything else produced by Europeans in North America.21 He shows us the exterior of an Algonquian temple, and a large central fire where villagers gathered for ceremonial and communal functions. And then there are the people. They gather about the central fire, singing and praying to the rhythm of gourd rattles, “a strange custom,” Harriot wrote, “and worthe the observation.” Men, dressed in deerskins and wearing body ornamentation similar to that witnessed by the English at Dasemunkepeuc, use stone

 . John White, painting of the Algonquian village of Pomeiooc.     .

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axes to split timber and gather to talk about their exploits in hunting or warfare. Children, who go without clothing in the summer, save the beaded necklaces and tattoos, play with toys (one had received a doll from an Englishman) and clamor for their parents’ attention. A domesticated dog watches all the activity in town.22 Barlowe described Secotan as the “westermost Towne of Wingandacoa,” and Wingina as the king of Wingandacoa. It is difficult to imagine that Wingina’s people did not have some sort of alliance with the peoples of Secotan. The wounds Barlowe said Wingina had received in battle, if not suffered at the hands of Spanish slavers, may have come from Piemacum’s warriors. This set of circumstances has led a large number of historians to identify Wingina’s people as Secotans. Still, David Beers Quinn, the historian who did more than any other to bring Sir Walter Ralegh’s colonizing ventures to light, asserts that Wingina’s people, whom he calls the Roanokes, were a separate tribe based geographically on the island and at Dasemunkepeuc. The evidence is ambiguous at best.23 Theodor DeBry, the Flemish engraver and printer who published Harriot’s report in , included a map based on White’s original watercolor that identified in boldface type three large tribes: the Weapemeoc, who lived on the northern shore of the Albemarle Sound; the “Chawanook,” who lived to their west along the Chowan River; and, finally, the Secotan. White, in the original from which DeBry worked, identified the location of villages, but did not identify tribes.24 Part of our problem may be conceptual. Indians, the conventional wisdom goes, live in “tribes” led by chiefs who oversee the activities of their followers. Some evidence exists to support this understanding of native leadership, and how stratified and hierarchical societies emerged among coastal Algonquians offers a fertile field of debate for archaeologists and anthropologists. The Englishmen who later would settle Jamestown to the north of the Carolina Sounds encountered the powerful paramount chiefdom commanded by Wahunsonacock, better known in English sources as Powhatan. In simplest terms, anthropologists and archaeologists define a chiefdom as “an autonomous political unit comprising a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief.” A rich ceremonial life, significant social stratification, and an economy that “emphasizes intergroup exchanges of many items and intragroup trade in luxury goods, but which lacks markets” characterize chiefdoms.25 As the paramount chief, or mamanatowick, Wahunsonacock collected tribute from

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his followers. He controlled and distributed much of this wealth downward to win the loyalty and maintain the allegiance of his supporters, many of whom were lesser weroances, or district chiefs, who ruled specific communities under his authority.26 Some native leaders in Ossomocomuck may have achieved a degree of consolidation approaching that of Wahunsonacock. Okisko, the weroance of the Weapemeocs, installed his “principallest men” as weroances over the towns of Pasquenoke, Chepanoc, Rickahokinge, and Masioming, all of which stood along the northern bank of Albemarle Sound and the east bank of the lower Chowan River. Still, Okisko could not control all the inhabitants in these villages, and he himself appears to have been subject to the Choanoac weroance Menatonon.27 Harriot considered Menatonon “the greatest weroans we met.” His principal town stood on a series of bluffs that overlooked the Chowan River in present-day Hertford County. Ralph Lane, the governor of the  English colony, asserted that Menatonon had  warriors at his disposal, indicating that the population of the town may have been as high as ,. According to Harriot, eighteen other towns owed their allegiance to Menatonon, but if Lane’s estimate that the Choanoacs located their towns “uppon most delicate plats of ground dystante the one from the other not above three Englysse myelles” is accurate, there may have been twice this number of communities under his control.28 The Choanoacs’ power rested on their access to trading routes in the interior that linked peoples across the Carolinas and Virginia together in an elaborate network of exchange. Occupying this position meant conflict, and the Choanoacs fought with the powerful Powhatans on occasion. The Choanoac weroance Menatonon also remained an important rival of Wingina, who like him sought opportunities for his people to engage in the surprisingly widespread networks of exchange that linked communities across the interior of the continent. Indians, quite simply, practiced politics before Europeans arrived. They fought wars and engaged in trade. They forged alliances and betrayed their enemies. They competed for control of access to valuable items and cooperated when it served their communities’ interests. The English, in short, did not discover a new world, but found one in which the Algonquian peoples of Ossomocomuck had developed and nurtured practices for interacting with foreigners that had served them well for many centuries.29 Choanoac approached, but never quite reached, the level of political consolidation

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and control attained by the Powhatans. The surviving documents hint that Wingina exercised control over some of the neighboring communities, but it is difficult to tell the extent of his power. The English did not remain in the region long enough to plumb the depths of native politics thoroughly. The important point is that localism prevailed, and the autonomy of villages and the people within them played a critical and underappreciated role in intercultural relations on the Carolina Sounds. We cannot hope to understand how Wingina’s head came into Edward Nugent’s hand, and the consequences that resulted from his killing, if we ignore the functional independence of Algonquian village communities, the relationships among the individuals who lived within them, and the debates and discussions they participated in as they attempted to understand and make sense of the newcomers. Indeed, for the  edition of Harriot’s Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, Theodor De Bry engraved a plate illustrating the tattoos worn by warriors in Ossomocomuck. Harriot, who wrote the captions, observed that “the inhabitants of all the countrie for the most parte have marks rased on their backs, wherby it may be knowen what Princes subjects they bee, or of what place they have their originall.” Wingina’s mark differed from those belonging “unto diverse chiefe lordes in Secotam,” and “certaine chiefe men of Pomeiooc, and Aquascogoc,” another town on the mainland aligned with Pomeiooc. Ossomocomuck was a world of village communities, and to describe them as “tribes” does little to help us comprehend the complex lives of the peoples who lived there.30 As weroance, Wingina attempted to preserve balance and order among his followers, and in his followers’ relations with the outside world. His duty to secure the well-being of his followers would inform his relations with the English. Wingina could not command completely, nor could he rule alone. English comparisons of the powers of a weroance with those of a king are misleading. “The word Weroance,” wrote Strachey, “which wee call and consiter for a king, is a Common word, whereby they cal all Comaunders, for they have but few wordes in their language, and but few occasions to use any officers.” Linguists have interpreted the word to mean “he is rich,” or “he is of influence,” or “he is wise.”31 Other weroances limited or influenced Wingina’s actions, and he relied as well on the advice of high ranking counselors who had earned their status through displays of bravery or heroism. Priests and “conjurers” also provided counsel that he could not ignore. These advisers drew conclusions about the newcomers based on deeply held

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cultural assumptions, and they did not all agree about the course Wingina should follow. Wingina found himself at the center of a lively debate with questions of enormous importance hanging in the balance.32 Weroances wielded great power over the lives and possessions of their followers. Still, the expectation that under the effective guidance of the weroance all would be well in the world balanced and constrained these powers. The weroance and his circle of advisers constituted a class apart, and in return for securing the well-being of their people they expected to receive the deference of commoners. Those who committed offenses, Harriot wrote, the weroance punished harshly, some “with death, some with forfeitures, some with beating, according to the greatnes of the factes.” By

 . Theodor De Bry, “The Markes of the Countrey,” engraving from the  edition of Harriot’s Briefe and True Report. Harriot wrote that “the marke which is expressed by A. belongeth to Wingino, the cheefe lorde of Roanoac. That which hath B. is the marke of Wingino his sisters husbande.” This individual is not otherwise identified in the documents, unless Wingina’s sister was married to Granganimeo. Marks C and D refer to those belonging “unto diverse chefe lordes in Secotam. Those which have the letters E. F. G. are certaine cheefe men of Pomeiooc, and Aquascogoc.”       .

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administering punishment for crimes or other offenses committed in his community, Wingina worked to restore peace and balance between the parties involved and insulate his people from a destructive cycle of blood feud and revenge. Weroances collected tribute from their followers as well, but ordinary Indians could vote with their feet, and they paid tribute to the weroance in expectation of receiving certain benefits. Wingina could not have led his followers where they did not want to go.33 Wingina’s followers expected him to protect them from the ravages of war and to lead them successfully in battle. Algonquian warriors on the Carolina Sounds painted themselves for battle “in the most terrible manner that they can devise.” The English thought the Indians’ weapons crude, and that these posed little threat to the colonists on the field of battle. “If there fall out any warres between us and them, we having advantages against them so many maner or waies,” Harriot wrote, “the turning up of their heeles against us in running away was their best defence.” Wingina’s people had “no edge tooles or weapons of yron or steele to offend us withal.” Their weapons, Harriot observed, “are onlie bowes of Witch hazle, & arrows of reeds, flat edged truncheons also of wood about a yard long.” They had no armor, and nothing to defend themselves with “but targets made of barks, and some armours made of stickes wickered together with threade.” Still, the military technology employed by Wingina and his followers suited their tactics, and a warrior could fire several arrows in the time it took an English soldier to load and fire his musket.34 Wingina would have overseen his community’s peaceful interactions with outsiders as well, and his followers expected the weroance to secure trade partners and allies. Exchange created reciprocal bonds of obligation between peoples. Wingina’s people sent shell beads and pearls into the interior, which they exchanged with the Tuscaroras, Tutelos, Saponis, Meherrins, Nottoways, and Mangoaks. They exchanged the shells of turtles, useful in religious ceremonies, with Indians in the upcountry. Shell-tempered, simple stamped Roanoke Ware pottery, the kind Wingina’s people produced, has been found in archaeological sites across the Virginia Tidewater south of the James River. From their varied trade partners, they sought copper, mined at a location called Chaunis Temoatan in the interior, red puccoon, stones for weaponry and tools, and, perhaps, antimony, a mineral that could be ground and mixed with oils to produce a silver-colored dye.35 The result was not solely an economic relationship. The Algonquians of Ossomocomuck sought items of utilitarian and spiritual value from their

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trading partners. The weroance, who oversaw this system of exchange, became the conduit through which items from outside flowed into and were diffused throughout the community. The success of the weroance as a leader was predicated at least in part on his ability to secure the objects his people needed and desired. By establishing and overseeing the system, the weroance created reciprocal bonds connecting his community with others in Ossomocomuck and beyond, a major impediment to conflict. Weroances like Wingina oversaw those matters that concerned their community as a whole—its wars, trade, and diplomacy. His responsibilities included overseeing and directing relations with outsiders. Wingina would have realized that balance and order comprised the critical core of his people’s values, and that it was his responsibility to maintain this balance. His followers would stick with him so long as he met the needs of his community and the individuals within it. Wingina and his subordinates treated the newcomers according to long-established and well-understood cultural practices. The arrival of the English, in this sense, cannot properly be seen exclusively as the beginning of a new world for the peoples of Ossomocomuck. No significant break existed between “prehistory” and history. They treated the English as they treated other outsiders. The English entered an Algonquian world. Still, after Ralegh’s colonists arrived, Wingina found it difficult to maintain balance and order within his community. Consensus became increasingly difficult to find. A leader whose power rested on the respect of his people and his own ability to persuade, and as well a man curious and honest, he moved cautiously after the newcomers arrived. He found himself caught between Algonquians who saw the English as potentially useful allies, and others who saw the newcomers as a mortal threat to his people’s way of life. Wingina understood that balance and order provided a suitable metaphor for the relations between his people and the natural world. To survive on the Outer Banks and the Sounds required work, and Wingina’s people lived in a certain tension with their environment. They struggled to balance their role in the world, as both a part of and apart from nature, as conservers and destroyers of the world in which they lived.36 The English at Roanoke said nothing about how the Indians on the Carolina Sounds marked time, but we know that the neighboring Powhatans divided the year into five seasons. The winter, John Smith wrote, “some call Popanow, the spring Cattapeuk, the sommer Cohattayough, the earing

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of their corne Nepinough, the harvest and fall of the leave Taquitock.” In the late winter and early spring, Wingina’s people lived primarily upon fish. From February through May, Harriot wrote, “there are plenty of Sturgeons” and also herring, “some of the ordinary bignesse as ours in England, but for the most parte farre greater, of eighteene, twentie, inches, and some two foote in length and better.” Alewives and shad began their run in March, and might have remained available into June. Wingina’s people used weirs to trap fish, but also speared them in the shallows or from their dugout canoes. Different species of fish preferred waters of different salinity and depth, so doing this vital work required an intimate knowledge of the environment. Algonquians throughout Ossomocomuck would have gathered as the herring and shad made their spawning runs, giving the people opportunities to engage in exchange, meet potential spouses, and share news and information. Herring, John White shows, could be preserved by smoking and could last for a considerable period of time. Algonquians also hunted small game during this portion of the year—turkeys, squirrels, and rabbits—and they could harvest crabs and shellfish, the latter in abundance.37 In May and June they began to plant their fields. They lived on acorns, walnuts, and fish during these months, along with whatever corn reserves they still had on hand. “To mend their dyet,” Smith reported, “some disperse in small communities, and live upon fish, beasts, crabs, oysters, land Tortoisess, strawberries, mulberries, and such like.” Wingina’s people did not fertilize the soil “with mucke, dounge, or any other thing,” Harriot noted, nor did they “plow nor digge it as we in England.” Men and women broke “the upper part of the ground to rayse up the weedes, grasse, & old stubbes of cornstalks with their rootes.” The fields cleared, the women set the corn, and “beginninge in one corner of the plot, with a pecker they make a hole, wherein they put foure graines.” They made sure to leave “a yard spare ground between every hole, where according to discretion here and there” they planted beans, squash, and sunflowers.38 The crops required constant attention, and a significant portion of the population remained in the village to tend them. Women worked to keep the fields clear of weeds. Young boys manned small watch houses and made “continual cryes and noyse” as they drove off “the fowles, and beasts, that unlesse they keepe the better watche . . . would soone devoure all their corne.” And as the women and children tended the fields, men left the village to hunt and to fish.39

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For the remainder of the summer they continued to live on fish, shellfish, and small game, as well as the walnuts, acorns, and berries that had been dried and preserved over the course of the year. The remains of deer, rabbits, black bear, and waterfowl have been found at archaeological sites in the region, indicating the diversity of food supplies upon which Wingina’s people drew as they awaited the harvest. The community reunited when the first of the three crops of corn was ready for harvest, a “graine,” Harriot said, “of marvillous great increase; of a thousand, fifteene hundred and some two thousand fold.” It was during harvest that most of the community’s celebrations took place.40 This yearly round of subsistence activities contributed to and reinforced a marked sexual division of labor in Algonquian communities. In general, men’s responsibilities took them away from the village. Women’s work focused on the village and its surrounding agricultural fields. Judgmental Englishmen, noting but not entirely comprehending these differences, condemned Algonquian men for their idleness and thought that Algonquian women “be verie painefull” because they and their children did so much of the community’s labor. Women, Smith noted, “make mats, baskets, pots, mortars, pound their corne, make their bread, prepare their victuals, plant their corne, gather their corne, [and] beare all kind of burdens and such like.”41 This was hard work. Skeletal remains from Late Woodland sites in the Virginia Tidewater indicate that arthritis began to afflict Indians in their thirties, and that their bodies by this age were beginning to wear out. Life expectancy hovered at around thirty-five years. Few women, it seems, lived long enough to experience menopause, and between a fifth and a third of all children died before age five. But these figures did not differ significantly from those for English men and women at the same time. Englishmen, furthermore, who criticized Algonquian men for burdening their women, failed to appreciate the onerous duties their own wives and daughters performed. Certainly they could not see that the sexual division of labor that existed among Carolina Algonquians originated in beliefs about the balanced and complementary roles played by men and women in these village communities.42 Men hunted and fought. Their role as hunters and warriors shaped their identity as men and their relationships with other beings in the Algonquian cosmos. Men killed in order to preserve, protect, and sustain life. While men killed, women created life. They planted, raised, and tended

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the crops. They gave birth, creating life anew. They raised the children. Women as nurturers, growers, and creators of life, a power represented in their menstrual blood, and men as life-sustaining killers: Ossomocomuck was, Algonquians believed, a world of balance where every being was supposed to have its place.43 Wingina’s followers, men and women, could not have sustained and maintained balance and order within their communities without the assistance of the powerful spiritual forces with whom they lived. As throughout the Eastern Woodlands, the Carolina Algonquians’ cosmos was dominated by two powerful spiritual figures. Wingina’s people believed in a distant and benevolent creator who, William Strachey reported, “governed all the world, and makes the Sun to shine, creating the Moone and Starres his Companions.” The Powhatans of Virginia called him Ahone, and he was, Strachey continued, a “good and peaceable god,” who required “no such dutyes, nor needs to be sacrificed unto, for he entendeth all good unto them, and will doe no harme.” Nearly ninety years later, John Lawson, traveling through the Carolinas, observed that this good god “they reckon to be the Author and Maker of every thing.” He “delights in doing good,” Lawson wrote, and in “giving the Fruits of the Earth.” Robert Beverley, who explored the border region between Virginia and North Carolina early in the eighteenth century, asked an Indian he encountered why his people did not worship this good god. Ahone, the Indian said, was “the giver of all good things,” and these he “showr’d down upon all Men indifferently without distinction.” But because Ahone did not trouble himself “with the impertinent affairs of Men, it was to no purpose either to fear, or Worship him.”44 Wingina’s people did not fear this benevolent creator, but they did worship and honor a more malevolent or mischievous figure they called Kiwasa. It was he, Lawson learned, who tormented the Indians “with Sicknesses, Disappointments, Losses, Hunger, [Travail], and all the Misfortunes that Humane Life is incident to.” They worshipped Kiwasa, who took human form, “more of feare than love.” Wingina’s people kept carved statues of him, “idols” the English said, in each of their temples. The carvings stood four feet tall, with the head shaped like those “of the people of Florida,” with the face painted “of flesh colour, the brest white, the rest is all blacke, the thighs . . . also spottet with white.” A necklace of white shell and red copper beads, like those worn by a weroance, hung about Kiwasa’s neck.45

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Wingina’s people engaged in ritual to appease Kiwasa and deflect his wrath, and so to maintain balance and order in their world. These rituals, Strachey observed later, the Indians considered so essential “that if they should omit them they suppose their Okeus [Kiwasa] and all their other Quioghcosoughes, which are their other godds, would let them have no deare, Turkies, Corne, nor Fish.”46 Specifically qualified specialists oversaw the religious life of the village, and ensured that the people properly performed the necessary rituals. The English observers at Roanoke distinguished between priests and “conjurors” or shamans. Both had acquired special bonds with the immense variety of natural and supernatural forces in the Algonquian cosmos. Harriot described the priests as men “well stricken in years, and as it seemeth of more experience than the common sorte.” Their dress and appearance distinguished them from the rest of the community. They wore “their heare cutt like a creste, on the topps of their heads as other doe, but the rest are cut shorte, saving those which growe above their foreheads in manner of a periwigge.” Priests hung objects from piercings in their ears, and wore “a shorte clocke made of fine hares skinnes quilted with the hayre outwarde.” They wore nothing else.47 Priests spent much of their time alone. They tended the temples to Kiwasa, and there “exercise themselves in Contemplation, for they are seldome out of them, and therefore often lye in them, and maynteyne continuall fire in the same upon a Harth somewhat neere to the East end,” where the sun rose. Harriot described them as “notable enchaunters,” who could communicate with Kiwasa. Priests had great power and status. They advised weroances and foretold the future. When they left the temples, they remained apart from commoners. They wandered along the rivers, “to kill with their bowes, and catch wilde ducks, swannes, and other fowles,” creatures who could move between the realms of earth, air and water. They felt comfortable here, for when Ahone created the earth, he made first the “waters, out of which by the gods was made all diversitie of creatures that are visible and invisible.”48 Conjurors were also important in preserving the spiritual well-being of the community. They dressed differently from the priests. Harriot thought they used “strange gestures . . . often contrarie to nature in their enchantments.” Conjurors wore nothing, save a “skinne which hangeth downe from their girdle, and covereth their privities,” and they affixed “a small black birde above one of their ears as a badge of their office.” They had been

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called to their position and given special powers by forces in the spiritual world. With these spiritual helpers, conjurors could predict the actions of enemies and disorient their opponents. They could find lost objects and foretell the future. They could cure disease and detect its cause. With the proper rituals, they could control the weather. Some conjurors became so intimate with the spiritual helpers who guided them that they became possessed, hence the “strange gestures” and familiarity with “devils” that Harriot witnessed, and the “convulsive posture” Beverley observed, “that seems to strain all the faculties.” They occupied a paradoxical position in Algonquian society. Their conjuring was an important public activity, witnessed by the entire village community, and they served as the villagers’ and weroance’s spokesperson with the spirit world. At the same time, they appear to have tried to maintain the sanctity of their intense bond with the spiritual powers by avoiding interaction with commoners. They lived a life both contemplative and ritualistic.49 Wingina and his followers engaged in ritual to preserve order and balance in the cosmos. They performed rituals to acquire the spiritual power necessary to prosper. Rituals surrounded the conduct of warfare. Priests and conjurors provided the weroance with advice on tactics and strategy. They carried, according to Harriot, a statue of Kiwasa into battle, asking it for support and strength. If the Indians treated Kiwasa with respect, and followed the accustomed rituals, they did not believe that misfortune could find them.50 The Powhatans erected certain “altar stones which they call Pawcorances,” apart from their towns and villages, to which the men made ritualized gifts of blood, deer suet, and tobacco when they returned safely from hunting or war. Wingina’s people probably did the same thing. The community gathered to celebrate the rising and the setting of the sun and, according to Robert Beverley, Indians near the Virgina-North Carolina boundary line solemnized “a day for the plentiful coming of their Wild Fowl . . . for the return of their Hunting Seasons, and for the ripening of certain Fruits.” Their greatest “Annual Feast is at the time of their Corn gathering, at which they revel several days together.” Harriot must have seen or heard something of this Green Corn Ceremony, common throughout the Eastern Woodlands, when he learned of “a great and solemne feaste whereunto their neighbors of the townes adjoyninge repayre from all parts, every man attired in the most strange fashion they can devise.” The Green Corn Ceremony assured the fertility of the fields, so that the people’s labors would secure their continued survival. The ceremony appeased

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those spirits responsible for the growth of corn. Full of rituals of rebirth and renewal, the Green Corn Ceremony strengthened the ties of the community to the land and obtained for it the cooperation of the spirit forces upon which life depended.51 Rituals of war and rituals of prosperity; rituals of thanksgiving, and for the renewal of life: Carolina Algonquians performed rituals to appease Kiwasa and to preserve order and balance within their community and in their community’s relations with the cosmos. But Wingina’s people celebrated as well elaborate, demanding, and time-consuming rituals of death and the afterlife. Death, for Wingina and his people, was thus an important part of life.52 The bodies of weroances and, perhaps, other high-ranking individuals received elaborate treatment after death. Working on scaffolds erected in the temples, priests disemboweled the body and removed the internal organs. Then, according to Harriot, they removed the skin in its entirety, and “cutt all the fleshe clean from the bones, which they drye in the sonne, and well dryed they inclose in Matts, and place at their feet.” They covered the bones, “remayninge still fastened together with the ligaments whole and uncorrupted” with leather, and worked to shape it “as yf their flesh wear not taken away.” Finally, they wrapped each corpse in its skin, and laid the body next to “the corpses of the other cheef lordes,” which also were preserved in the temple. Kiwasa stood guard, keeping “the dead bodyes of their cheefe lordes that nothinge may hurt them.” Priests resided in the temple, mumbling prayers night and day, Harriot wrote, standing watch over the community’s deceased leaders.53 Weroances stood above their communities in death as well as life. Their bodies received treatment that distinguished them from the rest of the community. John Smith, observing the Powhatans, suggested that the explanation for this difference lay in the Algonquians’ understanding of the afterlife. The Powhatans believed that elites, Smith wrote, “when they are dead, doe goe beyond the mountains towards the setting of the sun . . . but the common people they suppose shall not live after death.”54 While the surviving evidence does not support Smith’s claim that Indians of lesser rank did not believe they had an afterlife, there can be no question that elites, at death, were treated differently from other members of their communities. Smith drew a distinction between the scaffold treatments described first by Harriot and what he considered “ordinary burials,” with the deceased wrapped in skins and mats and buried in the ground.

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Evidence from archaeological sites on the North Carolina coast reveals a variety of methods for disposing of the dead. At the Tillett site, near the present-day town of Wanchese on Roanoke Island, archaeologists uncovered a number of burials contemporary with Ralegh’s colonizing ventures. Some were laid in their graves on the left side, in a semi-flexed position. Others were buried after receiving much more extensive mortuary treatment—the removal of the skin and the soft parts of the body.55 Yet whether the remains received careful treatment by priests and storage in temples, or burial in humble earthen graves, and however clearly the differential treatment of the dead reflected the social stratification of Carolina Algonquian communities, the majority of these remains seem to have ended up together in ossuary burials, a “collective, secondary deposit of skeletal material representing individuals initially stored elsewhere,” which contains “the remains of all or most of the members of the group who had died since the last collective burial.”56 Ossuaries are common along the Carolina Sounds. They hold the remains of men and women, young and old. They include fully articulated remains and entirely disarticulated bundles, as well as a scattering of bones. The people of Ossomocomuck placed grave offerings with some of the dead, but not with others.57 We know from descriptions of the ceremonies accompanying ossuary reburial in other locations that it required the participation of the community. Most of what we know about this demanding ritual comes from the pen of the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brebeuf, who witnessed the Hurons’ “Feast of the Dead” in . The ceremony took time, the expenditure of resources in the form of gifts, and a commitment to care for and tenderly clean the decayed remains of dead ancestors. Death, and the resulting grief, could disrupt a community, leaving those who mourned bereft of reason. The reburial of all who had died since the last ceremony served to unify the community and tie it to the land it lived upon. Whatever the differences in status in Algonquian communities, all could expect the same treatment in the end. All belonged, and all were worthy of being remembered and reintegrated after death into the village community. Ossuary burial, a ritual that required the participation of all in ways that must seem foreign to us, helped set things right, and preserved balance between the world of the seen and the unseen, the natural and the supernatural, and the living and the dead.58 This is why Wingina’s people engaged in ritual: they needed to acquire the spiritual power necessary to survive in the world. Harriot said more

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than he knew about the concept of spiritual power when he noted that the Indians “beleeve that there are many Gods which they call Montoac, but of different sorts and degrees.” Spiritual power—montoac among the Carolina Algonquians and Manitou among New England Algonquians— meant survival, and ritual provided the means for its acquisition. Harriot understood the Algonquian concept of montoac in terms analogous to the English god, but to Wingina’s people, it clearly meant more than that. Montoac represented a mysterious, immediate, and pervasive power beyond and greater than that of humans. It could manifest itself in animals, in people, and in things, all with the ability to impact dramatically the lives of human beings. Those who sought out this power, this montoac, Harriot suggested, would, with proper attention to ritual, enjoy its many benefits.59 Carolina Algonquians, like Eastern Woodland Indians generally, believed that rituals were gifts bestowed by powerful spiritual forces in the native cosmos. Harriot learned of two occasions where Algonquian individuals had traveled beyond the earth, one to a region called Popogusso, an Algonquian hell, and the other to a celestial paradise. Both spiritual voyagers returned from their journeys with vital information to teach their “friends what they should doe.” They learned ritual and ceremony, new avenues for acquiring sacred power. Carolina Algonquians gave thanks “when they have escaped any great danger by sea or lande, or be returned from the war,” Harriot wrote. They made “a great fyer abowt which the men and women sit together, holdinge a certaine fruite in their hands like unto a rownde pompion or a gourde, which after they have taken out the fruits, and the seedes, they fill with small stones or certayne bigg kernels to make the more noise, and fasten that uppon a sticke, and singing after their manner, they make merrie.” The Indians also grew tobacco, uppowoc, in fields separate from their other crops, and used it for ceremonial purposes. Tobacco, Harriot wrote, “is of so precious estimation amongest them, that they thinke their gods are marvelously delighted therwith.” They made offerings of tobacco, the smoke a mediating agent between the world of the seen and the unseen. “Being in a storme uppon the waters, to pacifie their gods, they cast some up into the aire and into the water,” Harriot continued, “so a weare for fish being newly set up, they cast some therein and into the aire likewise.” Hunters, too, performed rituals before they went in search of game. Hunters made a request, not a demand, and they understood that without proper attention to ritual, both before and after the hunt,

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animals would not make themselves useful to the human beings. Spirits were everywhere, and they must be accorded the proper respect.60 Wingina and his followers thus engaged in ritual and ceremony to appease the powerful spiritual forces that controlled the growth of crops and the supply of fish and game. With sufficient montoac, and proper attention to ritual, they need not fear a bad harvest or a poor hunt. Disregard for ceremony, however, or a failure of ritual, risked provoking forces that could rain destruction upon their village communities. There could be, in this sense, no accidents and no random misfortunes. Bad things happened for a reason, and resulted from the malevolence of spiritual forces in the Algonquian cosmos. This is an important point. Ritual and ceremony allowed Wingina’s people to maintain a delicate balance in their world and to acquire the montoac that allowed them to survive. It also provided them with an important lens through which they perceived the dramatic and terrifying changes provoked by the arrival of Ralegh’s men. And so we return to Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, as they explored the coast of that land they truly believed that they had discovered. They carried with them biases and prejudices that kept them from seeing this as anything other than a new world, a “new found land.” For Wingina and his people, and for their native neighbors, this was no new world. Over centuries they had developed lifeways and systems of belief that, despite the judgments of English observers, worked well for them, and allowed them to survive and comprehend their world in all its complexity. They had also competed with other Indian communities, engaging in battle with some of them and living in peace with others. They had long-established cultural forms for dealing with strangers, and for rendering unfamiliar people familiar. So many historians and anthropologists have described the arrival of Amadas and Barlowe off the Outer Banks as the beginning of a story, but we should know better. At Roanoke, the English newcomers intruded into an Indian story. And as the Algonquian communities of the Carolina Sounds worked to turn the English presence to their advantage, however variously defined, Ralegh’s colonists found themselves playing by Algonquian rules, and governed by the expectations of the peoples of Ossomocomuck. The story of the head in Edward Nugent’s hand thus began long before Englishmen set foot in America, as far back as when the first woman emerged from the waters of Ossomocomuck, and they first learned the rituals, songs and ceremonies that maintained order and balance in their world.

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ingina learned of the arrival of newcomers and sailing ships during the second week of July . The Englishmen went ashore, perhaps on the island the natives called Hatarask, perhaps at Wococon, or perhaps farther north, near the present-day town of Southern Shores. We cannot know for sure. The Englishmen fired their guns, frightening a large flock of white cranes, they said, that “arose under us” and took flight “with such a crye redoubled by many Ecchoes, as if an armie of men had showted all together.”1 Someone could have heard this. Roanokes who had been fishing or hunting or gathering shellfish on the Outer Banks carried the news of the arrival of the English to Wingina at Dasemunkepeuc. He had been wounded in battle, sometime before the English arrived, “shotte in two places through the bodye, and once cleane thorough the thigh,” a factor that certainly shaped his understanding of these newcomers. We can only imagine the reaction of Wingina’s people to this discovery, this strange and unexpected news. There must have been feelings of both excitement and fear. Wingina’s people had encountered Europeans before, and they would have worried that these newcomers would be like the others.2 We know how other Indians, in other places, perceived Europeans at the time of their “first contact” with them. Many native peoples remember the event in their oral traditions, those stories handed down from one generation to another that encapsulated a people’s history. Indians in New England and elsewhere, for instance, described their feelings of awe at the large “floating islands” they saw drifting toward them. The two ships commanded by 

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Amadas and Barlowe, though larger than Algonquian dugout canoes, were not that big, and only the unsophisticated “savages” of European racial fantasy would have mistaken them for islands. Still, there can be no doubt that these ships were unfamiliar, and they were piloted by strange men. Perhaps the newcomers were enemies, who came with hostile intent. But, then again, they might be friends and allies useful to a native community engaged in a war with its neighbors.3 We do not know the source of the conflict between Wingina and the Pomeioocs and their allies. They could have been fighting over access to and control of certain ecological resources, or over insults and slights real or imagined. Wingina may have met resistance as he attempted to consolidate his power over other communities. Or he may have been attempting to resist a rival’s efforts to extend power over Wingina’s towns. Wahunsonacock, to the north, violently attacked his most intransigent rivals, and we know that this conflict could claim enough lives to depopulate a region. We cannot know the case in Ossomocomuck with certainty, but Wingina, as weroance, sought assistance and allies, so he asked one of his lesser weroances, his “brother” Granganimeo, to investigate the newcomers. Thomas Harriot later wrote that the inhabitants of Roanoke Island, when they first saw the English, “began to make a great and horrible crye, as people which never befoer had seene men apparelled like us,” and that they made “out crys like wild beasts or men out of their wyts.” Perhaps this is so. They may have feared them as Spanish raiders, killers who casually took Indian slaves. Other Indians, in other places, reacted in this manner when they encountered Europeans for the first time. But here, at Roanoke, the evidence suggests another possibility. Wingina and his people, reasonably and rationally, began to try to make sense, to comprehend, the newcomers who had intruded into their world.4 But whose rationality? We have only one account of the initial meeting between Englishmen and Indians along the Carolina Outer Banks, only one eyewitness who left us a record of what transpired. Without question, Arthur Barlowe wrote with an agenda. He described the Carolina coast as a New World Eden, a land of plenty where the English would find life easy and profitable. Armed with his account, Sir Walter Ralegh hoped to generate support for his American enterprise, to encourage the wealthy in England to put their money behind the risky prospect of settling an English outpost on American shores. Barlowe’s account must be read with this

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objective in mind. His account was, in a sense, an advertisement, and Barlowe may have cast his experiences in the most positive light. Discerning the agenda of an author is a challenge with which all historians are familiar. But Barlowe’s account, if we are interested in Wingina’s people, raises additional problems of interpretation. He was, of course, an Englishman, and he carried with him certain beliefs and prejudgments that informed his perception of what he saw. We know that he had no previous experience with Indians, short of whatever Spanish accounts he might have read, so all that he saw was unfamiliar to him. Nor did he know any Algonquian language. He described actions, and offered explanations for the motives behind them, but he cannot have known much of what he was talking about. But Barlowe will have to do. To transform Roanoke into an Algonquian story, we must dig deep, and do the best we can from a variety of biased, flawed, and incomplete historical, ethnohistorical, and archaeological sources. Only then can we try to arrive at an understanding of how Wingina, Granganimeo, and their followers understood the English newcomers, why Wingina’s people tried at the outset to secure the friendship and allegiance of these strange interlopers, and how Wingina’s head ended up in Edward Nugent’s hand. Some of Wingina’s followers, however fleetingly, had encountered Europeans in the past. Others could have heard stories from their neighbors of the small numbers of strange visitors who had begun to appear in the region some six decades before Amadas and Barlowe arrived. Giovanni De Verrazzanno, that Genoese mariner sailing in the service of France, coasted the Outer Banks in , the first historically documented visit of a European to the region. About the same time, Spanish cartographers began to depict the Chesapeake Bay, “la Bahia de Santa Maria,” on their maps of North America, suggesting that they too had been visiting the region. In , the crew of a ship, either French or Spanish, traded with the Powhatans of Virginia somewhere along Chesapeake Bay.5 By the middle of the sixteenth century, European interest in the North American coast had grown significantly. French Huguenots established short-lived outposts on the coast of South Carolina in  and again in . An English privateer named Thomas Stukely, as well, attempted to establish a small refitting base on that coast in . The Spanish, with what turned out to be greater success in the long run, slaughtered the Huguenots and established St. Augustine on the coast of “la Florida” in .6

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Much of this activity, of course, took place either to the south or to the north of the Carolina Outer Banks. But not all of it. In the summer of , a young Indian from present-day Virginia named Paquinquineo was visiting relatives, perhaps on the Carolina Sounds, when he encountered Spanish mariners. Paquinquineo departed with the visitors voluntarily. Renamed “Don Luis” by the Spanish, he sailed with his captors to Spain, and then back across the Atlantic to Havana and Mexico City. He finally returned to his home in the Paspahegh territory, at the mouth of the Chickahominy River in Virginia, in , at the head of a small group of Jesuit missionaries. At first the Indians treated them with respect. The Jesuits seemed to possess great power. But they were pushy, intolerant, and few in number, and their presence came with significant costs. The priests relied on the Indians for food. One missionary reported that the land about the mission had experienced an extended period of “famine and death,” devastation that suffering Algonquians might easily have attributed to the newcomers. In  Don Luis led his people as they massacred the starving priests.7 The adelantado of Florida, Pedro Menendez de Aviles, learned that something had gone wrong at the Jesuit mission. Spanish sailors, carrying supplies for delivery to the priests, narrowly escaped from Indians who wore the priests’ vestments and who had attempted to lure them ashore. Menendez arrived with four ships and  men in . He skirmished with Don Luis’s people, killing twenty and taking a dozen captive. When the Paspaheghs refused to hand over Don Luis, Menendez hanged the captives from the yardarms of his ship. One of Menendez’s captains, feigning a desire to negotiate with Don Luis’s people, opened fire on the Indians who gathered on the shore to meet with him. The viciousness of the Spanish response, one observer noted, “has become famous throughout the land.”8 If Wingina’s people knew of Don Luis or the Spanish reprisal, they said nothing about it to the English, but they surely had seen Europeans closer to home, following a shipwreck on the Outer Banks in . The surviving sailors washed ashore on Wococon Island. They remained there for a time until some Algonquians from Secotan helped them fasten “two boates of the Countrey together, and made mastes unto them, and sailes of their shirtes.” The Secotans gave the sailors food and wished them luck. The castaways did not get far, “for the boats were found uppon the coast, cast aland in another Island adjoining.” Barlowe learned as well of a “Christian shippe” that wrecked on the Outer Banks in , a victim of “some storme, and outragious weather.” None of the sailors survived, but the Indians did

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salvage a portion of the wreck when it washed ashore. They took “the nailes, and spikes, and with those they made their best instruments.”9 This is all the contact that we can document—fleeting encounters, some hostile, some not, between small numbers of Indians and small numbers of Europeans. If any of Wingina’s people were among those who had encountered the random shipwreck or castaway, they could not have remained in contact with them for long. Amadas and Barlowe would have presented a mystery to most of Wingina’s people. The Indians could not have known that these two captains and their crews represented the vanguard of a movement aimed at incorporating the “New World” and its peoples into an Anglo-American, Christian empire. In  Sir Walter Ralegh received from Queen Elizabeth I the exclusive right “to discover search fynde out and viewe” any New World lands “not actually possessed of any Christian Prynce and inhabited by Christian people.” English imperialism, in its early years, took the form of this sort of personal enterprise. The crown, lacking resources of its own, entrusted the business of colonization and settlement to wealthy favorites. These gentlemen-soldiers took the bulk of the risk, venturing much of their personal wealth in the effort, but they also stood to gain handsomely if the venture succeeded.10 Ralegh and his small circle of supporters hoped to achieve three goals through their colonial enterprise. First, they wanted to profit, for themselves of course, but also for the crown and the commonwealth. The Queen reserved for herself “the fifte parte of all the owre of Gold and silver that from tyme to tyme and at all tymes after such discovery subduing and possessing shal be there gotten or obteyned.”11 A colony overseas could help the Queen in other ways as well. Economic despair gripped the nation in the second half of the sixteenth century. Elizabeth and her advisers feared the restiveness and riot of a population suffering through the scourge of rising prices, unemployment, and landlessness. A settlement overseas, wrote the younger Richard Hakluyt, Ralegh’s supporter and the greatest promoter of English maritime expansion, offered the poor a chance to free themselves from these burdens. There were, Hakluyt wrote, “many thousands of idle persons . . . in this Realme, which having no way to be sett on worke be either mutinous and seeke alteration in the state, or at least very burdensome to the common wealthe and often fall to pilferage and thevinge and other lewdness.” An American outpost, Hakluyt believed,

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offered hope for those who “for trifles may otherwise be devoured by the gallowes.”12 In addition to helping to relieve England of the political and humanitarian problems caused by its sturdy poor, Ralegh and his circle of backers hoped to profit by obtaining in the New World lucrative commodities that they could not obtain easily at home or from England’s imperial rivals. Barlowe eagerly described the numerous pearls worn by Wingina’s people. In  Harriot would devote an entire section of his report to describing the “Merchantable commodities” available in America: silk, flax, hemp, alum, naval stores, cedar, wine, oils, and hides, in addition to copper, iron, and pearls. Hakluyt imagined all sorts of commodities that Englishmen might find or produce on American shores and anticipated a day when civilized Indians would become consumers of English manufactures.13 There was yet another way to profit, as important as the others, that Ralegh and his circle spoke about less openly. The prevailing currents in the Atlantic moved in a clockwise fashion. Spanish ships, laden with New World silver, thus sailed a good distance up the North American coast before they set out eastward across the ocean. Ralegh envisioned his American outpost as a privateering base, where English ships could resupply and refit as they lay in wait for Spanish prizes sailing up the Gulf Stream.14 Indeed, the desire, as Hakluyt put it, to “cut the combe” of the Spanish Antichrist constituted the second important goal of Ralegh’s Roanoke venture. English privateers had been preying on Spanish shipping since the s, an activity fueled by a national hatred of the Catholic power and an appreciation that its wealth came from New World mines worked by oppressed and tortured Indian slaves. From a number of sources Elizabethan Englishmen learned of the atrocious treatment Spanish conquistadores meted out on their Indian subjects. The English believed they could exploit the disaffection of native subjects angry with their colonial overlords and, with the assistance of these Indian allies, rob the Spanish of their New World riches, liberate the Indians from Spanish thralldom and Catholic superstition, and, by capturing their shipping, bring the hated Papists to heel. Indeed, Hakluyt subscribed to the widely held national myth that throughout history his countrymen had traveled the globe and carried with them the standard of English liberty. All peoples, he believed, when presented with the virtues of English civility and Christianity, would gladly seek the protection and munificence of the English crown. The New World

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would be in better hands under the direction of an English queen than a Spanish king. Native peoples, men like Hakluyt believed, would quickly discern the differences between Spanish brutality and English liberty.15 Religion provided a key justification for the Roanoke ventures. Ralegh and his supporters sincerely hoped to convert the Indians they encountered in the New World to English Christianity. Hakluyt saw this religious mission as central to all others. Ralegh’s colonists would learn the Indians’ languages, “and by little and little acquainte themselves with their manner, and so with discretion and myldenes distill into their purged myndes the swete and lively liquor of the gospel.” Hakluyt believed that “infinite multitudes of those simple people that are in errour” could with care and attention be brought “into the right and perfecte way of their salvacion.”16 Profit, empire, and Christianity: Ralegh, Hakluyt, and Thomas Harriot, too, realized that to achieve these goals most easily and with the least expense, they needed the assistance of the Indians. Hostile natives would neither trade with the English nor show them how to harvest the New World’s riches. Disaffected Indians could ally with England’s imperial rivals, undermining the security of any colonial enterprise. Finally, Indian enemies would not be likely to listen to English sermons. So at the outset, it seemed, they would have to get along. The English, after all, needed the “naturall Inhabitants” in order to achieve their objectives in America. The military reality most evident to Ralegh as he planned his colony was the settlement of small numbers of Englishmen in the midst of large numbers of Indians. They could not afford to act like Spanish conquistadores, nor could they replicate the scorched-earth tactics Ralegh and his contemporaries had employed in Ireland against the “natives” (for so they called the Irish). There the English drew no distinction between combatants and noncombatants. To this end, Ralegh issued orders to his colonists that they treat Indians with respect. No Englishman could “stryke or mysuse any Indian.” A colonist who did so would receive “xx blows with a cuggell In the presentz of the Indian strucken.” A colonist who entered “any Indians howse without his leave” faced seven months “imprisonment or slavery.” After all, a settlement planted “without crueltie and tyrannie,” Hakluyt’s elder cousin and namesake wrote, “best answereth the profession of a Christian, best planteth Christian religion; maketh our seating most void of blood, most profitable in trade of merchandise, most firme and stable, and least subject to remoove by practise of enemies.” The newcomers

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envisioned an Anglo-American, Christian, new world empire. They did not anticipate the murder and decapitation of the Algonquian weroance who welcomed them to American shores.17 Arthur Barlowe described the arrival of the English at Roanoke, but he may not have told the whole truth. In , an English castaway sat down with Licentiate Francisco Marques de Villalobos, an abbot on the Spanish island of Jamaica. Who this Englishman was and precisely how he arrived in Jamaica remain something of a mystery. Certainly his story testifies to the large numbers of Europeans who found themselves deposited in various parts of the Atlantic world, early and little-known “Lost Colonists.” The castaway’s story, if true, can lead only to the conclusion that Barlowe chose to exclude from his report news of an extremely violent English encounter with Indians somewhere on the American coast. Villalobos reported that the English, at some point before they arrived off the Outer Banks, attempted to land on “one promontory.” Perhaps this occurred on the Chesapeake, an attempt to land among Don Luis’s people, who had learned the hard way that Europeans meant death and danger. The natives attacked Barlowe’s party, the English source reported to Villalobos, and “the wild Indians ate thirty-eight Englishmen” before the colonists fled.18 If the English hoped to establish an outpost on American shores that would secure peace at home while enriching the Crown and weakening its enemies, carry English liberty and true religion to peoples living in darkness, and serve the ends of both commonwealth and empire, Villalobos’s story suggests that Indians very much had their own agendas and their own reasons for behaving in the ways they did toward the newcomers. Accustomed to dealing with outsiders through exchange, warfare, and diplomacy, some Algonquians had learned about the European menace. It should not surprise us that Algonquians, exposed previously to rough fishermen, brutal slavers, or wayward explorers, acted on preconceived notions when more of these strangers arrived. Some Indians saw the newcomers as a threat, and they acted aggressively to protect the interests of their communities. Other Algonquian villagers needed help, and they welcomed the newcomers as prospective allies. Amadas and Barlowe came to America with instructions from Ralegh, and they tried to follow their orders. But what Algonquians wanted—their needs and concerns—more often than not shaped the nature of the early Anglo-Algonquian exchange.

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Wingina and his people had no interest in attacking the newcomers. That much is clear. From the outset they hoped to learn who these strangers were, what they wanted, and how they could be of assistance to a people engaged in a “cruell war” with its neighbors, a conflict that left the people “marvelously wasted, and in some places, the Countrey left desolate.”19 The Englishmen went ashore, somewhere on the Outer Banks, on July . They took possession of the land “in the right of the Queens most excellent Majestie,” performing “the ceremonies used in such enterprises.” The Roanokes may have watched from a distance as the newcomers erected English arms, engraved in lead and posted on a pillar, or took the customary “turf and twig” that signified possession by civilized people who tilled the soil. The significance of these acts to the newcomers would not have registered with Wingina’s people. Though the English who settled Roanoke said nothing about it, we know that coastal Algonquians embraced a concept of property in land entirely different from that held by the newcomers. Emerging English notions of private property and exclusive ownership of the land would have meant little to Wingina’s followers. Weroances determined how the community’s land was worked, by whom, and when, and Wingina’s people simply would not have recognized any English claim to any land in Ossomocomuck.20 Amadas and Barlowe explored the island on which they landed, and other barrier islands, noting woods full of “the highest, and reddest Cedars of the world” and many other trees “of excellent smell, and qualitie.” These woods, Barlowe wrote, “even in the middest of Summer” were “full of Deere, Conies, Hares, and Fowle.” To Barlowe the land seemed abundant and fertile but not secure. The English stayed aboard their ships, anchored just inside an inlet that they entered “not without some difficultie.” We can imagine the Indians watching the newcomers as they cautiously maneuvered their ships in what we now know to be some of the most treacherous waters in the Atlantic, and then clambered aboard their ships’ boats, fired their weapons, and explored the Outer Banks. It was not until the third day that any of Wingina’s people chose to show themselves to the newcomers. Three men in a canoe allowed themselves to be observed by the English. They kept their distance. After a time, they landed on the Sound side of the Outer Banks, “foure harquebushot from our shippes.” They knew, or had heard, that the weapons these strange men carried could kill from a great distance. Two of Wingina’s men stayed with the canoe. The third, an emissary chosen to meet the newcomers, walked along the shoreline, slowly

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approaching the ships. These were, according to Barlowe, the first Indians his men had seen. Wingina’s scout, a brave man, skilled in treating with outsiders and protected by the customary and appropriate rituals, watched the newcomers watching him, staring from their ships as “he walked up and downe upon the point of lande” closest to them. He waited, watching the ships, to see whether the Englishmen would recognize that he wanted to talk with them. Several of the men on board finally climbed down from the deck into a rowboat. Barlowe was among them, as were Philip Amadas, the pilot Simon Ferdinando, and a handful of others. The Englishmen rowed slowly toward the point of land. Wingina’s scout watched and waited, “never making any shewe of feare, or doubt.”21 When the Englishmen had safely come ashore, Wingina’s scout addressed them. He had reasons for doing this. He must have recited the words and greetings that his people traditionally had used when they encountered strangers for the first time. It was what his people always had done. Barlowe said that it was a long speech, during which the scout spoke “of many things not understoode by us.” The language barrier, of course, had yet to fall. After he finished, the scout watched the Englishmen as they attempted to respond. They imitated his movements, an effective opening. They gestured and gesticulated. The scout could tell that the newcomers pointed to their ships, and that they wanted him to come with them.22 Wingina’s scout obliged. His two companions remained by their canoe a short distance up the beach. If anything happened, they could escape and warn those in the village. The scout’s job was to learn about the newcomers. He accompanied Barlowe, Amadas, and the others back to the ships and visited both craft. The pinnace, the lesser of the two, carried a small crew of sailors and a light cargo. The flagship, or admiral as the English called it, was a different matter. The English may have led the scout below decks and shown him the crew’s quarters, the ship’s cannons, how it all worked. He saw on board compasses, telescopes, and books, objects of intriguing potential. This technology, much of which the English might have demonstrated, allowed the newcomers to do things Algonquians did not know were possible. The ship itself must have impressed the scout. He saw the enormous timbers, and would have admired the newcomers’ ability to craft such a ship. Beyond the strangeness of the ships were the people. They were different. The men traveled without women and children. Their hairy faces, their foul smell, their unusual and burdensome attire, all testified to their strangeness. But they did not appear to threaten the Roanokes. Barlowe

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bestowed gifts on the scout: a shirt, a hat, and “some other things.” The scout, Barlowe reported, tasted “our wine, and our meate, which he liked very well.”23 The newcomers seemed friendly. The English rowed the scout ashore, and he rejoined his companions down the beach. He showed his companions the gifts he had received. He then got in the canoe, paddled out into the water, and, according to Barlowe, “fell to fishing, and in lesse than halfe an howre, had laden his boate as deepe as it could swimme.” He came ashore again at the point of land, dividing the fish into two piles. He signified to the English that one was for the flagship, the other for the pinnace. After he had done this, and “after which he had (as much as he might) requited the former benefits received,” Barlowe wrote, “he departed out of our sight.”24 Wingina’s scout had done his job well. He had made contact with the newcomers. Having been aboard their ships, he could report on their strength and their numbers. He had learned that despite their strange behavior and unfamiliar language, they could be approached and that they desired friendship. Though they had much technology that he did not comprehend, and a considerable supply of weaponry, they did not seem to pose a threat. Gifts had been exchanged, and the reciprocal relationship that this established ensured at least the hope of an alliance for the future. The scout returned to Roanoke Island and told Granganimeo what he had learned. The weroance on the island decided that the time had come to formally establish his people’s ties to the newcomers, to render the strangers familiar, and, in essence, to incorporate them within the larger community of native peoples governed by Wingina. These were all jobs for weroances, and Wingina and Granganimeo must have concluded that this small group of Europeans were not like those who had traumatized Paquinquineo’s people. The village must have bustled with activity, as Granganimeo and his warriors prepared to greet the newcomers. The day after the scout’s return, the Algonquians climbed into several canoes and paddled away from the island, toward the two English ships. Barlowe reported that “there came unto us divers boates,” with Granganimeo in the lead. “Fortie or fiftie men, very handsome and goodly people, and in their behavior as mannerly and civill, as any of Europe” accompanied him. Barlowe said nothing more about the Indians’ appearance, but we know that weroances elsewhere, and their advisors, dressed themselves elaborately for such occasions, wearing the ritualistic attire necessary

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to protect the people from the power of the foreigners. As had the scout the day before, Granganimeo and his followers beached their canoes a distance from the English and walked “to the place over against the shippes, followed with fortie men.” At that point of land, Granganimeo’s “servants spread a long matte uppon the grounde.” Granganimeo sat at one end, and four of his advisers at the other. The “rest of his men stoode round about him, somewhat a farre off.”25 As they sat and waited, like the scout the day before, they watched the Englishmen clamber from the deck of the ship down into their boats and begin rowing to the shore. Some of these men wore their armor. The steel plate shone brightly in the sun. Granganimeo and his advisers saw that the English carried their weapons as well. The newcomers feared Indian treachery, and worried that Granganimeo’s warriors would attempt to attack them, and that by sitting on a mat on the beach, Granganimeo was somehow trying to lure them into a trap. Barlowe may have had in his mind the earlier violent landing, of which Villalobos had learned. Looking at the behavior of the English, as Barlowe described his own actions and those of his countrymen, Granganimeo could not have failed to notice the fear and unease that seemed to grip the newcomers. It is an image unfamiliar to most students of American history. We read of courageous and stalwart Englishmen, the best of their stock, confidently striding ashore, planting the flag, and claiming the continent in the name of the crown. In this, the first recorded encounter between roughly equal numbers of Indians and Englishmen, we see the opposite. It is Granganimeo who exudes confidence, and the English who appear timid and fearful.26 So Granganimeo attempted to reassure them, to assuage their fears. The English were of no use to him dead, and he did not want to scare them off. They might then move on, and settle among Wingina’s rivals elsewhere in Ossomocomuck. “When wee came to the shoare to him with our weapons,” Barlowe wrote, Granganimeo “never moved from his place, nor any of the other foure, nor never mistrusted any harme to be offered from us.” He gestured to the English, asking them “to come and sitte by him.” The newcomers understood, and after they had seated themselves, Granganimeo made “all signes of joy, and welcome, striking on his head, and his breast, and afterwardes on ours, to shewe we were all one, smiling, and making shewe as best hee could, of all love and familiaritie.”27 We were all one, Granganimeo tried to show the English. Native and newcomer, one head and one heart—“familiaritie,” after all, the word Barlowe

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chose to describe what he had experienced that day on the Outer Banks, in the Elizabethan period referred much more directly to family than it does today. Granganimeo had attempted to transform the newcomers from strangers into kin. He did so through ritual. He made, Barlowe said, a long speech to the English. “None of his companye durst to speake one worde all the tyme,” Barlowe noted, save for the four advisers who sat at the far end of the mat. They spoke “one in the others eare very softly.” Barlowe and his countrymen would have watched these four, nervously, as they listened to Granganimeo’s address. The Englishmen could not have understood what he said.28 The speech was an offer, an invitation, which the Englishmen accepted when, at its end, they presented Granganimeo “with divers thinges,” gifts that gave substance and meaning to abstract words. We cannot view these exchanges of goods merely as economic transactions. For centuries, native peoples in the Eastern Woodlands had engaged in trade with others, for goods they found both useful and spiritually powerful. But exchange also allowed native peoples to establish bonds with others. Granganimeo thus received the gifts “very joyfully, and thankefully.” He had achieved his objectives. The newcomers had much to learn about how to show proper respect to a weroance. After the Englishmen had given gifts to Granganimeo, Barlowe wrote, “we likewise gave somewhat to the other that sate with him on the matte.” Granganimeo quickly rose, “and tooke all from them, and put it into his owne basket, making signes and tokens, that all things ought to be delivered unto him, and the rest were but his servants, and followers.” As a weroance, he mediated encounters with outsiders, and saw to the distribution of goods within his community.29 Perhaps Granganimeo and his followers returned to Roanoke. Perhaps they remained, camped on the beach, opposite the English ships. In either case, they now felt comfortable with the newcomers, and the trading continued. The required rituals complete, Granganimeo extended to the newcomers an invitation to visit the village on Roanoke Island. As weroance, he had to find a balance between the power of the village and the spiritual power of the newcomers, between the familiar and the foreign. With this balance assured, a relationship based on the reciprocal exchange of goods could be established and nurtured. The English, according to Barlowe, exchanged “some thinges we had for Chammoys, Buffe and Deere skinnes.” Barlowe showed Granganimeo the “packet of merchandize” that the English carried along—according to Hakluyt it would have consisted

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of “Hats, Bonets, Knives, Fish-hooks, Copper kettles, Beads, Looking-glasses, Bugles, & a thousand of other wrought wares.” Only certain items drew the discerning attention of Granganimeo. The weroance looked over the English goods and, Barlowe reported, “of all the things that he saw a bright tinne dish most pleased him.” Granganimeo picked the dish up, “& clapt it before his breast, & after made a hole in the brimme thereof, & hung it about his necke.” Barlowe learned that Wingina’s people “maintaine a deadlie and terrible warre, with the people and king adjoyning.” Granganimeo told Barlowe, through signs, that the tin dish “would defende him against his enemies arrows.” He paid Barlowe well for the dish, twenty dressed deerskins.30 Something was going on here, perhaps more than met the eye. The tin dish may indeed have looked like English armor. An object of finished metal, similar in appearance to the metal gear the ranking Englishmen wore, it was an item of great rarity and value. Granganimeo and his closest advisers, elites who wore “redde peeces of copper on their heades,” fervently desired English trade goods. To get them, they tolerated the indiscretions of the English. When Granganimeo, his advisers, one of his wives, and some of his children came aboard the English ships, for instance, Barlowe noticed that he “had upon his head a broad plate of golde, or copper, for being unpolished we knew not what metal it should be.” It was copper, because gold does not tarnish, but Granganimeo valued it all the same, for he would not “by any meanes suffer us to take it off his head.”31 Each meeting with the Englishmen provided Granganimeo and his followers an opportunity to learn more about them. He may have brought women with him aboard the ships to see how the newcomers, males all, would respond. He worked to give the English no reason to fear. Granganimeo was, Barlowe wrote, always “very just of his promise: for many times wee delivered him merchandize uppon his worde, but ever he came within the daye, and performed his promise.” Each day, Barlowe continued, the weroance sent the English elaborate and generous gifts: “a brase or two of fatte Buckes, Conies, Hares, Fishe, the best of the worlde,” as well as “divers kindes of fruites, Melons, Walnuts, Cucumbers, Gourdes, Pease, and divers rootes, and fruites very excellent good, and of their Countrey corne.” Before he came to visit the English, Granganimeo always set signal fires “on the shoare a farre off,” one for each canoe, “to the ende that “wee might understand with what strength and companie he approached.” Granganimeo understood that frightened and startled Europeans could be quite dangerous.32

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Commoners traded as well with the English when the weroance was not around, bringing with them “leather, corall, [and] divers kindes of dies very excellent.” They greatly valued the trade goods the English carried, but they clearly valued some goods more than others. Granganimeo and his followers, Barlowe observed, “offered us very good exchange for our hatchetts, and axes, and for knives, and would have given any thing for swoordes.” Granganimeo himself “had a great liking of our armour, a sworde, and divers other things, which we had, and offered to laye a great boxe of pearle in gage for them.” The leader of a community at war, whose superior weroance lay at Dasemunkepeuc recovering from wounds, Granganimeo easily saw the value and utility of English bladed weapons. Steel tools, moreover, would have made all sorts of Algonquian tasks easier to perform.33 The Indians, Barlowe noted, “held our shippes in marvelous admiration.” When the English fired their guns, Granganimeo’s people “would tremble thereat for very feare, and for the strangeness of the same.” Barlowe scoffed at the Indians’ paltry weapons, which he thought scarcely “sufficient enough to kill a naked man.” The Indians marveled at English weaponry that demonstrated tremendous power. It was loud, dramatic, and capable of immense damage when it hit its target. The English certainly would have shown the Roanokes what their weapons could do.34 Yet the evidence suggests that Granganimeo and his followers saw much more than their obvious utilitarian value in the goods the English carried. A small tin dish, however attractive, is not a piece of armor, and it is not likely to protect its wearer from his enemies’ arrows. Unless, of course, Roanokes valued these items for reasons that the English could not appreciate. These Algonquians valued English goods for what they represented, symbolized, and manifested. When the Indians engaged in trade with the English, it was not a simple matter of untutored savages exchanging their wares “for the Bawbles and Trinkets of the English,” as William Byrd described the process early in the eighteenth century. Rather, Indians sought through trade to make sense of the newcomers.35 We know that Indians on the Carolina Sounds engaged in exchange with their neighbors to acquire all sorts of goods that they valued. Crystal and shell beads, copper, and other items came through native economies prior to the arrival of Europeans. In many Eastern Woodland communities, lightcolored shell beads, for instance, as well as crystals, symbolized long life and well-being. For this reason, Indians often buried their kin with these goods or tossed the goods into the pit before they sealed their ossuaries.

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Suffused with montoac, the objects possessed the power to allow their possessor to succeed in the world, in hunting, fishing, warfare, and courtship. The value the items possessed, then, was spiritual. English glass and porcelain beads fit into this indigenous conceptualization of value, and Granganimeo’s followers sought English goods at least in part for the power they possessed.36 Copper had a similar function. This material, too, the Indians interred with the remains of family and friends during the final act of caring for the dead. Copper could only be acquired through trade with outsiders. Only weroances and their closest advisers wore it, and its color signified life, energy, and power. The English newcomers provided copper pots, which the natives cut to pieces and used to make beads, plates to hang on necklaces, and other objects. A pot might have been useful to the Indians, but the spiritual value of the copper from which it was made was of greater significance.37 The newcomers, strange in appearance, bearing items of enormous utilitarian value to a people at war, and bearing a technology that seemed extraordinarily powerful and suffused with montoac, made sense and were useful to Granganimeo. Barlowe’s account of the first encounters between the Indians and the English records the initial wonder of the Roanokes, but their excitement came less from the strangers themselves than from the items that they carried with them. If the Indians perceived the English to have value as potential friends for a people at war, the source of this belief lay in the power Granganimeo’s people perceived in English objects. And through exchange with the Roanokes, even if they did not give Granganimeo all he wanted, the English allied themselves with Wingina’s people.38 These exchanges continued for several days. Granganimeo came aboard the English ships on a number of occasions, always careful to announce his approach. Granganimeo’s wife, accompanied to the point of land “with fourtie or fiftie women always,” visited the newcomers as well. Somehow, they gave Barlowe information on the geography of the region, and by signs encouraged him to come to their village. In this sense, the English did not discover Roanoke Island but rather arrived as invited guests. And after extending this invitation, the Algonquians left and waited to see what Barlowe would do.39 In the meantime, Granganimeo traveled to Dasemunkepeuc to describe to Wingina his encounter with the newcomers and his sense that the English

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could be of great use to Wingina’s people in their struggles with their Algonquian rivals. Granganimeo was absent from Roanoke Island when Barlowe, after several days, approached the Indians’ “village of nine houses, built of Cedar, and fortified round about with sharpe trees, to keepe out their enemies.” The English moored their ships seven leagues from the Roanoke village. Granganimeo’s wife, in charge of the village during his absence, and certainly in charge of some segment of public ritual, was surprised to see Barlowe and seven of his armed men rowing toward the island.40 When Robert Beverley encountered the remnants of the Powhatan chiefdom very early in the eighteenth century, he observed how the Indians greeted strangers at their villages, how they made the unfamiliar familiar. They met the visitors outside the town. They filled a pipe with tobacco and offered it to the leader of the visiting group. “If the Stranger refuses to Smoke in it, ‘tis a sign of War,” Beverley wrote. If the visitors intended peace, the pipe was passed among “all the persons of Note on each side,” and the ceremony came to an end. The visitors could enter the town. They had been, in a sense, purified by the smoke of prayer ascending to the spirit world, and could converse with the Indians within the village’s palisades, a world where peace prevailed. Once inside the palisades, the hosts washed the “Courteous Travellers Feet,” metaphorically cleansing them of the dangers of the journey through the woods. The hosts then treated the visitors to “a Sumptuous Entertainment, serv’d up by a great number of Attendants, after which he is diverted with Wild Musick.” This entertainment continued until late in the night, Beverley reported, “when a Brace of young Beautiful Virgins are chosen” to wait on the guests. “This kind of Ceremony,” Beverley added, “is us’d only to Men of great Distinction: and the Young Women are so far from suffering in Reputation for this Civility, that they are envy’d for it by all the other Girls, as having had the greatest Honour done them in the World.”41 The Roanoke Indians, under the direction of Granganimeo’s wife, welcomed the Englishmen in such a manner. “She came running out to meete us very cheerefully,” and stood “neere unto the waters side” to greet the newcomers. She commanded some of her people “to drawe our boate on shoare,” and others “to carry us on their backes to the dry ground.” These men carried Barlowe and his companions to a specific house, one with multiple chambers each designated for a specific ceremonial function. Granganimeo’s wife seated the Englishmen “by a great fire,” Barlowe wrote, “and after tooke off our clothes, and washed them, and dried them againe.” The

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English seemed filthy to Algonquians, who bathed twice daily. Other women “pulled off our stockings, and washed them,” and while still others “washed our feet in warme water,” cleansing and assimilating the newcomers into the world of an Algonquian village community.42 After this bath, Granganimeo’s wife escorted the uncharacteristically clean Englishmen into an inner room. A feast of boiled and roasted venison, “fishe sodden, boyled, and roasted, Melons rawe and sodden, rootes of divers kindes, and divers fruites” awaited. That the Indians kept within this room “their Idoll, which they worship, of which they speak uncredible things,” suggested that the rituals of assimilation and initiation were continued in a ceremonial feast. This communion transformed the foreigners into the familiar, and the strangers thereby became less strange.43 Granganimeo’s wife certainly kept a close watch on the proceedings. Given the presence of the “idol,” it is not difficult to imagine that priests and conjurors were there too, overseeing in some way the entertainment provided for the English visitors and watching the newcomers closely, in an attempt to discern their true motives. The Englishmen must have looked apprehensive, eight men in the midst of dozens of natives. She worked to calm their fears. It was not easy, and the gathering almost ended in disaster. “While we were at meate,” Barlowe reported, “there came in at the gates, two or three men with their bowes, and arrows, from hunting.” The surprised Englishmen looked nervously at each other. At least some of them reached for the weapons they kept close at hand. Granganimeo’s wife saw the Englishmen react and detected their distrust of their hosts. Englishmen consistently feared treachery in situations where they perceived themselves to be vulnerable. As had her husband in his meetings with the English on the Outer Banks, she moved to eliminate any tensions and assuage the newcomers’ fears. She was, Barlowe wrote, “very much moved” by her guests’ fears, “and caused some of her men to runne out, and take away their bowes, and arrows, and breake them, and withal beate the poore fellows out of the gate againe.”44 The entire incident seems staged. Armed men enter the village, frightening the Englishmen. The intruders are disarmed and punished, the English visitors protected and comforted. Granganimeo has earlier suggested to Barlowe and his companions that “we were all one,” that we shall be allies. The Indians saw their relationship with others in terms of reciprocity. That much is clear from the nature of the intercultural exchange that took place out on the Banks. The Indians met every English gift or initiative with gifts

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of their own in return. And now, as the armed hunters enter the village and surprise the Englishmen, Granganimeo’s wife says to them that we shall protect you if you become one with us. Despite the care taken by Granganimeo’s wife, the event spooked the English visitors, and they refused to spend the night in the Roanoke village. “When we departed in the evening,” Barlowe reported, “and would not tarry all night,” she was “very sorie, and gave us into our boate our supper halfe dressed, pots and all.” Barlowe and his men moved their boat “a prettie distance from the shoare,” he said, safe against any contemplated treachery. But she did not give up. She tried to win the Englishmen back, and to assure them that they had nothing to fear. Granganimeo’s wife “was much grieved” by “our jealousie,” so she sent “divers men, and thirtie women, to sitte all night on the bankes side by us, and sent us into our boates fine mattes to cover us from the rayne, using very many words to intreate us to rest in their houses.” The guarded Englishmen did not succumb to this temptation, Barlowe said, “because wee were fewe men, and if we had miscarried, the voyage had beene in very great daunger.”45 We know that Wingina did not meet the English in . Barlowe and his men did not travel the short distance across the sound to visit him, and it is not at all clear from Barlowe’s report that the English knew anything about Dasemunkepeuc. Of the towns in the region, it is one of the few they did not mention. Given its prominence in the subsequent history of the Roanoke ventures, this omission is striking, and we can conclude that Wingina chose not to meet the English. Unsure of their nature, of what they wanted, and in his weakened state, he kept his distance and trusted his lieutenants to conduct the proper rituals that governed relations between Algonquians and foreigners. Messengers carried news to him of the Englishmen. He learned of their mysterious technology, the items so suffused with montoac that they carried, their strange ways and their nervousness and distrust. By the third week of August, Granganimeo would have sent word to Wingina that the newcomers, having explored much of his territory, were preparing to leave, to return to their homeland. They promised to return to Roanoke the following year. This situation must have been a subject of concern for Granganimeo and Wingina. The English had engaged in exchange with the Indians. The newcomers seemed to accept Granganimeo’s plea that the Indians and the English become as one. On the other hand, the value of the English as allies

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remained somewhat in doubt. Granganimeo attempted to trick Barlowe into attacking Piemacum at his town. The Indians “promised and assured us,” Barlowe said, “that there will be founde in it great store of commodities.” The English did not take the bait, for Barlowe had too few men to engage in so risky a venture. Still, the Indians knew something about the English. A small group of men in strange ships arrived on their shores. They brought no women or children. Though given the opportunity, they showed no interest in Algonquian women. What they did bring with them—a technology suggesting great montoac—intrigued and interested Granganimeo and Wingina, particularly in the context of their rivalries with other native communities in Ossomocomuck. But they wanted to know more. The weroances thus selected two men, Manteo and Wanchese, to accompany the Englishmen to their homeland, to learn what could be known about them, and to report back what they found.46 English explorers had carried Indians to England in the past, but Manteo and Wanchese came as much more than curiosities. Wanchese came from Roanoke Island. He probably served as an important adviser to Wingina and as a leader of war parties.47 Manteo was of similarly high status. His mother was the weroansqua on Croatoan Island. His name, which closely resembles montoac, may have reflected his role as a traveler, willing to undertake the dangerous and spiritually perilous business of crossing from the Algonquian world into that of the newcomers, into a new world suffused with power and things strange, unusual, and new.48 Indeed, Indian cultures throughout the Eastern Woodlands told the stories of spiritual travelers who journeyed from one world to another. These voyagers returned to their people with knowledge bestowed on them by spiritually powerful figures in the native cosmos. Granganimeo and Wingina viewed the journey of Manteo and Wanchese in similar terms. Certainly indigenous concepts of power—beliefs about montoac—are critical to understanding the Indians’ unfolding relationship with the English. Wingina wanted friendly relations with the English, an alliance, but he also needed to learn more about them. His people wanted to acquire through exchange with the newcomers those elements of English material culture that manifested such great power or montoac, and they wanted the newcomers to assist them in their conflicts with their native neighbors.49 So the “two savage men of that countrie” traveled to England on a mission. They did not cross as captives or as victims of kidnapping. As they

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boarded Barlowe’s ship and prepared to leave their homeland, they likely performed the necessary rituals for crossing treacherous waters. “When they cross any great Water, or violent Fresh, or Torrent,” Robert Beverley observed a century later, the natives “throw Tobacco, Puccoon, Peake [shell beads], or some other valuable things, that they happen to have about them, to intreat the Spirit presiding there, to grant them a safe passage.” They hoped to learn about the newcomers as the newcomers learned about them. Each side used the other, and each needed the other if they hoped to achieve their goals. Manteo and Wanchese must have sensed that they had embarked on a dangerous journey, one for which they needed the assistance of Kiwasa.50 The two Indians journeyed among strangers whose language they could not yet understand, and whose manners and customs seemed strange and at times impenetrable. The English and the Indians set to work on the first of these problems immediately. Both sides needed a sure and secure way to communicate. Nobody wanted to risk a misunderstanding. Manteo and Wanchese worked with Thomas Harriot, the astronomer and explorer Ralegh had sent specifically to work with the Indians, gather information about them, and learn their language. The voyage from Roanoke to England gave Manteo and Wanchese an opportunity to begin to learn English and to teach Harriot the rudiments of their own language.51 Manteo and Wanchese experienced a swift Atlantic crossing. Still, the Indians must have marveled at the new sights they saw. We can only imagine their reaction to the wide Atlantic, the contours of shipboard life, and the Englishmen with whom they shared such cramped quarters. The mechanics of an Elizabethan sailing vessel, the rituals, customs, and superstitions of English mariners, and the unpleasant and filthy conditions on board all would have struck native peoples as worthy of note. They must have felt great relief as land—Ireland and then England—came into view. They came ashore “in the West of England,” probably Plymouth, “about the middest of September.”52 If their thoughts are distant from us across the span of time, we can at least reconstruct something of their experience in England. They traveled from Plymouth toward London by water. As they ascended the River Thames, they watched the countryside give way as they approached the metropolis. Wider and shallower than it is today, the river’s water flowed brown with silt and from the refuse produced by the nearly , people living in the metropolis.53

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Manteo and Wanchese took up residence at Durham House, Ralegh’s headquarters in the Strand, west of the city walls. The mansions here, one observer wrote, were “of great receyte, having cheife prospect towards the south.” The Thames, “a sweete river” at the time that offered “manie pleasinge delightes,” would have provided Ralegh and his circle their best route to the city proper, so the most elaborate frontages of homes like his faced the water. At Durham House, Manteo and Wanchese continued their study of English and their efforts to teach Algonquin to Harriot. “Being one that have beene in the discoverie, and in dealing with the natural inhabitantes specially imployed,” Harriot developed a sound enough understanding of the Algonquian language to begin assembling a phonetic alphabet for it. Manteo and Wanchese struggled with English, but with Harriot as an interpreter, and with what they did manage to learn, they provided Ralegh and his supporters with a valuable supply of information as they began to lay plans for their next voyage to the land they now called “Virginia,” in honor of the queen. By the end of the year they knew enough English to serve as interpreters and provide Barlowe with important ethnographic information that allowed him to flesh out portions of his report.54 Barlowe, of course, wrote to describe to his readers the ease of settlement in America. His intent was promotional; he never mentioned the exact location of the region he had explored, and he glossed over issues like the lack of quality farmland at Roanoke and the shallow and treacherous waters that surrounded the island. Ralegh’s supporters employed Manteo and Wanchese as well in their efforts to drum up support. In October , for instance, Ralegh allowed visitors at Durham House to view his native guests. The German Leopold Von Wedel was not impressed. “They were in countenance and stature like white Moors. Their usual habit,” he continued, “was a mantle of rudely tanned skins of wild animals, no shirts, and a pelt before their privy parts.” But Ralegh would not allow Manteo and Wanchese to appear before his guests in native dress. He wanted to demonstrate their potential, that Indians could be civilized and assimilated into an Anglo-American outpost overseas. So they wore what they must have considered the incredibly rigid and uncomfortable clothing of a civilized English gentleman. Ralegh, Von Wedel reported, dressed them in brown taffeta. “No one was able to understand them and they made a most childish and silly figure.”55 Promoting Ralegh’s colonizing ventures meant being on display, and this meant confronting the puzzled looks, amazed glances, and sometimes laughter of Londoners. This would have been their experience as they traveled

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about, objects of curiosity everywhere they went. Manteo and Wanchese, however, from Ralegh’s perspective must have performed splendidly. They generated interest in his colonizing ventures. When, in December , Parliament confirmed Ralegh’s patent to his American claims, it did so at least in part because “some of the people borne in those partes brought home into this our Realme of England” visited the House of Commons so that the “singular great commodities of that Lande are revealed & made knowen unto us.” Ralegh may also have sent either Manteo or Wanchese to visit and board with potential investors and supporters. Possibly “the Blackamore” who resided for a time with Henry Percy, the Duke of Northumberland, was either Manteo or Wanchese.56 The time Manteo and Wanchese spent in England almost certainly informed their views of the English, but we can only guess how they responded to the sights and sounds, the filth and the squalor, the crowds and the spectacle, of the rapidly growing metropolis. Dressed in clothing unfamiliar to them, paraded before the elite supporters of English maritime expansion, toasted and celebrated at court, and marveled at in the crowded streets, their reactions are lost to us. One amateur historian, Catherine Albertson, many years ago suggested that “in the kindly breast of Manteo, only wonder and admiration were aroused” in England, and “child-like trustfulness in the good will of the Great Weroanza and her Court.” Wanchese, however, an Indian “of sterner and far more savage temperament, viewed with dark forebodings the might and power of these strange pale faces,” and “with prophetic eye . . . felt with a cold and fearful sinking of the heart that with the coming of the white man, the Indian was doomed.” One need not rely on the supposed “child-like trustfulness” of an Indian to explain his attachment to the English. It was Manteo’s assignment to cross over into English culture. Still, in Albertson’s condescending interpretation of the Indian response to English society there may lie a kernel of truth, for upon returning to Ossomocomuck, the two Indians followed very different courses. England, and the people who lived there, looked very different to Manteo and Wanchese.57 The English people gawked at Manteo and Wanchese, but the two Algonquians returned the English gaze. And as they helped Sir Walter Ralegh they helped themselves, for they learned much during their stay. They saw the power of the Tudor state, as they were shown the sights that all tourists came to London to see: “the courts of princes,” Francis Bacon wrote, and

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  the walls and fortifications of cities and towns . . . antiquities and ruins, libraries, colleges, disputations and lectures, where they are; shipping and navies; houses, gardens of state and pleasure near great cities; armories, arsenals, magazines, exchanges, burses, warehouses, exercises of horsemanship; fencing, training of soldiers and the like; comedies, such whereunto the better sort of persons do resort; treasures of jewels and robes, cabinets and rarities.58

They saw English women of high status, delicate and fragile, incapable of what must have seemed to the two Indians as real work, with “the complexion of their faces” protected “against the power of the sun with hats and veils, and their hands with gloves.” Covered with heaps of clothing, “entirely in the power of their husbands,” they must have seemed foreign and as unattractive as Roanoke women had been to the English voyagers. Given the close connections between their host and the queen, it is not impossible that Manteo and Wanchese encountered Queen Elizabeth I. Ralegh had every reason to take the Indians to her to gain the support of the crown for his colonizing ventures. If they accompanied Ralegh to court they would have learned the rituals of English courtly life, which had parallels in their own communities. Guards “clad in red cloth, with roses embroidered in gold upon their breasts and backs” surrounded the queen. Waited upon by gentlemen advisers and officers, Elizabeth greeted her audiences in elaborate attire. Manteo and Wanchese would have observed that “whoever speaks to her it is kneeling,” though she did raise some with her hand. “Wherever she turns her face as she was going along,” the Indians would have observed, “everybody fell down on their knees.” Given the important ceremonial role performed by Granganimeo’s wife at Roanoke, and that Manteo’s mother was weroansqua at Croatoan, neither would have been surprised to witness a woman wielding power.59 Manteo and Wanchese probably attended services in the Elizabethan Church of England, providing an additional opportunity to observe the role of ritual in English life. Processions, choral and instrumental music, and the ceremony of communion, regardless how the English explained it, opened for them a window into the newcomers’ world. We must be careful not to overstate the incomprehensibility of English cultural forms to Manteo and Wanchese. They would have recognized the queen as a weroansqua of great power, who commanded great respect from her subjects. They could understand ceremony and ritual of her procession in light of the grand entrances made by their own leaders, as when Granganimeo

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addressed Barlowe and his crew for the first time along the Carolina Outer Banks. They would have seen in the appeal to unseen forces in the cosmos and in the direction of these rituals by specially qualified ministers parallels with their own religious practices. But there is no denying the strangeness of what they saw as well. Manteo and Wanchese could not have been but impressed by the enormous numbers of people who lived within several miles of Ralegh’s Durham House. Over , people lived in London when Manteo and Wanchese visited. John Stow, the great Elizabethan chronicler of life in London, complained of the huge numbers of “cars, drays, carts, and coaches,” that clogged the city’s narrow streets. The city was filthy. Crowded conditions and nonexistent sanitation helped spread disease. Life expectancy in the poorer parishes of London may have been no more than thirty years, with less than half of all babies born in the city surviving to reach their fifth birthday.60 Ralegh treated Manteo and Wanchese to what he considered the finest qualities of English life, but they would have witnessed as well the brutality and violence of the Elizabethan world: the carting and whipping of criminals or, as they entered the city proper through one of its fortified gates, the spiked heads of malefactors executed for crimes against the state.61 Manteo and Wanchese considered all of this as they tried to make sense of what they had seen. For Manteo, the power of the English was obvious. Attracted by the montoac they displayed through their technology, the size of their buildings and bridges, the firepower of their warships, and the sheer numbers of their people, Manteo worked to identify himself with them. If the power of the English in Manteo’s eyes manifested itself in their ability to do amazing things, Wanchese believed that the English could easily turn that power toward malevolent ends. Where Manteo saw opportunity, Wanchese saw a threat. The differences in perception between these two Indians paralleled in important ways the divisions that developed in Indian communities after the English returned to the island in . Manteo represented one pole in this debate, Wanchese the other. For much of  and the first months of , Wingina found himself buffeted between these two extremes. When he finally decided where he stood, he had only weeks left to live.

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he sojourn of Manteo and Wanchese in England lasted nine months. In the spring of  they moved down to Plymouth, where Ralegh’s men prepared the ships and assembled the men and supplies for the new expedition to America. They saw immediately that the English planned a much larger undertaking than that of the year before: seven ships, including the Lyon, the Roebuck, and the Tyger, all larger than those Barlowe had commanded in ; six hundred men, half of them soldiers; and provisions adequate to support several hundred men on the Carolina Sounds for a year. Ralegh’s advisers had suggested that the expedition consist of an even larger force of  armed men, half “harqubusiers,” the rest archers with longbows and swordsmen. Ralegh could not gather, recruit, or press into service that number of men. Still, Manteo and Wanchese could not help but notice the large quantity of arms and armor as the crews loaded it aboard the ships.1 Ralegh’s second venture was part of an orchestrated assault by English gentlemen-soldiers on Spanish America. Clearly the English wanted to profit from this enterprise through trade with the Indians or by harvesting the riches of the New World. They wanted to carry the reformed religion to American shores as well. But for many of those in Ralegh’s circle, these objectives must have seemed subordinate to a larger end. With a breakdown in diplomatic relations between England and Spain, they envisioned the Roanoke colony as an outpost of empire, a base from which the English could coordinate attacks on their hated Catholic enemies and their American possessions. Ralegh’s core group of supporters believed that they would 

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achieve these objectives with the support of the Indians among whom they settled. They did not imagine that less than a year after their colonists arrived, Edward Nugent would emerge from the woods with Wingina’s head in his hand. Spanish spies watched Ralegh’s preparations closely. They reported that “the members of the expedition include men skilled in all trades, and among them were about twenty who appeared to be persons of some importance, whose food was served on plate of silver and gold.” These latter gentlemen, the spies reported, “were accompanied by two tall Indians whom they treated well, and who spoke English.” The Spanish learned that the English carried musical instruments with them because they believed the Indians liked music. They also carried Bibles, translated into Spanish, useful to counter Catholic heresies. Rumors of Ralegh’s intent, Richard Hakluyt the younger reported, “doth . . . much vexe the Spaniard.”2 With the planting of “sufficient Colonies, under discrete governours in the aptest places of Terra Virginea,” one of Ralegh’s supporters wrote the queen, “yow may increase your navie by shipping made there, and be neere uppon everie event, to possesse” the Spanish king’s “pursse.” This, he continued, “is the sure waie, to ruine att one instant, both him, and all the usurers depending of him, that are and have bin the only nursses of unjust warres in Christendom, by the space of manie yeires.” To succeed, Ralegh and his supporters developed a plan for a two-pronged assault. Sir Richard Grenville commanded the fleet bound for Roanoke. He bore responsibility for carrying the soldiers and settlers across the Atlantic, and establishing them securely on the island. Having achieved this objective, Grenville would prey on the Spanish treasure fleet as it began its voyage across the Atlantic.3 Ralegh placed the garrison itself under the command of Governor Ralph Lane, an expert on fortifications and a veteran of Elizabeth’s brutal wars against the Irish. Ralegh empowered Lane to govern with a strict martial code. He would hold the outpost and explore the region as he provided a base for privateering raids against the Spanish. And, as Grenville and Lane secured possession of the land that they now called “Virginia,” Sir Francis Drake would lead a massive fleet into the heart of the Spanish Main, burning ports, taking prizes, and robbing from the Spaniards their New World riches. Drake would resupply Lane’s outpost after he completed his devastation of the Indies, and repair and refit his ships there if necessary.4 So Ralegh’s men viewed the Roanoke enterprise as part of a larger campaign against the Spanish antichrist and part of a program to establish

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English dominion and civility in America. The Spanish, at the same time, saw in Ralegh’s efforts a threat to their American treasure and colonial outposts. Both antagonists viewed their colonization efforts in terms of competition between European powers for a share of what the New World had to offer, and as part of the larger struggle between the forces of reformation and counter-reformation. But what of the native peoples of Ossomocomuck? Algonquians viewed this European activity in their backyard through a different lens, and from a different perspective. The clash of European powers for dominion in the Atlantic world did not mean anything to them, but their own clash with their native enemies most certainly did. With this in mind, Granganimeo had succeeded in transforming the newcomers into kin, in establishing the reciprocal relationship upon which any alliance must rest. He had sent emissaries to learn more about these allies, and to strengthen his people’s ties with them. They awaited the return of the newcomers who, they hoped, would supply them with the trade goods that manifested such great montoac and assist them militarily in their conflicts against their native rivals. But there were alarming signs after the English left—signs the English largely ignored when they learned about them, but which meant much to Wingina’s people. During Manteo and Wanchese’s absence, for instance, Algonquians on the Carolina Sounds witnessed a total eclipse of the sun. A comet appeared immediately after the second English expedition arrived in , and immediately before the first outbreaks of epidemic disease. Harriot told us about these events, and though he was a man who watched the skies, a contemporary and peer of Galileo, the eclipse and the comet were not visible in England. Some of Wingina’s people, it seems, drew a connection between these celestial events and the return of the newcomers, and Harriot learned about them from the Algonquians. It is difficult to know what lesson we might draw, but it is worth pointing out that in other native communities at other times and places, dramatic astronomical phenomena such as these often foretold significant and alarming events, and the conjunction of them with the arrival of the English confirmed for some their belief in the significant power possessed by the newcomers. Wingina’s people saw the arrival of the newcomers as an event of enormous significance.5 Grenville’s fleet departed from Plymouth on April , . A month later, they had reached the island of Cottea, off the coast of Puerto Rico. Grenville sent his men ashore,  strong, to pressure the Spanish governor for

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supplies. Grenville seized two Spanish frigates. In exchange for their release, and backed by his soldiers, he demanded of the governor “swine, yearlings, mares and horses,” which the Spanish learned “were wanted for some new settlement and did not permit the exchange.” Additional encounters with the Spanish along the coast of Puerto Rico brought Grenville what he wanted: livestock, salt, fish, wine, and the opportunity to come ashore and build a new pinnace, useful for coastal exploration. These engagements provided Manteo and Wanchese opportunities to watch the English throw up fortifications, plunder Spanish salt supplies, and prey on Spanish shipping. They saw English war parties threatening reluctant Spanish commanders and staring down well-armed colonial forces, and were left to draw their own conclusions about the military might of the English.6 Grenville spent several more weeks in the Caribbean hunting Spanish prizes. At Hispaniola, Manteo and Wanchese observed as the English acquired “by waye of trucke and exchange” from Spanish colonists “divers of their commodities as horses, mares, kyne, buls, goates, swine, sheepe, bul hydes, sugar, ginger, pearle, tabacco, and such like commodities of the Iland.” By the middle of June, his flagship loaded with provisions, Grenville took his leave of the region, and sailed toward Roanoke. On June , the expedition caught sight of the American mainland and on June  they anchored just outside Wococon Inlet. Wanchese, especially, must have carefully concealed his desire to flee from the English, return to his village, and describe the disturbing sights he had seen. He wanted to get word to Wingina to warn the weroance of the dangers that he now believed these newcomers posed.7 Manteo and Wanchese sailed aboard the Tyger, along with Harriot, John White, Lane, and Grenville. The largest ship in the fleet, it ran aground near the Wococon Inlet, and “did beat so manie strokes upon the sands, that if God had not miraculouslie delivered” the ship, “there had been no waie to avoid present death.” The treacherous waters of the North Carolina coast limited the numbers of Englishmen who could arrive by sea. Grenville attributed the accident, which illustrated forcefully the dangers of navigation on the Outer Banks, to the “unskilfulnesse of the Master,” Simon Ferdinando. The two Indians watched helplessly as the crew struggled for two hours to save the Tyger. Other ships in the fleet affixed ropes and pulled the -ton vessel off the Banks. They beached the Tyger safely, with no loss of life. Still, Grenville’s flagship “was so brused, that the saltwater

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came so aboundantlie into hir, that the most part of his corne, salt, meale, rice, bisket, & other provisions that he should have left with them that remained behind him in the countrie was spoiled.” The accident, Thomas Harriot reported, left the colonists with food for only twenty days.8 Grenville had little choice but to make the best of a bad situation. The crew set to work making the necessary repairs to the flagship. On July , Grenville decided to send “word of our arriving at Wococon, to Wingino at Roanocke.” This required a voyage of nearly one hundred miles along the Sounds. Wanchese accompanied a small English crew aboard one of the fleet’s pinnaces. He was the logical choice to lead the first English party to return to Roanoke Island, and the voyage provided him with the opportunity he had waited for. Previous historians of the Roanoke ventures have had little to say about Wanchese’s abandonment of the English. They note that Wanchese urged Wingina “to move against” the English, and that “he became hostile to his former hosts,” but not when or, indeed, why.9 None of the Roanokes knew the English as well as Wanchese. With the assistance of friends and family, he would not have found it difficult to slip away from the Englishmen. He told his story to whoever would listen, and then fled across the Croatan Sound to Dasemunkepeuc. We can imagine his friends and kin gathering about him to hear of the newcomers, of his time away. He told a terrifying tale. Wanchese knew the power of the newcomers, and had begun to understand something of how they had acquired it and what they wanted. He urged caution. Be not deceived by the English, their weapons, and the powerful objects that seemed to possess so much montoac. The newcomers were human. He had seen their women and children, their vast numbers in their homeland in England. He had seen them eat and sleep, live and die. They could be killed and they should be resisted. English power could be turned to malevolent ends. The Indians at Dasemunkepeuc listened to Wanchese’s words. Wingina weighed his ominous warnings against the more optimistic views of Granganimeo. He needed more information, and wanted to hear from Manteo. In the meantime, Wingina welcomed Wanchese back to the village and sheltered him from the English. That one of their two friends had abandoned them, an act of treachery and betrayal, greatly concerned Grenville. Why had Wanchese not returned to the English party? Wanchese’s departure must have awakened in some English hearts deep-seated fears of treachery. On unfamiliar ground, with their provisions ruined, they knew they were vulnerable, and now they had

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been abandoned by one of the two Indians on whom they had hoped to rely. Grenville ordered John Arundell to take the pinnace and sail to the mainland in search of Wanchese. Manteo would accompany him, and serve as a guide and interpreter. They left on July . Manteo had to serve as Arundell’s mediator at Dasemunkepeuc. Standing between the two worlds of natives and newcomers, he conveyed to Wingina the newcomers’ interest in the whereabouts of the other Algonquian they had carried across the Atlantic. We cannot know what Wingina told Manteo, but the result was clear. Wanchese was nearby, we know, for he will show up again in the English records. He left the newcomers, and probably settled back into much of his old life at Dasemunkepeuc, except that his view of the English was much darker than that of his neighbors. His arguments that the newcomers should be attacked apparently fell on deaf ears—at least for now—but no one at Dasemunkepeuc demanded that he return to the newcomers. The villagers at Dasemunkepeuc would not help the English find Wanchese. Arundell knew that he lacked the power to do anything about the situation, and he and Manteo returned to the fort empty-handed. Wanchese was gone.10 Described in  as one of the “two savage men of that countrie” who left his people to voyage to England, Manteo now stood metaphorically between Algonquian and white worlds. It was, he would find, a tenuous and fragile place. Indeed, early America was like that. It was a place where the boundaries between people became at times difficult to define, an ambivalent new world where people could not easily be placed in set categories. In places, what was “Indian” and what was “English” could blur at the edges. This colonial world was also a marchland, a “ragged outer margin of a central world,” as one historian described it, where the ordinary restraints of civility could be abandoned in pell-mell exploitation, a remote place where recognized enemies and pariahs of society . . . could safely be deposited, their contamination sealed off by three thousand miles of ocean, and where putatively inferior specimens of humanity, blacks and Indians, could be reduced to subhuman statuses, worked like animals, and denied the most elemental benefits of law and religion.11

As they attempted to colonize what seemed to them a “New World,” the English learned that their much vaunted civility transferred poorly across the Atlantic. In marchlands like these, Englishmen learned to be a

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bit savage to get by. But Manteo’s experience shows that the process could work both ways. He, too, might easily have left the English orbit, but he did not. He remained close to them, serving as an interpreter and a guide. He changed, selectively identifying himself with the newcomers, dressing like them, learning how to use their language and their weapons. Given the close quarters Manteo and Wanchese probably shared in England, and their shared language in a foreign land, it is improbable that Manteo would have been surprised by Wanchese’s return to his own people. But he could not have realized the extent to which standing between natives and newcomers, Algonquians and Englishmen, placed him on treacherous ground.12 When Grenville decided to dispatch men to explore the Carolina Sounds further, Manteo accompanied them. Perhaps Grenville hoped to find a site for settlement preferable to Roanoke. He anticipated the arrival of additional settlers later in the summer, and may have sought a location with resources adequate to support them, and a harbor where ocean-going ships could moor without running aground. Without such a site, the number of Englishmen that Ralegh’s mariners could land in America would remain limited. The wreck of the Tyger had demonstrated the problems they would face unless they found a solution. A tilt-boat, two ship’s boats, and a pinnace, carrying Grenville, Lane, Harriot, White, Philip Amadas, and about forty others, “passed over the water from Ococon to the mayne land victualled for eight dayes.”13 The next day they arrived at Pomeiooc, the home of the weroance Piemacum. The Pomeioocs welcomed the English. With Manteo serving as interpreter and cultural broker, the explorers, slowly becoming more familiar with native protocol, exchanged gifts and formal greetings with their hosts. Some of the party moved into the interior to explore Lake Paquippe. Manteo stayed with Harriot and White, aiding them as they gathered additional information about the people of Pomeiooc. White composed a painting of the large, palisaded town, and also completed portraits of “a chiefe Herowans wife of Pomeioc and her daughter of the age of . or . yeares,” an “aged man in his winter garment,” and another “wife of an Herowan of Pomeioc” carrying her baby on her back.14 It is worth noting that the English visited Pomeiooc first. In , Barlowe reported that Piemacum and Wingina had engaged in a “mortall warre” against each other If Wingina had been wounded in battle, and parts of his country “left Desolate” and “marvelously wasted” in a war with Piemacum, perhaps the Pomeioocs offered Grenville the promise of a more

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attractive alliance than that proposed by Wingina. Certainly Wingina recognized that the English were fair-weather friends, and that they had no reservations about being friendly with one of his more lethal rivals. That the Pomeioocs welcomed the newcomers suggests that, like Wingina, they saw in the English a prospective ally and trading partner. Piemacum treated the English well, and wanted them to feel welcome.15 Whatever Piemacum’s intent, the English decided to keep moving. On July  the expedition “passed by water to Aquascococke,” a town on the shore of the Pungo River estuary that must have owed some allegiance to Piemacum. The formal greetings, the rounds of ritual, and the feasting would have continued, as the Aquascogocs attempted to forge an alliance with the newcomers. From there, the English moved on to Secotan, where they arrived on July  and “were well intertayned there of the Savages.” Here White had the opportunity to complete a number of paintings. He depicted the town itself, and “the wife of an Herowan of Secotan.”16 The Secotans allowed the English to feel at ease. The explorers spent the night there. Feasting would have continued late into the night. The English party would have watched the Secotans perform the dances and rituals that purified the strangers and welcomed them into the community, a world of ritual they could not have understood without Manteo’s assistance. The following morning all but one of the boats began the return trip to Wococon, where they arrived on July . Philip Amadas, in one of the ship’s boats, led a group of men back to Aquascogoc “to demaund a silver cup which one of the Savages had stolen from us.” Amadas would have needed an interpreter to make his demands known, so he would have had Manteo with him. The Aquascogocs’ weroances met the Englishmen. Perhaps the Aquascogocs denied taking the cup. Perhaps they viewed the cup as a gift that could not be returned, or they felt that taking items from foreigners was permissible. They may have thought Amadas made much ado about nothing. The Aquascogoc weroance, however, must have sensed the fury of the English, an anger he found irrational, unreasonable, and rude. He promised the angry and frightened Englishmen that he would try to retrieve the cup. The English waited, but nothing happened. The weroance was stalling, a risky gambit. He sensed the danger his people were in. He may have experienced the violence of Europeans at an earlier time, or heard tales of their ferocity and savagery. He wanted to buy his followers time to flee. Amadas grew angrier. He saw the women and children leaving the town, moving out of harm’s way. These Algonquians apparently had reason to

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anticipate violence. Not recovering the cup from the weroance “according to his promise,” the one chronicler of the incident reported, Amadas’s men “burnt, and spoyled their Corne, and Towne, all the people being fledde.”17 No retaliation followed the brutal attack at Aquascogoc, a fact that can help us make some sense of the political geography of the region. Barlowe had learned of Pomeiooc and Secotan in , but he made no mention then of Aquascogoc. Manteo could have told the English about the town, and he probably did. But it is likely that it was Piemacum who first described Aquascogoc to the newcomers and identified the town as dependent upon him. We know that the Secotans maintained some connections with Wingina’s people, even if the nature of that connection is difficult to define with precision. Piemacum of Pomeiooc and Wingina were enemies. No one from Dasemunkepeuc, Roanoke, or Secotan lifted a finger to avenge the destruction of Aquascogoc. For Piemacum to have retaliated would have required that his warriors enter the territory of a hostile weroance, a situation that invited perhaps more conflict than he wanted.18 It is not difficult to imagine that word of the burning of Aquascogoc traveled quickly throughout the Carolina Sounds, so that shortly after Grenville’s party returned to Wococon, Wingina knew what had happened. The fury of the English assault had fallen on one of his enemies, a factor that complicated his assessment of the newcomers. There still was Wanchese, who saw in the English a dangerous threat to the Indians’ way of life. The scorched-earth tactics employed by the English were something new and frightening, a show of force far in excess of what the original insult justified. While the Powhatan weroance Wahunsonacock apparently engaged in the wholesale destruction of his opponents, the people of Ossomocomuck had learned a practice of war that emphasized personal bravery and skill rather than wholesale slaughter. The most common “maner of warres amongst themselves,” Harriot wrote, “is either by sudden surprising one an other most commonly about the dawning of the day, or moone light, or else by ambushes, or some suttle devises.” Pitched battles, which Harriot would have understood as the massing of men in formations, were rare, and when they did occur they took place “where there are many trees, where eyther part may have some hope of defence, after the deliverie of each arrow, in leaping behind some or other.”19 The peoples of Ossomocomuck traditionally fought their wars for specific and limited purposes, for control of strategically critical resources, for

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access to trade, and to impose their will upon other communities. However, like other peoples in the Eastern Woodlands, they also fought what historians now believe ought to be called “mourning wars.” The loss of a member of the community left kin and neighbors grieving. One socially acceptable path for assuaging this sadness was to launch a raid looking for captives or slaves to “replace” the deceased member of the community. For this type of warfare to serve its purpose, casualties must be kept to a minimum, an imperative that influenced Algonquian tactics: quick movement, the use of cover, and a tendency to flee rather than suffer losses.20 The English viewed the Indians’ “skulking way of war” as unmanly and cowardly, and the attack at Aquascogoc shows that the encounter between Englishmen and Algonquians in Ossomocomuck brought together two very different philosophies of war. If the Aquascogoc attack seemed unnecessarily savage and violent, however, the burning of the town may as well have demonstrated to Wingina that he might find the English useful in his conflicts with his neighbors, an extremely dangerous weapon, if he could control them. If Manteo found himself standing on treacherous ground between Indian and Englishman, Wingina stood in a similar situation, uncomfortably placed between Indians repelled by and attracted to the newcomers. He had a weapon, if he could learn how to use it, but doing so might also come with costs. He must have considered the possibility that English fury could descend on his own people if he took a wrong step. The power of the English to do great things now stood in stark contrast to their ability to do enormous damage to those who offended them.21 While Grenville’s party had been away, repairs to the Tyger proceeded. By July  at the latest this work was complete, and the entire fleet “wayed anker for Hatoraske.” They sailed at a leisurely pace along the Outer Banks, arriving finally at Hatorask, or Port Ferdinando, on July . Manteo, and some others, made the quick trip across to Roanoke Island to reestablish relations with Granganimeo.22 It was the first time that they had seen each other in nearly a year. Granganimeo certainly had many questions. The Englishmen must have stood apart, listening as the two Algonquians engaged in a spirited conversation that the newcomers could not understand. Manteo could have told Granganimeo that the strange technology the English had displayed the summer before was nothing beside the many marvels he had seen on his journey. Wingina certainly was involved in these discussions. The records, sparse as they are, demonstrate clearly that he wanted to know more. After meeting

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for two days, Granganimeo, “brother to King Wingino, came aboord the Admirall, and Manteo with him.” Manteo served as an interpreter once again, as Granganimeo and Grenville discussed plans for the site of the English settlement. Wingina, Manteo told Grenville, would allow the English to establish a post on the northern tip of Roanoke Island, close to the Indian village there. Wingina thus kept the Englishmen near his people and effectively isolated from native rivals who may have wished to establish relations with the newcomers on their own. Wingina would control access to Ralegh’s colonists.23 It is an important point. The familiar image of stalwart European explorers climbing from their boats, planting the flag, and claiming the New World does not fit the reality of what occurred at Roanoke. Grenville acceded to the Algonquians’ invitation. Once again, English colonists came to Roanoke Island not as discoverers but as invited guests. They settled on Roanoke Island because Wingina allowed them to do so, and the English recognized clearly the dynamics of the relationship. They did not have the power to dictate to native peoples the terms under which they took possession of American soil. They took what they were given. As the newcomers began transporting men and supplies from ship to shore, one more exploring party sailed up into the interior. Led once again by Amadas, they apparently sailed up the Albemarle Sound to “Weapemeoke.” Given the maps that survive from the  colony, Harriot or White probably went along. An interpreter was needed as well, so perhaps Manteo accompanied the party. Twenty leagues from Roanoke, one colonist suggested, the English “landed and met some of the natives of those parts” who were “enemies of those of Puerto Fernando.” Amadas’s force attacked and killed approximately twenty warriors and captured “some of the women whom they gave to the other savages.” Amadas and the colonists had now engaged in two conflicts with natives on the Carolina Sounds. Both attacks, as far as the sources allow us to determine, fell upon enemies of Wingina. By delivering the captive women to the Roanokes, the newcomers had powerfully asserted their worth as allies.24 It is not possible to tell how long Amadas was gone. We do know that he had returned to Roanoke by September , but it is almost certain that he arrived well before that. In the first week of August, as the colonists carried the supplies ashore, much of the fleet prepared to sail for England. The wreck of the Tyger was significant; because of the destruction of the provisions in the ship’s hold, Grenville left a smaller force than he originally

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had intended, only  men. It is unlikely that Wingina would have welcomed a larger force in any case. On the th of August, the governor of the colony, Ralph Lane, wrote several letters home, suggesting that most of the ships were ready to depart. Lane believed the colony would succeed, but he had little patience for those who spoke of Christianizing the Indians. The land, he wrote, “was fytte to be cyvylly, and Chrystyanly inhabited, as at the presente yt is inhabited only with savages.” Amadas had reported to Lane that more Indians lived “towards the weste, where there are townes of theyere fasshyone, scytuated upon moost delicate plattes of grounde.” And though he found himself “in the myddest of infynyte businesses, as having, emungst sauvages, the chardege of wylede menn of myne owene nacione, Whose unrulynes is suche as not to gyve leasure to goovernour to bee al most at eny tyme from them,” he pledged to keep order.25 Lane understood what the promoters of the enterprise wanted to hear. He told the elder Richard Hakluyt that “we have discouvered the maine to bee the goodliest soile under the cope of heaven, so abounding with sweete trees, that bring such sundry rich and most pleasant gummes, grapes of such greatnes, yet wild, as France, Spaine, and Italy hath no greater, so many sortes of Apothecarie drugs, such severall kindes of flaxe, and one kind like silke, the same gathered of a grasse, as common there as grasse is here.” From the outset, Lane found the people of the interior—more numerous and living in larger towns—better prospects than Wingina’s people as prospective English allies. With cattle and horses, “no realme in Christendom” would equal “Virginia,” and Lane believed that “what commodities soevere Spaine, France, and Italy or the east parts do yield unto us in wines of all sortes, in oiles, in flaxe, in rosens, pitch, frankensence, currans, sugers, & such like, these parts do abound with the growth of them all, but being savages that possesse the land, they know noe use of the same.”26 In this the governor differed from Hakluyt and Harriot. Lane saw little place for Indians in his vision of Virginia. Perhaps as many as  of the  men who remained with Lane on the island were soldiers. They were products of a world of violence, where the possible was defined by the force available to achieve it. So as Wingina and his people struggled to make sense of the newcomers, and disagreed over the best course to follow, the English, too, were divided over the place of Indians at the outpost Ralegh and his backers wished to establish. Harriot and White, especially, saw in the Indians enormous potential. In , for instance, when the Flemish

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engraver Theodor DeBry published an edition of Harriot’s Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, he included engravings based on White’s original artwork. At the urging of White and Harriot, he also included engravings “of the Pictes, which in the olde tyme did habite one part of the great Bretainne.” The point was simple. Harriot and White believed that “the Inhabitants of great Bretannie have bin in times past as sauvage as those of Virginia.” The Indians are, Harriot and White argued, as we once were, and with education and patience they could be improved. They could, in a word, progress. Men of this mind played a critical role in justifying Ralegh’s colonization efforts and generating support for them at home. Once they arrived in America, they found themselves forced to work with soldiers who shared few of their philanthropic concerns.27 Wingina and his people watched as the English began constructing a settlement about half a mile from their village. The Englishmen threw up an earthen rampart on which they erected a palisade. They built a single stronghold within to provide short-term shelter for the colonists in the event of a surprise attack. Lane believed that the offensive potential of English weaponry served as his best defense against the Indians. He does not appear to have been overly concerned at the outset about the military abilities of Wingina’s warriors. The colonists built individual homes for the colony’s leaders, and perhaps a larger building to house colonists of lesser rank. All these, we believe, stood outside the palisade. They may have also built a blacksmith or apothecary shop where Harriot and the Swiss-born metallurgist Joaquim Ganz conducted a variety of experiments.28 With his knowledge of the Carolina Algonquians’ language, and with the assistance of Manteo, Harriot worked to establish a peaceful working relationship with Wingina’s people. Historians often commend Harriot for his relative open-mindedness toward the Indians, and his willingness to learn from them. Historians depict Harriot as an enlightened Englishman, representing an alternative to the violence that historically has characterized so much of the Anglo-Indian exchange. There is much truth in this, for Harriot was not a killer, but focusing on his considerable virtue in this fashion slights the importance of Algonquians in this story. Too often in American history, when hostilities erupt on the frontier the Indians are blamed. Peaceful relations, through a process that is equally unjust, are attributed to the wisdom and foresight of certain Englishmen, whether Harriot or, for instance, Roger Williams or William Penn. We must remember, however,

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that the colonists planted themselves on Roanoke only at the sufferance of Wingina and his people. Harriot, White, and Manteo entered Granganimeo’s village only with the permission of those who lived there. Were it not for them, and their willingness to welcome the outsiders, Harriot never would have had occasion to write his famous Report. There can be no doubt that he hoped the English could achieve their imperial objectives in America while maintaining peace with the Algonquians, but we might better view Harriot as an unusually courteous guest than a tolerant statesman.29 The Roanokes welcomed Harriot to their village. They engaged in extensive conversations with him, crossing as far beyond the language barrier as he and Manteo’s ability to translate allowed. Only Algonquian hospitality could have allowed Harriot to acquire the information he presented in his Report, a book that is at once an early anthropological treatise and a masterfully written piece of promotional literature designed to generate interest in Ralegh’s enterprise and defend the project from its defamers. Harriot saw much to admire among the “naturall Inhabitants.” Their agriculture was extraordinarily productive, and their ability to derive sustenance from the land impressed him. He found their manners modest and temperate and, in some cases, thought both his fellow colonists and Englishmen and women at home might learn much from them. The villagers taught Harriot about the geography of Ossomocomuck, the names and uses for a great variety of plants and trees, and the names of different animals. Harriot must have questioned the Roanokes incessantly, and they did their best to educate him. They taught Harriot enough to allow him to provide his readers with a wonderful description of Algonquian systems of belief. The Roanokes taught Harriot about their belief “in the immortalitie of the soule, that after this life as soon as the soule is departed from the bodie, according to the workes it hath done, it is eyther carried to heaven the habitacle of gods, there to enjoy perpetuall blisse and happinesse, or els to a great pitte or hole, which they thinke to bee in the furthest partes of their part of the worlde toward the sunne set, there to burn continually.” They told Harriot of spiritual journeys Algonquians took to Popogusso, an Algonquian hell, and of spirit travelers who died and were buried, but whose souls remained alive. One individual, from his grave, “traveled fare in a long broade waie, on both sides whereof grewe most delicate and pleasuant trees, bearing more rare and excellent fruites, then ever he had seene before or was able to expresse, and at length came to most brave and faire houses, neere which

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hee met his father, that had beene dead before, who gave him charge to goe backe againe and show his friendes what good they were to doe to enjoy the pleasures of that place, which when he had done he should after come againe.” These things Harriot learned “by having special familiarity with some of their priests.” But as the Roanokes were educating their ally, teaching him how to behave and socializing him into the mores and values of an Algonquian village community, they were attempting to learn as much from Harriot as he was from them.30 He told them of the Bible, of the rituals of English Christianity. From him, the priests learned that the newcomers intended to stay and sought wealth in the form of pearls, metals, and what the English called “merchantable commodities.” The priests learned that the newcomers wanted allies, but also that they hoped the people of Ossomocomuck would change their ways and become more like the English. Harriot recognized that the Indians were, “in respect of us . . . a people poore” and untutored. But he also believed that “if meanes of good government bee used . . . they may in a short time be brought to civilitie, and the imbracing of true religion.”31 No English writer of the era had more faith in the capacity of the Indians for improvement. Still, the best Harriot could see in the Indians was the possibility that they might, if treated with care and caution, become something else, something more like him. Indians, Harriot believed, were in a state of becoming, and he never imagined that Wingina’s people could be happy and live rich lives as they were. Harriot was no heavy-handed missionary. He did not push religion to the point that his countrymen at later colonies would. But he mistook the Roanokes’ polite behavior, and their desire to learn about the newcomers who had intruded into their world, for a desire to become Englishmen. Wingina’s people watched the English and continued to learn what they could about and from them. They sought to understand the English on Algonquian terms. That they traded and interacted with the colonists did not mean that they wanted to be like them.32 Wingina’s people sought to acquire goods through trade with the English colonists. By talking to Harriot, and watching the newcomers, at least some of Wingina’s people came to view Ralegh’s settlers as powerful people bearing magical and otherworldly items permeated with montoac, a power that allowed the English, in one historian’s apt phrase, “to do things that ordinary human beings could not.”33 From observing Wingina’s followers, and conversing with others, Harriot learned that “most things they saw with us,

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as Mathematicall instruments, sea compasses, the vertue of the loadstone in drawing yron, a perspective glasse whereby was shewed manie strange sightes, burning glasses, wildfire woorkes, gunnes, bookes, writing and reading, spring clocks that seeme to goe of themselves, and manie other things that we had, were so straunge unto them, and so farre exceeded their capacities to comprehend the reason and meanes how they should be made and done, that they thought they were rather the works of god then of men, or at the leastwise they had been given and taught us of the gods.”34 We know that Wingina, who began to spend much of his time on Roanoke Island, and others of his followers as well looked for the means to acquire powers like those possessed by the English. From Harriot’s perspective, it appeared that the Roanokes, impressed by English material culture and the power it seemingly possessed, were ripe for conversion. Harriot observed that Wingina’s people had “such opinion of us, as that if they knew not the trueth of god and religion already, it was rather to be had from us, whom God so specially loved then from a people that were so simple, as they found themselves to be in comparison of us.” The Indians, Harriot reported, listened closely to what he had to say.35 But this was not a case of conversion, of Indians listening to English theological arguments and accepting them at the level of fundamental belief. Wingina’s people approached the newcomers with assumptions—about who the English were, what they wanted, and how they should be treated— that drew nourishment from their own long history in Ossomocomuck. They viewed the English through lenses crafted of native manufacture. Montoac, the spiritual power the English seemed to possess in such abundance, allowed individuals to do unusual things. It also allowed them to stay alive. Wingina’s people conducted ritual to keep their world in order and to ensure an adequate harvest and ample supplies of game. And within weeks of the newcomers’ arrival, this quest for power became for his people quite literally a matter of life and death. The scant remaining records reveal that relations between natives and newcomers late in the summer and into the fall were overwhelmingly peaceful. Harriot and others traveled about, showing off their wares, learning about the potential of the countryside, and engaging in diplomatic encounters with prospective allies. Manteo accompanied Harriot on these expeditions. So did Wingina, who heightened his own stature in the eyes of his followers and other neighbors through alliance with the mysterious but powerful newcomers.

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Yet, as the English explored the Carolina Sounds, Wingina and others were reminded of the amorality that characterized all montoac, and that the power the English possessed could do evil as well as good. English technology and material culture deeply impressed the Roanoke Indians, but the power manifested by English disease perplexed and frightened them. Both factors intensified the Indians’ conviction that the newcomers possessed great montoac. “The Wiroans with whom we dwelt called Wingina, and many of his people,” Harriot wrote, “would be glad many times to be with us at our praiers, and many times to call upon us both in his owne towne, as also in others whither he sometimes accompanied us, to pray and sing Psalmes.” It is truly an incredible image: Algonquians and Englishmen, a short time after the newcomers arrived, gathering together to sing God’s praises. It is almost unbelievable, until we consider Harriot’s explanation for this behavior, this openness on the part of the Algonquians to the public rituals of English Christianity. By joining the English in prayer and in the singing of psalms, Harriot observed, Wingina hoped “thereby to bee partaker of the same effectes which wee by that meanes also expected.”36 Twice Wingina fell ill. He would have attempted to cure himself through the ingestion or application of a number of traditionally effective remedies. When those failed, he called upon the assistance of supernatural powers. This was not unusual. But the priests and shamans could not help him, and Wingina grew desperate. He “lay languishing, doubting of anie helpe by his owne priestes.” He was not alone. According to Harriot, in a number of towns the English faced some sort of opposition from the Indians. The English did nothing to retaliate, “but within a few dayes after our departure from evrie such towne, the people began to die very fast, and many in short space: in some townes about twentie, in some fourtie, in some sixtie, & in one sixe score, which in trueth was very manie in respect of their numbers.”37 The English did not describe symptoms, so it is unlikely that they understood the specific cause. Clearly the disease struck quickly and killed with brutal efficiency, though we cannot know for sure the specific nature of the disease or how it was transmitted from person to person. No record describes sickness among the English. Most probably it was some variety of influenza. Modern medical historians have found that outbreaks of this sort can produce fatality rates exceeding  percent. The outbreak stunned the Algonquians and further complicated their understandings of the English newcomers. Wingina recognized that the illness was beyond the abilities

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of his priests, so he called upon the English for assistance. Algonquian rituals had failed. The English conducted rituals as part of their religious life. Perhaps these offered a means to assuage the wrath of Kiwasa. Wingina, Harriot wrote, after he fell ill “sent for some of us to praie and bee a meanes to our God that it would please him either that he might live, or after death dwell with him in blisse, so likewise were the requestes of manie others in the like case.”38 The disease was “so strange” to the Indians, Harriot continued, “that they neither knew what it was, nor how to cure it.” For Carolina Algonquians, there were no accidents, no random events. Bad things happened for a reason, because of a failure of ritual, or the displeasure of Kiwasa. If Algonquian rituals failed to secure relief from the onslaught, perhaps other rituals might work. Indian religions throughout the Eastern Woodlands historically were characterized by their dynamism, their openness to innovation. Algonquian communities readily incorporated rituals from neighboring groups that seemed especially powerful and effective.39 Indians incorporated Christian rituals into native contexts for precisely the same reason. So it is not surprising that Wingina called upon the English to pray for him. English religion had its rituals. The English did not get sick. It was a basic syllogism. In the rituals of these newcomers, whose technology already suggested that they possessed such great montoac, perhaps there lay salvation from disease.40 When, for instance, Harriot and his companions entered a village, they made, as best their language skills allowed, “declaration of the contentes of the Bible, that therein was set foorth the true and onelie God, and his mightie woorkes.” The Bible, Harriot told the villagers, “contained the true doctrine of salvation through Christ,” and he described the “manie particularities of Miracles and chiefe poyntes of religion, as I was able then to utter, and thought fitte for the time.” It is not clear what the Algonquians thought of Harriot’s teaching, and how these abstract ideas changed through the process of translation, but they did watch how the English made use of the Bible. The English read from it, held it on high. The Algonquians, Harriot noted, wanted to touch the book, “to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their breasts and heades, and stroke over all their bodie with it.” For Harriot, this was evidence of the Indians’ “hungrie desire of that knowledge which was spoken of,” but he missed the point. When Wingina’s people watched the English kneel down in prayer, “and went abowt to imitate us,” they did so not because they desired Christianity, but because they

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wanted access to the sacred power that enabled the English to stay alive in Ossomocomuck while Indians suffered.41 Wingina believed that English ritual could limit the impact of disease on his community. From here, it was just a small step for him to conclude that the English controlled the disease. Wingina asked that the newcomers deploy disease, as it were, as a weapon. He had learned of the attacks by the English on his rivals at Aquascogoc and on the Albemarle Sound. These raids were devastating because of the strength of English fire and steel. Here was a new weapon, even more powerful. The Algonquians, Harriot wrote, believed that disease “was the worke of our God through our meanes, and that wee by him might kil and slaie whom wee would without weapons and not come neere them.” They begged the English to send the disease against their native rivals, so that they “might in like sort die, alleaging how much it would be for our credite and profite, as also theirs; and hoping furthermore that we would do so much at their requests in respect of the friendship we professe them.”42 Wingina’s request demonstrates the high level of animosity between the Algonquians on Roanoke and their rivals. They wished something truly devastating upon their enemies. They also expected things from the English. We are allies. We are, as Granganimeo told Barlowe, “all one.” We feed you, and now we need your assistance. Halt the spread of the sickness. Send it out upon our enemies. Harriot told the Roanokes that the English God did not answer prayers of this sort, but the disease struck Wingina’s opponents anyway. The Roanokes offered thanks to the English, noting that even though the newcomers had said that they could not help, “yet in deedes and effect we had fulfilled their desires.” Harriot noted that “this marvelous accident,” an epidemic that wrecked hundreds of coastal Algonquian lives, “in all the countrie wrought so strange opinions of us, that some people could not tel whether to thinke us gods or men, and the rather because that all the space of their sicknesse, there was no man of ours knowne to die, or that was specially sicke.”43 “Gods or men”: it is a phrase Harriot used twice in his Report, once when he described the reaction of Wingina’s people to English technology and a second time when he discussed their understanding of the horrors of epidemic disease. When Harriot tried to make sense of the Algonquian concept of montoac he used the English word gods. Both disease and technology awed the Algonquians with a sense of the great power possessed by the colonists. Indeed, Harriot wrote, “there could at no time happen

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any strange sicknesse, losses, hurtes, or any other crosse unto them, but that they would impute to us the cause or meanes thereof for offending or not pleasing us.” The colonists, moreover, settled at Roanoke in the midst of a drought, intensifying the pressure the newcomers must have put on native subsistence measures. The Indians on the island, Harriot said, “would come to us and desire us to pray to our God of England, that he would preserve their corne, promising that when it was ripe we also should be partakers of the fruite.” The newcomers brought death and destruction. They controlled the weather, and kept away the rains. Some began to fear the newcomers’ power and began to look for means to avoid their wrath.44 Late in the fall Wingina and his followers noticed that a group of Englishmen had gathered their supplies and left the outpost on Roanoke Island. They could not know that Governor Lane thought that a better site for long-term settlement might be found elsewhere, but they would have discovered where the English party went. The English had already looked in the vicinity of Secotan and the Albemarle Sound, but English violence eliminated these possibilities. This time, a party headed north, toward Chesapeake Bay. We cannot tell for sure which of the colonists moved north to reconnoiter the Chesapeake. To judge from the detail of the maps he composed, John White certainly was a member of the group. Lane would have sent soldiers, too. He would have needed to retain an interpreter at Roanoke, so it is unlikely that he would have sent both Manteo and Harriot to the north. Nothing in Harriot’s Report suggests a familiarity with the region, and he reported that “some of our company . . . have wandered in some places where I have not bene.” Given that relations with Wingina’s people apparently had been established, and that Manteo was the most skilled interpreter, Harriot probably remained at the outpost, conducting his experiments, assessing the island’s resources, and overseeing whatever intercultural business that arose. Manteo would have been most useful on the Chesapeake, where the English were encountering new groups of native peoples for the first time.45 The English records contain almost no information about the Chesapeake outpost, but from what remains, it appears that its brief history serves as something of a microcosm of the larger story. The English party sailed north and entered the bay. They stopped at a number of villages near its mouth, Chesapeoc and Apassus near today’s Norfolk and three villages on

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Virginia’s Eastern Shore: Massawatoc, Combec, and a third that White did not name. At these sites the familiar protocol of greeting foreigners was acted out. Natives and newcomers exchanged gifts and assessed motives. In some towns the English were welcomed, and in others they were encouraged to make their stay as short as possible.46 Ultimately the English accepted an invitation to settle near a site known as “Skicoak,” the capital town of the Chesapeake Indians. The “territorie and soyle” of the Chesapeakes, Lane learned from the members of the expedition, “was for pleasantness of seate, for temperature of Climate, for fertilitie of soyle, and for the commoditie of the Sea, besides multitude of beares (being an excellent good victual, with great woods of Sassafras, and Wall nut trees), is not to be excelled by any other whatsoever.” Skicoak, Barlowe had learned the year before, was the “greatest citie” of the Chesapeakes.47 English montoac was as attractive and intriguing to the Chesapeakes as it was to Algonquians on the Carolina Sounds. “Sundry kings,” Lane wrote, from “Countries of great fertilitie adjoining to the same, as the Mandoages, Tripanicks, and Opossians,” traveled “to visit the Colonie of the English, which I had for a time appointed to be resident there.” All these names are obscure. The Mandoags, also known as the Mangoaks, were an Iroquoianspeaking community, probably Meherrin and perhaps Nottoway, with powerful trading connections in the interior. The Tripanicks, perhaps the people better known as the Algonquian Nansemonds, lived on lands between the Chesapeake Indians and natives of the interior. The Opossians, who lived to the west of the Tripanicks, were likely the Algonquian Warraskoyacks.48 All wanted trade. The Chesapeakes, who must have benefited from their role as middlemen, extended an invitation to the English to settle permanently in the region. They would have secured thereby a supply of trade goods from the newcomers that demonstrated considerable montoac. They witnessed the power of English weapons as the newcomers hunted the many bears that they found in the region. And finally the Chesapeakes almost certainly saw in these newcomers a useful ally in their conflict with the powerful Powhatan chiefdom to their immediate north.49 But even here we begin to see evidence that the power of the English could manifest itself in a malevolent and destructive fashion. White identified three villages on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. When John Smith visited the area two decades later, only two remained. The Accomacks who lived in the region told Smith of “a strange mortalitie” that had devastated the community. Few survived. Their weroance told Smith that the disease struck

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quickly, was of short duration, and was very deadly. As with the outbreaks of disease described by Harriot, the weroance reported no specific symptoms. Influenza becomes most virulent and deadly in winter, when it begins to work hand in hand with pneumonia, cutting gaping holes in the fabric of native life. It was most likely then that the English party visited these towns on the Eastern Shore. The Accomacks’ experience showed that even fleeting contact with the newcomers could bring devastating results.50 The English settlement was small, barely one hundred men, but by the beginning of winter it had done much damage. Disease was one thing. During the entire history of colonization, even cursory contact with Europeans launched horrible epidemics in native communities. But there was more to the problem than that. Governor Lane was apparently quick to take offense and to use force. Even Harriot complained of the violence used by the colonists. Their laziness was another problem. If Lane saw the colonists as “wyldemenn,” Harriot said that many of them “were of a nice bringing up, only in cities or townes, or such as never . . . had seene the world before.” The wreck of the Tyger had destroyed the bulk of the colonists’ provisions, yet they “had little or no care of any other thing but to pamper their bellies.” Much of Harriot’s report focused on what the Indians ate, and there is no doubt that the English relied heavily on Wingina’s people for food. As drought withered that fall’s harvest, and the weather turned colder, this burden became difficult for the Indians to bear. The resulting strains on Wingina’s people, and the question how best to respond to them, generated divisions within the Roanoke Indian community. Wingina had to do something. As weroance, he was responsible. Followers expected their leaders to preserve balance and order. If all was going well, there was no cause for concern, but now Wingina’s people struggled. Ideas about power, how to acquire it, and what it could or could not do framed the resulting discussions. English power, it seemed, could both harm and help Indians. Though they could agree that they had declined relative to the newcomers, they were divided over what to do about it. In this sense, English settlement in Ossomocomuck produced devastation but not apathy and acquiescence. Wingina and his people responded creatively to the changes rending their communities, even as they debated the effects of close contact with the English.51 Manteo and Wanchese stood at the two extremes in this debate. Manteo had anglicized enough to earn the trust and respect of the English colonists, even those as suspicious of Indian motives, and as wary of treachery, as the

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colony’s governor. No evidence exists to suggest that Manteo ever wavered in his cooperation with the English. His motives cannot be reconstructed with absolute certainty. It seems at least plausible that he found both status and security through cooperation with what he believed to be the more powerful English. Someone from elsewhere in Ossomocomuck who wished to speak to the English had to go through Manteo. Wanchese, on the other hand, quickly left the colonists and returned to his people. He saw the newcomers as a threat. He had seen enough during his sojourn in England to eliminate any affection he may initially have felt toward the colonists. Sent to England by his weroance to learn about the newcomers, he may have anticipated the problems the English settlement produced: the pressure upon their food supplies, the violence, and the death.52 Others, who of course had not gone to England, wavered between these two poles, trying to secure their own and their people’s survival in an arena of unprecedented change. Granganimeo, the Roanoke weroance who had greeted Barlowe’s expedition the year before, and Ensenore, described as a “savage father” to Wingina, apparently agreed that the newcomers possessed great montoac. They hoped to secure their people’s survival through careful accommodation to, and cooperation with, the English visitors. They feared the newcomers’ wrath. Ensenore, for instance, a man of great influence in Wingina’s councils, according to Harriot was among those who “were of the opinion that we were not borne of women, and therefore not mortall, but that wee were men of an old generation many yeeres past then risen againe to immortalitie.” Harriot reported that Ensenore, and Indians who thought like him, believed that the English colonists were aided by invisible warriors, who “by our intreaty & for the love of us did make the people to die . . . as they did by shooting invisible bullets into them.” According to Ralph Lane, Ensenore opposed all who suggested that the English be attacked and driven from the island. Ensenore warned those “amongst them that sought our destruction,” that instead they “should finde their owne, and not be able to work ours.” Fearing what he believed to be extremely powerful, otherworldly beings, “dead men returned into the world againe . . . that . . . doe not remayne dead but for a certaine time, and that then . . . returne againe,” Ensenore believed that it was not possible to kill the English.53 It is a fascinating statement, one that places in stark relief just how frightening the power of the Englishmen could be. How, indeed, Ensenore asked, could you kill powerful and terrifying beings who were not alive? Ensenore’s warnings that the English were “the servants of God,” and that

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the newcomers “were not subject to be destroyed by” the Roanokes because they possessed such great montoac carried weight with Wingina. He recognized their power. He had seen their weapons, and marveled at their immunity to the diseases that killed Algonquians throughout Ossomocomuck. But he also could not have missed the violence, and their intolerance. The weroance listened to those of his advisers like Wanchese, who argued that the English should be attacked and driven off the island, but during the last months of  and into the spring of , he sided with Ensenore. Wingina joined those of his people who sought the assistance of English prayers to combat the effects of drought. In these rituals, he thought, salvation might still be found. Certainly, at Ensenore’s urging, he continued feeding the English, caring for his ally, and holding the tiger by the tail. Unlike Manteo and Wanchese, whose experiences with the English at home and abroad had forged for them strong impressions of the colonists, Wingina, Ensenore, Granganimeo, and others felt their way along slowly. They tried to understand the sources of English power and to incorporate that power into their accustomed ways of living. They attempted to understand the reasons for the misfortunes that had befallen them. They joined the English in prayer. They learned to sing their psalms. They assessed carefully how best to protect the interests of their community when confronted by visitors who appeared to have the power to do things that Algonquians could not. Doing so, of course, required a significant willingness to experiment. For Wingina, this effect was nothing less than profoundly disillusioning. Buffeted in a world of rapid change, Wingina experimented with English cultural forms and practices in order to secure the power that preserved and bestowed so many benefits upon the settlers. The English prayed, read from books, and gathered together to worship their god. They did not fall ill. They did not die. English power, however, provided few answers for Wingina’s beleaguered people. Indeed, English montoac manifested itself in malevolence, in death, and in suffering. Wingina moved rapidly away from the accommodationism of Granganimeo and Ensenore, and toward Wanchese’s openly hostile position. Deaths from disease continued. Granganimeo was among the casualties during the winter of –. The rains never came. Lane’s hungry settlers placed increasingly dangerous pressure on limited Algonquian food supplies. Like Wanchese, Wingina arrived at the conclusion that his people’s problems stemmed from contact with the English. What to do about the crisis was another question.54

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A K  I C

G

ranganimeo died sometime during the winter of –. Afterward Wingina changed his name to Pemisapan and, according to Lane, began plotting against the English. The precise significance of the name change is difficult to discern. We will never know for sure what it meant. We do know that Powhatan Indians changed their names on occasion. Opechancanough, for instance, took a new name during the winter of –, prior to the surprise attack he launched against the English colonists along the James River. The young woman known best as Pocahontas changed her name on a number of occasions during her life.1 James A. Geary, a linguist who assembled a glossary of Carolina Algonquian words, suggested that the name Pemisapan might reflect the vigilant attitude of one who watched from a distance, or one who supervised, “as if that were his office.” This is possible. Wingina’s adoption of a new name probably was related closely to Algonquian spirituality and the weroance’s developing understanding of the English. He had arrived at an important conclusion, a seminal moment in his life, and what followed from this point was going to be very different from all that came before. Pemisapan, as we shall call him from now on, one who watched things closely, had concluded that his people’s survival depended upon separating themselves from the English, whose arrival in Ossomocomuck had initiated drastic and devastating changes in his community.2 Governor Ralph Lane, who said little about the meaning of the name change, dedicated the second part of his account to a description of “the conspiracy of Pemisapan, the discoverie of the same, and at the last, of our 

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request to depart with Sir Francis Drake for England.” Pemisapan, Lane believed, orchestrated a massive Indian uprising directed toward the extermination of the English colonists. There is no reason to believe everything the colony’s governor had to say. Indeed, Lane’s account is our only source for the final months of the colony’s existence. As a result, we must handle his words with care. It is a difficult document to read, owing to the author’s imprecise language and the palpable confusion his work manifests. We must, as a result, question all his assumptions, his choice of words. We must look carefully at his descriptions of the things that he saw, and try to see these events from the perspective of Pemisapan’s followers. It is an imortant undertaking, for, at the end of the chain of events Lane described, Pemisapan lay dead with his head in Edward Nugent’s hand.3 Pemisapan’s proximity to the newcomers, Lane’s story went, provided him with enough richly valued English copper through trade to purchase a large following. According to Lane’s own self-serving account, Pemisapan sent word to the powerful Chowanoacs and Mangoaks of the interior, warning them that Lane and his men intended to sail into their territory and attack and kill any Indians they encountered. Indian villages along the Sound, then, should abandon their villages, remove their corn, and so starve the English invaders and their aggressive leader.4 But there is a problem here. Lane wrote his account of these events after his return to England in . At the time of this expedition, he believed something very different. Lane had told Pemisapan that he hoped to sail up the Albemarle Sound on a voyage of exploration, and he asked Pemisapan for guides. Pemisapan, Lane wrote, “did never rest to solicite continually my going upon them, certifying me of a general assembly . . . made by Menatonon at Choanoak of all his Weroances, & allyes to the number of  bowes preparing to come upon us att Roanoak, and that the Mangoaks also were joined in the same confederacie, who were able of themselves to bring as many more to the enterprise.”5 Ominous news, this. Pemisapan told Lane that perhaps , warriors, an incredible number, would descend on the English colony. It was to confront this “confederacie” that Lane began his voyage. But was Pemisapan telling Lane the truth? Pemisapan had enemies, we know. His warriors fought and had suffered to a point where he saw the English as important allies. Perhaps, by encouraging Lane to confront the Choanoac weroance Menatonon, Pemisapan intended to use the English as a weapon against an important native rival. The English had already roughed up closer threats

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at Aquascogoc and along the Albemarle Sound. The Choanoacs and Mangoaks would have liked to trade with the English in order to acquire objects manifesting the montoac that so attracted Wingina’s people. They probably would have welcomed the English as military allies as well. If Pemisapan monopolized this trade and access to the newcomers, this could have provoked opposition and rivalry between his people and those of the interior. There is no evidence of conflict between the Choanoacs and the coastal peoples, but we cannot rule it out as a possibility. In other words, a powerful native force may indeed have been gathering at Choanoac. Its target was Pemisapan, not the English, but with his people weakened by disease, Pemisapan needed all the help he could get. He had to think creatively. There are other explanations as well for Pemisapan’s frightening message. Pemisapan was weak, but the Choanoacs and Mangoaks were not. Fearing the consequences of further contact with the English, Pemisapan may have tried to provoke Lane to attack a native force far more powerful than anything the English had encountered thus far. If Pemisapan lacked the warriors necessary to rid himself of the English, other native communities in the region were not so weak. If Lane approached the Choanoacs and Mangoaks with his weapons drawn and looking for a fight, Pemisapan could reasonably have concluded that the bellicose English governor stood little chance of surviving. Whether Pemisapan hoped to eliminate Lane by sending him into the center of an aboriginal hornet’s nest, whether he intended to use Lane to eliminate his most powerful native rivals, or whether he was actively conspiring against the English is difficult to tell. What is clear and revealing is that Pemisapan did not expect the English to return from this journey into the interior. The English party, in the end, was even tougher and more powerful than he had anticipated. Lane and his men sailed in their pinnace to the head of the Albemarle Sound. As they sailed against the current they saw on their right the Weapemeoc towns situated along the northern bank. Lane had Indians along to serve as interpreters. Manteo, of course, was there. So were three Indians from Roanoke Island, Tetepano, Erecano, and Cossine, about whom we know nothing. Pemisapan probably offered Lane these men to serve as guides, but also as spies. He certainly could not trust Manteo, whom he may have seen as being too close to the English. Though Lane believed the Weapemeocs were friendly and could be relied upon, he and his men did not stop to visit. The thought of what he would find ahead concerned him too much.6

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Sometime early in March, Lane and his men climbed into the smaller vessels they carried in tow for the ascent of the Chowan River. Here they entered the territory of Menatonon, the principal weroance of Choanoac, “the greatest Province and Seigniorie lying upon that River.” Indians were indeed gathered at Choanoac when Lane arrived. Mangoaks were there, and so, too, were the Moratucs and some Weapemeocs. Manteo and the other Indians would have told Lane the towns from whence these Indians came. They would, as well, have pointed out Menatonon.7 We have no way of knowing what occasion brought so large an assembly of native peoples together, but it is not difficult to imagine that, if , warriors had assembled intent on attacking the English, Lane and his party would not have survived. Those who gathered at Choanoac that day in March interacted with each other according to social norms, expectations, and values that to them needed no explanation. They may have greeted the newcomers and expected to begin the ritual process of rendering these strangers familiar. They would have been shocked as Lane and his men, sixty strong, their matches lit, stormed into the center of the gathering and claimed the elderly Menatonon as their prisoner. Lane clearly believed that he had encountered the Choanoac-Mangoak “confederacie” of which Pemisapan had spoken earlier, and he was prepared to shoot first and ask questions later. The speed of his actions surprised Menatonon’s followers. And though Lane claimed that his decisiveness “did so dismay them, as it made us have the better hand at them,” Menatonon’s people did what many other Algonquians did historically when they encountered uncomprehending outsiders: they talked.8 Menatonon, “a man impotent in his lims,” Lane said, “but otherwise for a Savage, a very grave and wise man,” explained to the English leader that he had misapprehended the true situation. The Choanoacs and Mangoaks had no hostile designs against the English or the Indians at Roanoke. Pemisapan, Menatonon said, was the problem. It was he who had sent word to the Choanoacs, Lane wrote, “that our purpose was fully bent to destroy them.” It was Pemisapan, Menatonon said, who wanted to destroy the English.9 Whom do you believe? Pemisapan tells Lane that a large group of Indians is assembling upriver to strike at the English. Lane ascends the Albemarle Sound and at Choanoac finds a large gathering that fits this description. With a mixture of foolhardiness and courage, he storms the gathering and takes Menatonon, the Choanoac weroance, hostage. Speaking through an interpreter, Lane confronts Menatonon with what he has been told by

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Pemisapan. And now, at gunpoint, Menatonon turns the story upside down and around. We are not out to get you, Menatonon tells Lane. Pemisapan said that you were going to attack us? Pemisapan said that we have hostile designs against you? Nonsense. It is Pemisapan who intends your destruction. The two Indian leaders cannot both be telling the truth. Lane continued to talk with Menatonon. The tensions that arose when he stormed the gathering subsided. Lane, as time passed, concluded that Menatonon was a friend, and Pemisapan was an enemy. Menatonon knew nothing of Lane’s plans before the Englishmen arrived in his village. If he had been planning on attacking the English or Pemisapan’s people, or anticipating an attack from the English, he would not have allowed Lane’s armed force to march into the middle of his town. Menatonon was surprised by Lane’s impetuous assault and told the Englishman what he thought Lane wanted to hear. Menatonon answered Lane’s questions for two days. According to Lane, the Choanoac weroance “gave mee more understanding and light of the Country then I had receaved by all the searches and salvages that before I or any of my companie had had conference with.” Menatonon provided his captor with a geography lesson. Three days farther up the Chowan River, Menatonon told Lane, and then four days travel overland, “a certaine Kings countrey, whose Province lyeth upon the Sea” would be found. This “King,” Lane learned, “had so great quantities of Pearle, and doeth so ordinarily take the same, as that not onely his own skins that he weareth, and the better sort of his gentlemen and followers, are full set with the sayd Pearle, but also his beds, and houses are garnished with them, and that he hath such quantitie of them, that it is a wonder to see.”10 Menatonon must have detected Lane’s interest in the pearls. It would not have been difficult to do so. Perhaps the weroance hoped to send Lane on a journey into the Powhatan chiefdom, one he may have thought Lane unlikely to survive. Lane certainly planned on making this journey, but only once reinforcements arrived from England. The expedition, he believed, would require  men, so it would have to wait. Menatonon offered guides and provisions, and told Lane that Wahunsonacock, the Powhatan leader, “would be loth to suffer any strangers to enter into his Countrey, and especially to meddle with the fishing for any Pearle there, and that he was able to make a great many men into the feelde, which he sayd would fight very well.” Menatonon may have seen great promise in an alliance with the English, as a counter to Wahunsonacock’s power.11

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Menatonon told Lane as well of riches that lay to the westward, up the Roanoke, or Moratico, River. This venture was of immediate interest to the English leader. Forty days upstream, Menatonon told Lane, stood “this huge rocke . . . nere unto a Sea, that many times in stormes (the winde coming outwardly from the Sea) the waves thereof are beaten into the said fresh streame, so that the fresh water for a certaine space, groweth salt and brackish.” English explorers, well into the eighteenth century, believed that a water-borne passage through the American continent existed, and to Lane the Moratico sounded promising.12 To make such a journey required that the English pass through territory controlled by the Iroquoian group known as the Mangoaks. Lane learned at Choanoac that “there is a province to that which the sayd Mangoaks have recourse and traffike up that River of Moratico, which hath a marvelous and most strange Minerall” that the Indians called “Wassador.” At this site, Chaunis Temoatan, the Indians panned for and dug copper. The Mangoaks, Lane learned, had so much of this wassador “that they beautifie their houses with great plates of the same.” Menatonon offered Lane guides to direct him to Chaunis Temoatan, and Lane became “verie desierous by all meanes possible to recover the Mangoaks, to get some of that their copper for an assay.”13 The Choanoacs paid a ransom, and Lane released their weroance. He did not accept their offer of guides, but he did take as a hostage Menatonon’s son, Skiko, who earlier had been a prisoner of the Mangoaks. Manteo helped Lane work out some sort of “league” with the Moratucs and Mangoaks. Lane then led the English party back to the head of Albemarle Sound, sent Skiko, in the pinnace, to Roanoke Island, and prepared to ascend the River Moratico “with two double wherries” and forty men.14 Lane had little food, and he hoped to obtain additional supplies from the Moratucs and Mangoaks as he ascended the river. This, he believed, had been the substance of his agreement with them. Here, as elsewhere, Lane appears to have misapprehended the situation. But how could he have gotten things so wrong? He still had with him Manteo, as skilled an interpreter as could be hoped for in the situation. Clearly the Moratucs had no interest in aiding Lane’s party, and they stayed away. Was Manteo misled as well by the Moratucs and Mangoaks with whom he negotiated? Did Manteo know better and keep vital information from Lane? Did the Moratucs and Mangoaks, after witnessing the precipitance with which Lane seized Menatonon and took his son hostage, say whatever was necessary to rid

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themselves of the demanding newcomers? And could Manteo, given the very different stories told to Lane by Menatonon and Pemisapan, bring any clarity to the situation? Manteo must have understood more than he revealed. The Moratucs watched the English as they began their ascent of the Moratico. They did so from a distance, staying out of Lane’s sight. They recognized that an Algonquian, in English clothing, guided the party upriver. After two days, Lane reported, “we heard certaine savages call as we thought Manteo, who was also at that time with mee in boate.” This made Lane “verie glad,” and he hoped to arrange “some friendly conference with them.” He asked Manteo to respond. The Moratucs, invisible to the English along the wooded banks of the river, “presently began a song.” Lane and his men felt welcome, but Manteo “presently betooke him to his peece.” He knew a threat when he heard one. The Moratucs, Manteo told Lane, “ment to fight with us.” A volley of arrows, launched from cover along the shore, “did no hurt God be thanked to any man.” Lane put his men ashore to pursue the hidden attackers, but the Moratucs escaped. With night falling, Lane encamped with a strong guard, and decided that he could ascend the river no farther.15 This was Moratuc territory, and we must ask why they attacked. Certainly they had seen enough from Lane at Choanoac to conclude that his aggression could pose a threat. They watched for two days as foreign invaders intruded into their territory, and when they did not turn back, the Moratucs attacked. The Moratucs had less contact with the newcomers than did coastal Algonquians, and what little they had seen they must not have liked. Lane’s own conclusion, however, given the sequence of events, seems preposterous. He did not believe that the Moratucs could have decided to attack on their own. Pemisapan, Lane told his men, had “sent worde to the Mangoaks of mine intention to passe up into their River, and to kill them (as he sayd) both they and the Moratuks.” As a result, despite having “entred into a League” with the English, and having “ever dealt kindely with us,” the Moratucs “abandoned their Townes along the River, and retired themselves with their Crenepoes [women], and their corne within the mayne.” Pemisapan, Lane concluded, had “betrayed” the English, who he had “of purpose drawen foorth . . . upon the vaine hope to be in the ende starved.” Lane depicted the Moratucs as pawns in a sinister plot directed by Pemisapan.16 Pemisapan’s behavior during the absence of Lane and his party confirmed the English leader in this belief. Lane’s men returned homeward as quickly as they could after the Moratuc attack. They lacked the requisite force and

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the determination to invade the American interior. Algonquians fled before them as the Englishmen drifted eastward with the river, and they took their provisions with them. The English were in jeopardy and dangerously short of food. Lane and his men killed and ate their dogs, and found enough fish in the weirs of abandoned Weapemeoc towns to see them home. Lane expected assistance from the Weapemeoc town of Chiapanum and was surprised to find nobody there. On the Monday after Easter, the English party finally returned to Roanoke, and Lane learned that, while he was gone, the Algonquians on Roanoke Island “raised a bruite among themselves that I and my company were part slayne and part starved.” Pemisapan and his followers also, according to Lane, “contrary to their former reverend opinion in shew, of the almightie God of Heaven, and Jesus Christ . . . whome before they would acknowledge and confesse the onely God,” began to “blaspheme.” According to Lane, the Roanokes began “flatly to say, that our Lord God was not God, since hee suffered us to sustaine much hunger, and also to be killed of the Renapoaks, for so they call by that general name, all the inhabitants of the whole mayne, of what province soever.” It makes sense that the weroance would see in the demise of Lane’s party evidence of the failure of English power and ritual. The English could be destroyed and, Pemisapan could easily have concluded, the survivors left behind on the island need not be feared. Believing himself rid of Lane, and disaffected with the English, Pemisapan rallied support among the Roanokes and convinced many that the English god lacked spiritual power. He did not accept Wanchese’s advice and call for an attack, but he did argue that his people ought to turn their backs on the English. Through their acquisition of trade goods from the settlers and experimentation with the rituals of the colonists’ religion, the Roanokes had actively pursued English spiritual power. The costs of this pursuit had been unacceptably and devastatingly high. To stop paying that price, they must separate themselves from the English. Abandonment of the island would weaken critically the remaining colonists, for Pemisapan knew that the English were short on supplies and, more importantly, that they could not feed themselves.17 We should not be surprised by this. Throughout the long course of Native American history, visionaries and leaders emerged during periods of adversity. Some advocated violence, but others called on their people to separate themselves from the corrupting elements in Anglo-American society. Pemisapan certainly was such a leader. But was there more to the

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story, and how far was Pemisapan willing to go? Was he, as so many historians of the Roanoke ventures have concluded, at the center of a conspiracy to wipe out the English? The evidence is ambiguous, and telling the story of this colony requires that we fill in considerable gaps in the record. And as we do this, we make choices. Pemisapan tells Lane that the Renapoaks are conspiring against the English. While Lane is away investigating this and other matters, Pemisapan and his followers gloat that the newcomers have been destroyed. At Choanoac, Lane learns from Menatonon that it is not the Indians of the interior, but Pemisapan’s people themselves who are organizing an attack on the colonists. That Lane took Menatonon’s son hostage suggests that he did not yet know who to believe entirely. Lane began his ascent of the “River Moratico” in league with the Indians who lived along that river. They failed to provide for him from the outset and, two days into the journey, they opened fire on the English party with a volley of arrows. As we read Lane’s account, itself convoluted and in places confusing, we can watch as he arrives at conclusions about the nature of the threat that he faced. The focus of the account remains always on Lane—what he did, what he believed to be happening. If we look at the communities through which he passed, we begin to see that Indians and Englishmen both acted and reacted, dynamically maneuvering to make sense of what was going on around them. As Lane struggled to understand the Algonquians he confronted, they struggled to understand the English. Lane believed that Pemisapan intended in March  “with all his Savages to have runne away from us, and to have left his ground in the Island unsowed, which if he had done, there had bene no possibilitie in common reason, but by the immediate hande of God, that we could have been preserved from starving out of hand.” Without fish weirs and the ability to make them, and lacking seed corn, the English could not feed themselves. Lane’s return to Roanoke generated renewed divisions within the Indian community on Roanoke. Pemisapan’s “owne . savages,” Lane wrote, who had accompanied him on the journey, told their weroance that the Choanoacs and Mangoaks, “whose name, and multitude besides their valour is terrible to al the rest of the provinces,” did not resist the English. They told Pemisapan how Lane stormed the gathering at Choanoac, took Menatonon hostage, and later “his sonne that he best loved.”18 The martial power demonstrated by Lane, namely, the ability to survive a journey that should have killed him, “did not a little asswage all devises

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against us,” and “made Ensenors opinions to be received againe with greater respects.” Ensenore once again appealed to Pemisapan and to others in the community who felt the English a threat. Ensenore told his people that the English “were the servants of God, and that wee were not subject to be destroyed by them.” Ensenore reminded Pemisapan of the “invisible bullets” the English fired at native peoples and that the newcomers had the power “of dead men returned into the worlde againe, and that we doe not remayne dead but for a certaine time, and that then we returne againe.”19 Power. All Pemisapan’s claims—that Lane and his men had died, that the Roanokes need not fear the power of the English, that the surviving newcomers could be left to starve—now seemed empty and dangerous. Pemisapan understood this. Ensenore made his arguments, and Pemisapan and the “savages in council then with him” changed “in disposition toward” the English. Ensenore persuaded Pemisapan that he should “cause his men to set up weares forthwith for us” and to plant corn, “both which he, at that present went in hand withal & did so labour the expedition of it, that in the end of April, he had sowed a good quantitie of ground, so much as had bene sufficient, to have fed our whole company (God blessing the growth) and that by the belly for a whole yere: besides that he gave us a certaine plot of grounde for our selves to sowe.” Lane felt optimistic. If the English could survive from the end of April until the beginning of July, they would be in good shape, with new supplies from England and their own harvest available to them.20 Other events as well, seemed to be breaking in Lane’s direction. Menatonon sent a messenger to Lane at Roanoke to visit Skiko, and to deliver to Lane “certaine pearle for a present.” Pemisapan, who evidently first greeted the messenger, told Lane the gift from Menatonon “was for the ransome of his sonne.” Lane refused to discuss a release of his hostage. The messenger had nothing of this sort in mind. His attempt to speak to Lane was interrupted by Pemisapan, and his intentions deflected, he left the island. When the messenger returned a short time later, with Okisco and twentyfour armed men from Weapemeoc, Pemisapan was apparently unwilling to try and keep two dozen of Okisco’s “principallest men” from meeting with Lane. At Menatonon’s command, Okisco came to Roanoke to “yelde himself servant, and homager, to the great Weroanza of England,” Queen Elizabeth, “and after her to Sir Walter Ralegh.” Okisco’s men told Lane “that from time forwarde hee, and his successours, were to acknowledge her Majestie their onely Soveraigne.”21

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It is difficult to tell what all this meant. Menatonon must have learned enough from Lane of Ralegh and Elizabeth that an alliance seemed attractive. In entering into a union of sorts with the newcomers, Menatonon expected reciprocity, an opportunity to engage in exchange, and to acquire from the English the same kinds of items that earlier had impressed Granganimeo and Wingina. It is possible that Menatonon may have beaten Pemisapan at his own game. With the Weapemeocs’ submission, Pemisapan must have felt himself isolated. The peoples of the Albemarle Sound were now English allies and subjects of the queen. Menatonon probably aspired to occupy the role of a middleman in intercultural exchange, distributing English trade goods to peoples of the interior and bringing native goods to the English. And the same debates that divided Pemisapan’s people occurred elsewhere. Menatonon lived far enough away that he did not need to worry about the English imposing on his people as they had on Pemisapan’s, but Okisco’s followers were far from unanimous in their willingness to submit to English authority. Some of the towns split away from Okisco.22 Indians disagreed about how best to deal with the changes caused by English colonization. Pemisapan and Ensenore held very different beliefs. Ensenore feared their power. Pemisapan argued that the English threatened the existence of the community and wanted to separate his people from the newcomers. Without native assistance, the English would starve, and if they did not die, they would be so weakened that they could be attacked with minimal risk. For a time following Lane’s return from his voyage into the Albemarle Sound, Ensenore prevailed in this debate, but this period of accommodation would not last long. On April , , Ensenore, “the only frend to our nation that we had amongst them,” succumbed to disease, discrediting in Pemisapan’s eyes the path his “father” had followed. It is one of the few dates recorded during the year the colonists spent on Roanoke Island, and so we can conclude that it was an event of great significance to both natives and newcomers. But it meant different things to different people. We can view Ensenore’s death in political terms if we choose. With his departure, the only moderating influence curbing Pemisapan’s animosity had been removed, and Pemisapan could continue developing his plot to destroy the English. Perhaps this is the way to see it. This is the way Lane saw it. 23 We must remember, however, that Ensenore’s death would have meant much to Pemisapan’s people in terms of native concepts of religion, ritual,

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and power. Bad things happened for a reason. Those who had worked most closely with the English had died. Accommodation to the superior power— montoac—of the English, then, brought to Pemisapan’s people nothing but destruction. It could not halt the spread of disease. It could not bring an abundant harvest, nor could it bring rain. The English, once feared and respected for the power that left the Indians wondering if the newcomers were indeed “gods or men,” Pemisapan now viewed as the source of his community’s problems. They were a violent and pestilential people who placed a growing strain on native food supplies. The gifts he had provided the English were reciprocated with disease and death. Why, Pemisapan must have asked, should his people continue to feed them?24 Encounters with the English were encounters with death. English power was a danger. Pemisapan knew from his men who had accompanied Lane earlier that his people lacked the military capacity to destroy the English, and with accommodationism on Roanoke Island weakened following the deaths of Granganimeo and Ensenore, Pemisapan renewed his plans to abandon it.25 According to Lane, Ensenore “was no sooner dead, but certaine of our great enemies about Pemisapan, as Osocan a Weroance, Tanaquiny and Wanchese most principally, were in hand to put their old practises in use against us.” All the actions of Pemisapan and his followers suggest that they wanted to separate themselves from Lane’s men, to leave the English to their own devices, and to leave them to starve. Pemisapan and his followers abandoned Roanoke, and crossed the Croatan Sound over to Dasemunkepeuc. There they hoped to avoid the exactions of the English, the constant demands for food. The decision to leave was not unanimous. Some of Pemisapan’s people remained on the island, but most of them certainly left. Once on the mainland, Pemisapan oversaw preparations for the planting of a corn crop and, in effect, Lane said, withdrew “himselfe from my dayly sending to him for supply of victual for my company.” Pemisapan’s warriors destroyed the weirs that they had built for the English, and would “not for any copper, sell us any victuals whatsoever.” Lane concluded that Pemisapan intended to force the English governor to break his men into small companies and disband them “into sundry places to live upon shell fishe, for so the Savages themselves doe, going to Otorasko, Croatoan, and other places fishing and hunting, while their grownds be in sowing, and their corne growing.”26 Perhaps Pemisapan planned on knocking off these small groups of Englishmen. Militarily, this was his only option. But Pemisapan had the chance

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to fall upon these isolated English parties, and he did not do so. He left. Lane did not fear starvation, however, as much as he did an Algonquian attack, and that is what he wrote about. After Ensenore’s death, Lane concluded that Pemisapan had organized a massive conspiracy to wipe out the colonists. Lane described the plot in elaborate detail. After removing to Dasemunkepeuc, Pemisapan sent messengers to the Weapemeocs bearing a large gift of copper. He invited the Weapemeocs to bring seven or eight hundred warriors “to a certaine kind of moneths minde which they do use to solemnise in their Savage maner for any great personage dead, and should have bene fore Ensenore.” Mangoaks and Chesepians also would travel to Dasemunkepeuc, bringing an additional seven hundred warriors. There the combined force would await a signal from Roanoke Island. Pemisapan would cross to the island before the attack. According to Lane, Tarraquine and Andacon, “two principall men about Pemisapan, and very lustie fellows with twentie more appointed to them had the charge of my person to see an order taken for the same, which they ment should in this sort have been executed.” In the middle of the night, Lane wrote, this force “would have beset my house, and put fire in the reedes, that the same was covered with: meaning (as it was likelye) that my selfe would have come running out of a sudden amazed in my shirt without armes, upon the instant whereof they would have knocked out my braynes.”27 Pemisapan, Lane continued, developed similar plans for killing Thomas Harriot and “for all the rest of our better sort, all our houses at one instant being set on fire as afore is sayde.” With the leaders dead, and the rest of the English “both dismayed and dispersed abroade in the Islande seeking of crabs and fish to live withal,” the rest of Pemisapan’s force would cross to the island and finish off the newcomers. Pemispan set the rendezvous for June  at Dasemunkepeuc. Mangoaks and Chesepians would be there. So, too, would some Weapemeocs, members of a tribe, Lane noted, that “was divided into two parts.” Okisko, who at Menatonon’s direction had submitted himself to the Queen, refused to take part in the conspiracy “and therefore did immediately retyre himselfe with his force into the mayne.” He did not favor attacking the English, but he did nothing to stop it and nothing to warn them. The rest of the Weapemeocs, Lane noted, accepted Pemisapan’s copper and planned to join in the attack on the English.28 Lane assembled the information necessary to construct this detailed account from two sources. Some of Pemisapan’s plans, Lane wrote, were “revealed unto mee by one of Pemisapan’s owne men, the night before he

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was slaine.” Alarming evidence, this. Pemisapan killed one of his own warriors who told Lane that the weroance had orchestrated a large conspiracy against the English. The story of the ill-fated informant is one that historians pass by quickly, with little comment. Most take it as evidence that Pemisapan was indeed guilty of all that Lane imagined. He had silenced a voice that revealed his plans. We know that Pemisapan left Roanoke Island and hoped that the English would starve. Perhaps, once they had been sufficiently weakened, he would send warriors to finish them off. Some Roanoke Indians, apparently, still struggled with the decision of what was best. Pemisapan could not command, and some of his followers had not yet been persuaded that abandoning the English was the safest move. Some, like Wanchese, for instance, may have favored action more aggressive than that proposed by Pemisapan. Certainly the hostility of Wanchese and several of his close associates drew Lane’s attention and concern. Others still favored the position advocated by Granganimeo and Ensenore. Both had been respected and beloved members of the community, whose deaths occasioned great mourning. If the English could fire “invisible bullets” at their enemies, and strike down so many with powers mysterious and great, some Indians on Roanoke believed that any plan to abandon the island and starve the English could draw down on them the wrath of the English. From these concerns, an informant emerged in , and Pemisapan, or someone else, quickly killed him.29 Lane learned much more from Skiko, his hostage. Skiko had tried to escape but the colonists caught him. Lane “laid him in the bylboes, threatening to cut off his head.” Pemisapan, Lane said, at this point intervened and asked Lane to spare the boy. Pemisapan believed, according to Lane, that Skiko “was our enemie to the death.” By befriending the boy and saving his life, Pemisapan expected to gain an ally, a pair of Indian eyes with close and regular contact with the English, who could keep him informed of Lane’s intentions. Given Lane’s aggressiveness during his voyage up the Albemarle, Pemisapan might reasonably have feared an English attack. It was a grave miscalculation. Lane gave Skiko considerable freedom of movement. He watched Skiko closely, but allowed him to visit the village on the island. Through his contacts, Lane believed, Skiko learned the details of the conspiracy. And Skiko, Lane wrote, “finding himselfe as well used at my hand, as I had meanes to shew, and that all my companie made much of him, he flatly discovered all unto me.”30 Skiko was Menatonon’s son. This is a point we must remember, for the

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story Skiko told Lane well served Choanoac interests. The Choanoacs had a score to settle with Pemisapan. He had, after all, sent the armed Englishmen straight into the heart of Menatonon’s territory. Two could play this game, and Skiko’s tales continued the disinformation campaign Menatonon began upriver: it is not us who conspire against you, but those who sent you. You have been betrayed. The idea must have been repeated continuously. Skiko pointed out that Okisko, an obedient servant of Menatonon, was not participating in the conspiracy. But other Weapemeocs, who rejected Okisko and, implicitly, Menatonon, had accepted Pemisapan’s copper and pledged themselves to help wipe out Lane’s colonists. Skiko also implicated the Mangoaks, who may have limited Choanoac access to the riches of Chaunis Temoatan. The Choanoacs refused to take part against the English, and Skiko persuaded Lane that his father’s people, “having given many tokens of earnest desire they had to joine in perfect league with us,” would make dependable allies.31 Skiko and Menatonon, then, used the English to pursue Choanoac goals. Pemisapan and his people, who already had suffered for their close contact with the newcomers, lost yet again, on yet another front. Convinced by his Choanoac friends that Pemisapan was set against the English, Lane went on the offensive, a strategy designed to preempt any gathering of hostile Indians at Dasemunkepeuc. Lane sent a messenger, perhaps Manteo, to announce that he was leaving for Croatoan. First, he would ask Pemisapan for assistance, “to borrow of his men to fish for my company, and to hunt for me at Croatoan, as also to buy some foure dayes provision to serve for my voyage.” The English fleet, Lane told Pemisapan, had arrived, and he intended to journey south to meet them. He lied. Lane sent his messenger to Pemisapan merely “to put suspition out of his heade,” to lead him to believe that the English did not know what he was planning.32 Pemisapan did not want Lane entering his village. He sent Lane’s messenger with “word that he would himselfe come over to Roanoak.” Several days passed, however and Pemisapan did not show himself. He knew now that Lane was lying about the fleet, for nothing had happened over the intervening days. Meanwhile, Skiko told Lane that Pemisapan was waiting to assemble his forces, that this time, when Pemisapan crossed the Sound to come over to Roanoke, it would be to wipe out the colonists. There is, however, no evidence that Pemisapan had any such plan. He did not know what the English governor had in mind until it was too late.33

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We come now to the crime—the killing—that in the end doomed Ralegh’s colonizing efforts. It was the last day of May when Lane decided to attack. The English governor who feared treacherous savages resorted to treachery first. He targeted first the small number of Algonquians remaining on Roanoke Island and gave “them in the Island a Canvisado,” a surprise assault. He sent a small number of men in a light horseman, one of the colonists’ boats, to gather up all the natives’ canoes after darkness fell. They planned to capture any Indians rowing from Roanoke to Dasemunkepeuc, but to “suffer any that come from thence to land.” Lane wanted to cut Pemisapan off from any news of what occurred on the island. Floating in the Croatan Sound, the Englishmen met with a canoe leaving the island. Lane’s men “overthrew the Canoa, and cut off . savages heads.” The operation required stealth, and stealth was apparently in short supply. The decapitation of two Indians, Lane wrote, was “not done so secretly” as the English had hoped. The Roanokes on the island, who, “privie to their owne villainous purposes against us, held as good espial upon us, both day and night, as we did upon them,” saw what had happened. They had watched the English closely, noting, perhaps, their war-like preparations. “The cry arose,” Lane wrote, and the Roanokes rushed for their weapons. They traded fire with the English, arquebus shots for arrows. “Some three or foure of them,” Lane wrote, “at the first were slayne with our shot, the rest fled into the woods.” The warriors did not kill or injure any of the Englishmen.34 Pemisapan knew nothing of this assault. He did not hear the gunfire, and none of his followers on the island succeeded in carrying word to him that the English had spilled first blood. We can only understand the final minutes of his life if we assume these two things to be true. On the morning following, the first day of June, Pemisapan saw Lane, Manteo, and twenty-five men approaching in two boats. He sent one of his men to meet the English at the shore. Pemisapan’s messenger asked Lane and his company what they wanted. Lane said that he and his men were on their way to Croatoan. Before they left, they wanted to complain to Pemisapan of the actions of the weroance Osocan, who, Lane said, had tried to kidnap Skiko. Pemisapan knew nothing of Skiko’s storytelling, of his manipulation of the English, and Pemisapan permitted the English party to enter the village. No guard, no sense of imminent danger, is detectable in Lane’s account. Pemisapan, Lane said, “did abide my comming to him.” Pemisapan did not expect treachery on the part of the English, but he should have. Pemisapan and his advisers sat and waited for Lane to declare his purpose. The

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English leader looked around, and found himself “amidst . or . of his principal Weroances, & followers.” Demonstrating that the newcomers, too, lived in a world of ritual, Lane called aloud for the help of his God. “Christ our Victory!” Lane proclaimed. It was an invocation, but also a “watchword.” The English opened fire with their weapons, “and immediately those his chiefe men, and himself, had by the mercie of God for our deliverance, that which they had purposed for us.”35 Pemisapan fell in the initial volley, hit at close range with fire from the pistol of Philip Amadas. He lay still on the ground, and the English thought he was dead. The wound, indeed, had done considerable damage. Lane continued with the attack. He looked to protect Manteo’s friends—a significant number of Croatoans spent time at Dasemunkepeuc—and apparently tried to save those who had closely supported Ensenore. While Lane tried to protect potential Algonquian allies, his countrymen continued the slaughter,

 . Theodor De Bry, “The arriual of the Englishemen in Virginia” (detail), from DeBry’s map in the  edition of Harriot’s Briefe and True Report. The scene of the crime, where Lane and his men crossed from Roanoke Island over to Dasemunkepeuc to attack Pemisapan.       .

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staying “busie that none of the rest should escape.” Few did. The Englishmen killed Pemisapan’s followers and Manteo’s kin alike, those who had opposed the English and those willing to accommodate the newcomers.36 In these, the last few minutes of his life, Pemisapan must have observed that the English, occupied in killing his followers, were no longer watching him. Lane noticed that Pemisapan “started up, and ran away as though he had not bene touched.” He surprised the Englishmen and “overran all the companie.” One of Lane’s soldiers fired a shot from a pistol, hitting the fleeing weroance “thwart the buttocks.” He was wounded twice and bleeding, but he escaped into the woods. Pemisapan ran, but he could not get far. The wounds sapped his strength. He knew that Lane’s men were in pursuit. The quickest, and the most relentless in pursuit, was Edward Nugent, “an Irishman,” said Lane, with whom he had served in Kerry. Pemisapan ran through the woods, Nugent behind him. The chase lasted too long for Lane’s comfort, but eventually Pemisapan’s strength gave out. At some point, he collapsed, and some time after that Nugent found him. Lane was worried. Nugent had been gone too long and Lane feared that “we had lost both the king, and my man by our owne negligence to have been intercepted by the Savages.” The Englishmen prepared to follow Nugent’s path out of Dasemunkepeuc, expecting that their friend had run into an ambush. They marched a short distance before they met Nugent alive. They found him “returning out of the woods with Pemisapans head in his hand.” The English returned to Roanoke. Once there, they impaled Pemisapan’s head on a pole, a sign for any in Ossomocomuck who contemplated an assault upon the newcomers.37 One week after the murder of Pemisapan, Lane received word that a massive fleet commanded by Sir Francis Drake had arrived off the Outer Banks. Drake had missed the Spanish treasure fleet, but he had destroyed the ports at Cartagena and Santo Domingo. By the first of June, as Lane and his men destroyed Dasemunkepeuc, Drake completed his looting of St. Augustine, on the Florida coast. The Indians there, who had assisted Drake in an assault against their Spanish overlords, suffered as did those at Roanoke. One of Drake’s men noted, that they “died verie fast and said amongst themselves, it was the Inglisshe God that made them die so faste.” Drake carried aboard his ships equipment and supplies for Lane’s outpost, as well as “ Indians from Cartagena, mostly women,  negroews, Turks and

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Moors, who do menial service.” He expected Lane to be doing well enough to absorb some of this additional population.38 After describing the attack on Dasemunkepeuc in his account, Lane did not mention the Indians again. The gathering of hostile Algonquians Lane feared would occur on June  never took place. Perhaps Lane’s attack, by killing the chief conspirator, eliminated the conspiracy as well, as some historians have suggested. More likely, there never was a native conspiracy directed by Pemisapan to eliminate the English colonists. That story was concocted by his opponents, a successful ploy to implicate a weroance who had no affection for the English, who wished to separate himself from them and see them starve, in something much more sinister. 39 Pemisapan, after all, had welcomed the English. The newcomers came to Roanoke Island as invited guests. He saw the English as useful allies, and he hoped to incorporate the physical manifestations of English power into the daily lives of his people. That power, Pemisapan learned, could be directed toward malevolent ends. The pursuit of it could do untold harm. Religion provided Pemisapan with the lens he used to perceive these changes. Recognizing that forceful resistance could not succeed against the powerful English, his people departed from Roanoke Island. Lane did not understand this. His men pressed the Indians for food on a daily basis and carried devastating diseases. Some historians have suggested that Lane left Roanoke ultimately because he feared native retaliation. In all likelihood, the attack he launched on Dasemunkepeuc was more devastating and violent than anyone suspected. Pemisapan’s people, already weakened by disease, could do nothing more to the English than refuse to feed them.40 Drake offered Lane additional supplies and shipping to enable him to explore the coast and, perhaps, relocate to the Chesapeake. He would provide as well “so much victual likewise that might be sufficient for the bringing of them all (being an hundred and three persons) into England if they thought good after such time.” Lane struck an optimistic tone in his account of the colony’s final days. But then the hurricane struck, an “unwonted storme” that “continued foure days.” It would have destroyed Drake’s fleet “if the Lord had not held his holy hand over them.” Still, the damage was severe. The storm drove much of the fleet out to sea, including the craft Drake had intended to leave with Lane. Several smaller ships went down. Drake offered Lane the only remaining ship he could spare, but it was too large to cross the Outer Banks safely. With that offer untenable, Lane considered “the case we stood in, the weaknesse of our companie,

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the small number of the same,” the carrying away of Drake’s ships: all led him to the conclusion that “the very hand of god as it seemed,” which earlier had kept Drake’s ships from utter ruin, now “stretched out to take us from thence” to England.41 Drake agreed to take Lane’s company home. He may have set ashore the slaves and Indians he had captured from the Spanish, a first lost colony, or they may have gone down with some of Drake’s “small pinnaces and boates,” many of which were “lost in this storme.” The English left in a hurry. Many of their belongings, Lane wrote, “with all our Cardes, Bookes, and writings, were by the Saylers cast over boord.”42 Lane had hoped to extend his stay on the Carolina Sounds, he said, but the hurricane prevented this. If Lane saw the hand of God in the preservation of parts of Drake’s fleet, other Englishmen drew different conclusions. Richard Hakluyt the younger, who had believed that the English could Christianize the Indians and incorporate them into an Anglo-American, Christian, New World empire, noted that Lane’s colonists clambered aboard Drake’s fleet “so confusedly, as if they had bene chased from thence by a mightie armie, and no doubt so they were, for the hande of God came upon them for the crueltie, and outrages committed by some of them against the native inhabitants of that Countrie.”43 You choose what you want to believe. You can believe, if you want, that the hand of God preserved or punished the Englishmen. You can view the hurricane as a random act of nature, a combination of wind and currents not uncommon in summertime on the Atlantic Coast. But consider this: Pemisapan’s people believed that shamans could control the weather. The fatal storm may have found its origins not in the divine will of a Christian god, but in the ritual songs of a devastated Algonquian community.

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P

emisapan was shot, took flight, was hunted down, and was then beheaded, killed by colonists who feared that he was conspiring against them. It is a story few people know about. Most Americans, after all, are far more interested in the English struggle to conquer a wilderness than in the collateral damage inflicted upon a small Indian village and its people. Yet Pemisapan’s story mattered in deep and important ways to the Algonquian peoples who lived in Ossomocomuck late in the sixteenth century, and when the English resumed their efforts to colonize the region, his surviving followers forced them to live with the consequences of their treacherous attack. Governor Lane tells us that he would have remained on the island had not the hurricane arisen, but he needed to justify to Ralegh the decision to abandon his post. The simple fact is that he knew he could not safely remain on Roanoke. The slaying of Pemisapan and the savagery of the English attack made this impossible. When Drake lost the few ships he could spare in the storm in the summer of , Lane seized the opportunity to evacuate. He and the English colonists abandoned Ossomocomuck in a hurry. Much was lost. The sailors, pulling themselves together in the hurricane’s aftermath, cast the colonists’ excess baggage overboard. They had been at sea with Drake for over a year, and badly wanted to return home. As a result, Harriot’s notes and research material and much of John White’s artwork ended up on the ocean floor. Three of Lane’s men, if they did not die in the skirmish at Roanoke or in the assault on Dasemunkepeuc, were left behind in the rush to depart. We already have mentioned 

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the several hundred African slaves and Central American Indians whom Drake may have deposited somewhere on the Outer Banks. These would have been a first and almost entirely forgotten “Lost Colony,” ignored by generations of American mythmakers who chose to believe, as one antiquarian put it, that only men of “the purest Anglo-Saxon Blood” colonized America.1 But something more may have been lost in  at Roanoke Island. The English, at least in part, had launched their invasion of America on waves of benevolent intent. Sir Walter Ralegh had premised his plans for America on a “dream of liberation,” in which Englishmen would carry civility and English Christianity to America, bringing benefits to natives and newcomers alike. Ralegh’s empire, if it had lived up to expectations, would have been an Anglo-American empire.2 It did not live up to those expectations, of course. Algonquians had little interest in playing along, once they recognized what the English expected of them. For Wingina’s people to follow the path of progress and civility that Harriot, Hakluyt, and others believed them capable of would have required that they abandon their religion and the cultural assumptions on which it was based. Ralegh’s empire failed to live up to his expectations, as well, because of the violence of Lane’s soldiers and the diseases his men carried. The disappointment of English metropolitans with this result is readily apparent in the writings of Harriot and the younger Richard Hakluyt. Pemisapan, the weroance who with his advisers had initially welcomed the English into Ossomocomuck and invited them to settle on Roanoke, was dead, killed by Edward Nugent in an act of horrific personal violence. Murder replaced philanthropy. Harriot, indeed, noted that “some of our companie towards the ende of the yeare, shewed themselves too fierce, in slaying some of the people, in some towns, upon causes that on our part, might easily have bene borne withall.” Most historians leave it at that and move on to the next colonizing effort. Lane and his men attacked Dasemunkepeuc. They killed Pemisapan and his followers. The English then left, and with their departure the story of the first colony comes to a close. Instead of asking about the consequences of the English attack and the wreckage it caused in destroyed human lives, historians have focused on the English: Was Lane justified in acting as he did? Could he claim selfdefense, or the good of the colony, as grounds for his duplicitous attack on Pemisapan’s people? Because Europeans wrote the few surviving documents, historians have followed the English colonists, and their paper trail, as they

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moved across the Atlantic. But the events that occurred in the villages of Ossomocomuck mattered. The colonists left behind them devastated Indian communities. We may lack the evidence to know much with certainty about these Algonquian towns, but we must likewise acknowledge that we can know nothing about the killing of an Indian, and its consequences, if we do not ask.3 Lane’s colony lasted less than a year, but the damage it did was greater than previous historians have recognized. Because we know how native communities elsewhere in America responded to the devastation and dislocation produced by English colonization, we can, if we choose, reconstruct something of what occurred in Ossomocomuck after Lane’s men attacked Pemisapan’s town. Small numbers of armored and well-armed soldiers could do immense damage when they struck Indian villages. The experience of the Pequots in southeastern Connecticut in , as well as the Indians in Dutch New Netherland a decade later during a conflict known as Kieft’s War, provide brutal testimony on this point.4 Pemisapan’s principal advisers fell in the initial English volley. Many others were slain. The English spilled more blood at Dasemunkepeuc than Lane’s terse account would lead us to believe.5 The English had destroyed Aquascogoc and its fields in the summer of . The Indians rebuilt their town, but the cost was high. An Algonquian community on the Albemarle Sound, probably one of the Weapemeoc villages that had rejected Okisko’s authority, had faced the fury of English assault early as well. These attacks, a product of the same mentality that led to Pemisapan’s death, alienated and injured the residents of Algonquian communities who had greeted the colonists with no hostile intent and hoped, in Granganimeo’s words, to become one with the newcomers. These were, in short, significant events in the lives of the native peoples who lived through them, even if they escaped the full attention of the English observers who left us the written records upon which historians rely.6 English diseases killed many more Algonquians than did English weapons. Harriot described the resulting carnage and its effects on the Algonquians’ understanding of the new world that English settlement created. A dangerous tool in the hands of men of wrath, the “invisible bullets” of the newcomers killed hundreds of men, women, and children in Ossomocomuck, perhaps many more than that. Wingina’s people came to see disease as an English weapon. The influenza epidemic we can assume killed the most vulnerable members of the community first, the elderly and the

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very young. The newcomers thus robbed the people of their past and their future, of members of the community who carried with them the wisdom of many generations, and those who would parent the generations yet unborn. There is thus no reason to believe that things returned to normal after Lane’s armed men killed and decapitated Pemisapan. The invaders affected the lives of every Algonquian living in the region. Disease, violence, the killing of a weroance, all created a “new world” for Indians in Ossomocomuck. The drought continued, leading one European observer to complain that the land was “wretchedly poor,” and that it “produces little to eat.” The violence, and an epidemic that killed “in some townes about twentie, in some fourtie, in some sixtie, & in one sixe score,” shattered a world in which balance and order were cardinal social and spiritual values. Disease, Harriot tells us, weakened traditional religion at least for a time, as shamans found themselves powerless to halt its spread. Towns that lost significant portions of their population no longer had the critical mass to remain viable. A reshuffling of peoples began, producing over time new political alignments and balances of power. The deaths of Granganimeo and Ensenore, who succumbed to disease, and the killing of Pemisapan opened leadership positions that could not be filled through traditional means.7 The presence of Lane’s colonists also created for coastal peoples a common enemy. Though only a “remnant of Wingino his men . . . were left alive” at Dasemunkepeuc, they came together with Indians from Secotan, Aquascogoc, and Pomeiooc. They shared a hatred of the English that trumped their prior hostility. The Indians did not resettle Roanoke, but they would force the small groups of Englishmen who returned to the island in the immediate aftermath of Lane’s departure to pay dearly.8 Manteo left Roanoke along with Lane’s colonists. In the rush to abandon the colony, he was not left behind. Accompanied by another Algonquian named Towaye, about whom we know nothing, Manteo chose to climb aboard the boats as they rowed out to join Drake’s fleet. He was not expendable. He was not excess baggage. More than anyone else, Manteo now embodied the hopes of Ralegh and his supporters for the New World. Men like the elder and younger Richard Hakluyt, those great promoters of English maritime expansion; John White, Thomas Harriot, and their publisher, Theodor De Bry; Ralegh, at times, as well: all viewed the Indians of the Roanoke region in progressive terms. The Indians, they believed, would

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participate if properly guided in a natural historical process whereby all societies moved upward, becoming more civilized as time passed. The conviction that the English had at one time been as “sauvage” as the natives of North America undergirded the optimism of men like these who believed that, as had their own English forebears, Indians too would progress. Manteo seemed living proof.9 Yet if these English idealists were attracted to the bright, shining example of Manteo, it is not always easy to discern why he was attracted to them. Power played a role. He had traveled to England, and the power of the English must have shaped his perceptions of Ralegh’s men. Security probably was an additional benefit accruing from close association with the newcomers. Pemisapan had killed one Indian who had aided the English; given his closeness to the newcomers, Manteo had reason to feel unsafe. The Moratucs’ taunts as he accompanied Lane’s voyage up the Roanoke River may have been threats directed at him. Perhaps with Wanchese an important anti-English voice at Dasemunkepeuc, Manteo had nowhere else to go safely but England. Yet if Manteo gained protection from Algonquians who viewed him, for lack of a better word, as a collaborator, he also grew in importance in the eyes of the English. No one could trade with the newcomers without first speaking to him. Speaking English, wearing English clothing, and carrying an English gun, he was the conduit through which the newcomers conducted their relations with the peoples of Ossomocomuck. He became a person of substance, influence, and power. While it is difficult to tell the extent to which he identified himself with the English— he never changed his name, after all—there seems little doubt that the people of Ossomocomuck identified him closely with the newcomers.10 When Ralegh received word late in  that the Tyger had been wrecked on the Outer Banks, he took steps to resupply the colonists. “Immediately” after Lane’s colonists abandoned the island and departed “out of this paradise of the worlde,” Richard Hakluyt wrote, Ralegh’s first supply ship arrived at Hatorask. The crew searched for the colonists along the Sound and, apparently, “up in the countrie.” Not finding Lane’s men, they “returned with all the aforesaid provision into England.”11 Two weeks later, a larger supply fleet arrived. Sir Richard Grenville finally had returned, two months late, with four hundred men aboard five ships. He, too, looked for the colonists. Grenville found their fort on the island, a wooden structure “of no great strength,” according to a Spanish captive

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aboard the fleet. They saw no sign of Lane’s men. Grenville landed an exploring party on Roanoke Island. They found “the said island deserted, and discovered the bodies of one Englishman and one Indian hanged.”12 A strange puzzle indeed. The unfortunate pair could not have been there very long. Because “the weight of the decaying cadavers would have separated them from their heads in a few summer weeks,” archaeologist Ivor Noël Hume assumed that the corpses “were the recent legacy of an event associated with Ralegh’s supply ship.”13 Certainly this is possible, but Hume reasoned from the premise that Ralegh’s first supply ship arrived sometime between June  and , two weeks after Drake’s departure. These figures put the arrival of Grenville’s fleet  or  days after the abandonment of the settlement, too long a time in Hume’s view for the bodies to remain hanging. Yet Hakluyt, who knew the precise dates, said that the first supply ship arrived “immediately” after Lane left, not two weeks later. If Hakluyt is correct, and there is no reason to believe that he is not, Grenville arrived less than three weeks after the colonists abandoned Roanoke, sometime near the end of June.14 Grenville found bodies hanging on Roanoke, then, because Lane had ordered the execution of two men during the last moments of the colony’s life and left them there. It is not difficult to imagine the identity of one of the victims, for there was an Indian, close at hand, whose life Lane had threatened in the recent past. When Skiko, Menatonon’s son, had earlier attempted to escape, Lane confined him and said that he would cut off his head if he tried it again. Skiko found himself in a dangerous and difficult situation. He worked to conciliate the English governor, spinning for him a story that implicated Pemisapan in a terrifying pan-Indian movement against the English. Lane thereafter never expressed any doubt that Pemispan was conspiring against the colonists. Skiko had promised Lane the support of his father. In the days after the attack, there is no evidence that this help arrived. Menatonon limited the assistance he offered the English to empty gestures that cost him nothing: a promise to guide them through the continent to a mythical western sea; a treasure map leading them to a supply of copper and pearls controlled by his rival Wahunsonacock; and a showy display of obeisance on the part of a tributary weroance. Lane may have had doubts about Skiko, but there is no reason to believe that he would have sent him home as the colonists prepared to board Drake’s ships. Skiko was young and bright and knew the interior of the continent. He had contacts with the peoples of the Great

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Trading Path that Manteo did not. With the proper training in England, Skiko would make a valuable interpreter and guide. Skiko did not want to go to England. He was charismatic, and he had made friends with some of Lane’s colonists. We know this. The rest is left for us to imagine. Rather than be carried across the Atlantic, Skiko may have made a break for it, an attempt to get home. One of Lane’s men would have had to help him. All this, of course, is highly speculative. We cannot say for sure that the hanging Indian was Skiko, or who the Englishman was, but it is difficult to imagine another scenario that could possibly have produced this result. Grenville seems not to have cared about the identity of the hanging corpses. People died all the time, and life at sea was short. There were human remains littered across the beaches of the early modern Atlantic world, lost colonists who have yet to find their chroniclers, mythmakers, and promoters. Grenville stuck to his mission and continued to hunt for Lane’s colonists. He sent boats into the Albemarle Sound and went himself “up into divers places of the Countrey.” He explored areas he had not visited the year before. But he found no sign of the colonists. They had vanished. Something else was missing, too, and it is surprising that the English did not say more about it. The people of Ossomocomuck stayed out of sight, deliberately avoiding Grenville’s expedition. No overtures to trade took place, no efforts to assimilate or welcome the newcomers. They hid from the English. During Grenville’s time on the coast, his men saw only three Algonquians. They captured them, but two quickly escaped.15 From this solitary remaining captive, who spoke enough English to make himself understood, Grenville learned that the colonists had embarked for England aboard Sir Francis Drake’s fleet some time before he arrived. The captive did not tell Grenville about Lane’s attack on Dasemunkepeuc, or of the tattered relations between natives and newcomers that effectively doomed the colony and led to the killing of Pemisapan. Grenville spent a total of two weeks exploring the waters of Ossomocomuck. According to Hakluyt, hearing no other news of the colonists, “and finding the place where they inhabited desolate,” Grenville decided to return home. He did not want “to loose possession of the Countrie, which Englishmen had so long helde.” Grenville had with him as many as  men with ample supplies. He may have intended to leave a large portion of these men to reinforce and reequip Lane’s colony. Not finding Lane, he easily could have left behind a substantial group of well-provisioned colonists. Instead, Grenville “landed  men in the Ile of Roanoke furnished

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plentifully with all maner of provisions for two yeeres.” He provided them with four small pieces of artillery for mounting at the fort. Then, with his Indian captive, Grenville departed for England, unwittingly sentencing his men to death.16 Wanchese and the warriors who now saw him as their leader watched as the Englishmen made themselves at home as best they could in the houses Lane’s colonists left behind. The Roanokes stayed out of sight, using the woods for cover. The newcomers, Wanchese knew, were men. They were few in number, and with the help of allies they could be killed. Wanchese watched, and waited, for an opportunity to avenge the people Lane had slaughtered the month before. The Englishmen lived “carelessly,” John White learned later. The two men Grenville placed in charge of the outpost, Cofar and Chapman, do not seem to have recognized just how precarious their position was. They were not military men but sailors, deposited by their captain on an island they knew nothing about. Lane’s fort, of course, still stood, but Cofar, Chapman, and the others lived in the houses outside. They kept little guard, and went off in small numbers to explore the banks and pass their time in hunting and fishing.17 Wanchese saw that the Englishmen had guns, and he certainly would have noticed the four small artillery pieces that Grenville had left them. He knew that he lacked the men necessary to stand up to the newcomers. He traveled to Aquascogoc, the village Grenville’s men had attacked the year before, and asked that past hostilities be forgotten. Aquascogoc and Dasemunkepeuc had both suffered because of the English. Many people had died from disease and violence. Now they must come together to rid themselves of an enemy who threatened them both. If we keep in mind the devastation spawned by the English settlement, we are more likely to arrive at an understanding of how Wanchese’s neighbors received his appeal. These Algonquian villages were small communities, so the loss of scores of people to a quick-killing and mysterious ailment hit them extremely hard. English attacks, as well, left networks of kin grieving. After Lane’s colonists left, having caused so much misery, this much smaller group of newcomers arrived. Wanchese had seen England. It would not have been difficult for him to recognize that Grenville’s men were nothing more than a holding party, and that more newcomers would soon arrive. They must attack these unsuspecting Englishmen, and do so quickly.

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Warriors from Aquascogoc found this argument compelling. So, too, did those of Secotan, who stood ready to avenge Pemisapan. Wanchese assembled a select force of thirty warriors. They conducted the rituals necessary to ensure success in battle, armed themselves, and crossed undetected over to Roanoke Island. They took cover and watched the newcomers. Four of the Englishmen, John White learned later, were away, looking for shellfish at a creek about a quarter of a mile from the fort. That left eleven men at the outpost. Wanchese and a companion emerged from the woods and called to the newcomers “by friendly signes.” He asked that the colonists send out “two of the chiefest of our Englishmen” to “come unarmed to speake with those two Savages.” Wanchese and his associate, after all, appeared unarmed. The colonists complied. They had been on the island for only a short period of time and had not seen any Indians. This was, for the small English party, a first chance to make friends. Two of the Englishmen, perhaps Cofar, perhaps Chapman, came out of the settlement to greet the two Indians. When one of the Indians “traitorously embraced one of our men, the other with his sword of wood, which he had secretly hidden under his mantel, stroke him on the head, and slewe him.” The remaining Englishman bolted. He ran for the safety of “the house, wherein all their victual, and weapons were.” He found no shelter. The Algonquians emerged from their cover and fired their arrows at the colonists. This was not a raid for captives, nor was it an example of the mourning war complex. This was vengeance, the work of warriors who sought to destroy Englishmen whom they held responsible for the slaying of their people and the beheading of their weroance. The Indians would likely have scalped or mutilated the body of the Englishman they had killed, an insult designed to ensure that his soul wandered alone forever in a cold and barren spirit world. The colonists, hunkered down behind the palisade, would have heard the frightening taunts of Indians determined to avenge their people’s losses. There would not have been much noise. Voices could be heard, including that of Wanchese, jeering at them in English. And then the fire started. Wanchese’s warriors launched flaming arrows into the thatched roof of the colonists’ stronghold, placing the Englishmen in a desperate situation. They could not remain where they were. So they gathered the weapons they had close by and left the burning stronghold, forced “without order” to “runne foorth among the Savages.” The Englishmen tried to stay together, but “the place where they fought,

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was of great advantage to the Savages.” Wanchese’s men moved quickly from tree to tree, deftly using cover as they fired their arrows. Another colonist fell when one of Wanchese’s warriors shot him in the face. An Indian, too, died, shot in the side as an Englishman returned one of the Indians’ own fire arrows. The “skirmish” lasted nearly an hour, a running battle from the fort to the bay. But the Englishmen were outnumbered, surprised, and poorly armed. Wanchese’s warriors “so offended our men with their arrows, that our men being some of them hurt, retired fighting to the water side, where their boate lay.” They climbed in and rowed away from Roanoke. A short distance away, the fleeing Englishmen found their four companions. They gathered them in and fled east, landing “on a little island on the right hand of our entrance into the harbour of Hatorask.” They remained there for a time, not far from where Granganimeo had met Amadas and Barlowe for the first time two years earlier. They dressed their wounds and decided what to do next. They had few options. They were hunted men. After a while, they fashioned a sail out of their clothing and put out to sea. It was a foolish and desperate move. They were never seen again.18 Grenville’s men were all dead by the time his fleet made it home. The relief expedition, which provided no relief and left only fifteen men on the island, suffered badly on its return trip to England, and the solitary Indian captive on board surely witnessed the horrors of shipboard life. Grenville left his men on Roanoke in the summer. He attacked the Spanish in the Azores. But on the voyage home, disease broke out, killing thirty-four men. The expedition did not return to Bideford, Grenville’s home port, until late in December. We might stop the story right here, for Grenville did not return to Roanoke. But we are, once again, interested in the native peoples of Ossomocomuck. Grenville’s men captured three of them, but two escaped. The remaining lone captive traveled with Grenville to Bideford in Devonshire, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Grenville named him Ralegh, for Sir Walter, certainly a testament to the high esteem in which this new English-speaking native ally was held. To earn this respect, Ralegh the Algonquian probably provided important assistance to Englishmen like Sir Walter and Grenville, who continued to dream of empire. Bideford was a small port town over which Grenville presided like a feudal lord. Ralegh became a part of the community, one familiar to the English men and women who lived there. Grenville trusted him. Perhaps

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he planned on carrying Ralegh back to America on board the expedition he hoped to lead in . Had not the Spanish Armada intervened, Ralegh might have had the opportunity to return home. But Grenville did not sail for North America again. Ralegh remained in Bideford. He went before the congregation in the Bideford Church in March of , accepting formally the Christian faith and entry into the parish. In so doing, Ralegh convinced his neighbors that he believed “in God the Father, who hath made me and all the world,” in “God the Sonne, who hath redeemed me and all mankinde,” and in “God the Holy Spirit, who sanctifieth me and all the elect people of God.” Accepting this trinity may not have required that he abandon his belief in Kiwasa and in the montoac that suffused all things—other native peoples who accepted the English religion merely added Christian figures to an already crowded pantheon. But in crossing the Atlantic and accepting the Christian faith, Ralegh had traveled a distance that could not be measured simply in miles. He believed now “in God the Father Almightie, maker of heaven and earth.” This jealous god insisted that his followers “have none other Gods but me,” a commandment Ralegh convinced the minister he accepted as divine law. Ralegh accepted as well that “Jesus Christ his Sonne our Lord,” conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary, “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried, descended into hell, the third day hee rose againe from the dead, hee ascended unto heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.” Ralegh believed, he said, that Jesus would come again “to judge the quicke and the dead.” He believed in the “forgiveness of sinnes, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” He may of course have believed in concepts similar to these before his capture, before he became a member of Grenville’s household. There is no evidence, however, that his neighbors in Bideford doubted the sincerity of his conversion and the depth of his acceptance of the new faith. His brothers and sisters in Christ saw in Ralegh the potential for Indians to live in English society, to assimilate. They cared for their fellow parishioner. We know that. After an outbreak of disease swept through Grenville’s household, killing his daughter and a servant, it was they, in April , who carried Ralegh to the Bideford church and quietly placed his body in hallowed ground.19 Wanchese drove Grenville’s small party off Roanoke Island late in the summer of . After the flight of these desperate and wounded men, the peoples of Ossomocomuck worked to repair the tattered fabric of their

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communities. Algonquians from Roanoke, Dasemunkepeuc, Secotan, Aquascogoc, Pomeiooc, and Croatoan visited with each other and attempted to understand the horrors that had befallen them. Epidemics could do that. As native communities lost the population necessary to remain viable, a reshuffling and reorganization of peoples took place. We know that it occurred elsewhere in early America, and we have every reason to expect that it happened in Ossomocomuck as well. The people began the difficult process of forging new, blended Algonquian communities out of the wreckage caused by the English presence. No Europeans visited the Carolina Sounds for the remainder of . Drought conditions appear to have continued, but in the spring of  Algonquians throughout Ossomocomuck began to set their corn and their other crops, and some anticipated a harvest that they would not have to share with hungry, infectious, and aggressive intruders. But not Wanchese. He could easily have anticipated the return of English colonists to his homeland and the commencement of another round of invasion. He had been in England, and had seen the numbers of people there, their weapons, and their power. He understood something of what Ralegh and his backers hoped to accomplish. It would not have been difficult for Wanchese to expect that the English would try again, somewhere along the American coast, in the very near future. Another English expedition had in fact left Plymouth in May . By July , the majority of the fleet had arrived at “Port Ferdinando,” the entrance to the Carolina Sounds where the expedition’s Portuguese pilot ran aground two years earlier. This venture differed in important ways from its predecessors. Richard Hakluyt the Younger and Thomas Harriot both took part in the initial planning, but the artist John White provided the moving force. White would stop at Roanoke Island and look in on Grenville’s holding party, which he expected to find alive and well. This small group of Englishmen, White suggested, would support Manteo, whom White would install as a sort of feudal lord to govern Roanoke Island and the surviving Indians in Ossomocomuck in the name of the queen and Sir Walter Ralegh. Manteo, once in place as Lord of Roanoke, would serve as the eyes and ears of the English, providing intelligence and information to White as he, in turn, led his party of  colonists to their intended place of settlement on Chesapeake Bay.20 There the colonists, under White’s leadership, would establish an agricultural settlement, perhaps on the lands of the Algonquians with whom

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the Chesapeake party had spent time in late  and early , or perhaps at another location. White and his backers recognized that the colonists must be self-sufficient, a tacit admission that the problems with Pemisapan’s people, in English eyes, were occasioned in part by the colonists’ heavy demands for Algonquian food. But this would be more than a mere agricultural outpost. The “Cittie of Ralegh” would sit near a deep water anchorage. There English ships could safely re-provision and take on water, make necessary repairs, and get in order for the return trip home to England.21 To succeed, this venture required a new sort of colonist. A group consisting exclusively of soldiers, adept at killing and fighting and little else, would not do. Aboard White’s ships were fourteen families, four of which included children. The men, though they certainly knew how to handle weapons, were artisans and farmers of small means. Two of the women were pregnant, including White’s daughter Eleanor. In all, seventeen women and nine children traveled with the expedition. White recruited many of the voyagers himself. One historian, looking at the colonists who followed John White, suggested that together the group constituted a separatist congregation, religious dissidents dissatisfied with the lukewarm reforms of the Elizabethan period who promoted a version of Christianity based strictly and literally on the Bible. If so, they may have welcomed their isolation on the far reaches of the Atlantic world, where they could plant their crops, resupply the occasional English ship, and practice their religion free from outside interference.22 This time the pilot Simon Ferdinando chose not to bring his ships across the Outer Banks, anchoring instead off Hatorask Island. White and forty men climbed into the pinnace, intending to sail to Roanoke and “finde those fifteene Englishmen, which Sir Richard Greenville had left there the yeere before.” White hoped to confer with them “concerning the state of the Countrey, and Savages, meaning after he had so done, to returne againe to the fleet, and passe along the coast, to the Baye of Chesepiok, where we intended to make our seate and forte.” As White and his men prepared to depart, however, Ferdinando called out an order to the sailors on the pinnace: he told them “not to bring any of the planters backe againe.” They should leave the colonists at Roanoke. Governor White could return to the ship and help transfer his people ashore, but Ferdinando said “that the Summer was farre spent,” and “he would land all the planters in no other place.”23 The sailors, on the pinnace and on Ferdinando’s ship, supported the pilot. White, stunned by this surprising turn of events, meekly acquiesced in the

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decision. His motives for doing so are not clear. That White fully expected Grenville’s men to be alive suggests that he believed that the Algonquians had been badly weakened by English diseases, or that the bloody conclusion of the previous year’s colonization effort posed no obstacle to good relations between natives and newcomers. If so, he was sadly mistaken. White made no effort to justify his actions, so we can never know. The important point is that White did acquiesce, putting his colonists within reach of warriors in Ossomocomuck who still viewed the English as a threat, and who still sought opportunities to avenge the leader whom Edward Nugent had beheaded the year before. From the outset White’s colonists would contend with the legacy of Lane’s attack on Dasemunkepeuc.24 White and his men landed on the evening of July , “in the place where our fifteene men were left” the year before. “We found none of them,” White wrote, “nor any signe, that they had been there, saving onely we found the bones of one of those fifteene, which the Savages had slaine long before.” The next morning, White and several of his men walked from this location, near today’s Shallowbag Bay on the island’s eastern side, “to the North Ende of the Island, where Master Ralfe Lane had his forte, with sundry necessarie and decent dwelling houses made by his men about it the yeere before.” There White “hoped to finde some signes, or certaine knowledge of our fifteene men.”25 If the bleaching bones of one of Grenville’s men did not suggest their fate, the visit to the fort left White convinced that he had no “hope of ever seeing any of the fifteene men living.” The fort, White said, was “rased downe,” perhaps a reference to the damage done by fire arrows during the attack. Wanchese certainly would have had no reason to level the earthworks on the island. The scene White described suggests that the Roanokes had avoided the settlement since the attack on Grenville’s men. The fort was damaged, but White found “all the houses standing unhurt, saving the neather roomes of them, and also of the forte,” which he found “overgrowen with Melons of divers sortes, and Deere within them feeding on those Mellons.” White brought his company to the desolate fort and ordered his men to make repairs to the standing houses, and to begin constructing additional new cottages for his colonists.26 Governor White observed large numbers of deer on Roanoke Island that summer, and these may have drawn Algonquian hunters to Roanoke. The hunters moved cautiously through the reeds by the waterside, a place “where

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oftentimes they finde the Deere asleepe and so kill them.” Instead of deer, the Roanoke hunters saw George Howe, one of the principal colonists and one of White’s closest advisers. They found him “wading in the water alone, almost naked, without any weapon, save only a small forked sticke, Catching Crabs therewithal.” The Englishman had wandered two miles from the settlement. He was alone, an easy target, and he represented something malevolent. Using the cover provided by the reeds, they approached him, “secretly hidden.” The hunters “shotte at him in the water, where they gave him sixteene wounds with their arrows: and after they had slaine him with their wooden swordes, beat his head in peeces, and fled over the water to the maine.”27 That these hunters mutilated Howe’s body and bashed his skull to pieces tells us much about how Wanchese’s followers viewed the English. It did not matter to them that Howe was defenseless. He represented the enemy and they hated him for that reason. We must recall that in Algonquian communities, on the Carolina Sounds and elsewhere, order and balance comprised fundamentally important social and communal values. Priests and shamans directed the ritual life of villages toward maintaining this balance. Warfare, too, could help restore order to the world. Indians fought to avenge injuries, to right wrongs, and to secure justice. They also fought to teach enemies the error of their ways. Revenge, as in the killing of Howe, served to set things right by easing the pain of those still mourning, but also to demonstrate to the enemy Algonquian strength and the wrongness of English behavior. Warfare, in this sense, was spiritual, moral, and corrective in nature. Other colonists, who died at Indian hands in the Eastern Woodlands, suffered similarly. Archaeologists have found the remains of an Englishman at Jamestown, killed by a blow to the head, who was then scalped and, while lying face down, had his skull smashed into tiny pieces. These acts of violence ensured that the enemy would not only die horribly but suffer in the afterlife as well, and served as an assertion of power on the part of the warriors.28 But that power must have seemed limited to the battered peoples of Ossomocomuck. The hunters fled after the attack on Howe. It was July . The colonists had not completed the process of bringing their goods ashore, and they had taken their first casualty. But no massed attack on the English followed. If killing Howe asserted spiritual power, its possible consequences provoked fear in Dasemunkepeuc. The village had not recovered from the losses of the year before. Wanchese would have crossed over with his scouts

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to Roanoke. Of all the survivors at Dasemunkepeuc, he had the most experience and knowledge of the English. There, he would have recognized Manteo, dressed in English clothing and wearing his hair in an English manner, and White, with whom he had spent so much time during the final months of . He would have seen as well the presence of enough armed men among White’s colonists to render any thoughts of attacking the newcomers impossibly difficult. His people would keep watch on the English, but they would move out of harm’s way. They expected the English to retaliate, and they fled. Pemisapan’s people, the evidence suggests, abandoned Dasemunkepeuc, moving either to Secotan or, less likely, to a location farther in the interior. John White could do nothing more than try to make the best out of a bad situation. Helpless on his own, he relied on Manteo. The governor instructed his only Algonquian friend to gather whatever information he could to repair the English colonists’ tattered relations with the peoples of Ossomocomuck. The colonists looked south, to Manteo’s home village on Croatoan Island. There Manteo “had his mother, and many other kinred, dwelling.” With twenty men, White and Manteo sailed in that direction on the last day of July, looking for “some newes of our fifteene men, but especially to learne the disposition of the people of that Countrey towards us, and to renew our old friendshippe with them.”29 It is a stunning statement on White’s part. His associates, after all, had beheaded Pemisapan the year before, attacked his followers, and spread diseases throughout the region. Grenville’s fifteen men, White must now have recognized, had been killed. Howe’s body he found bristling with arrows, his head beaten to a bloody pulp. Yet he hoped to find friends at Croatoan and elsewhere, and he seems to have believed that the bloodshed and violence of the previous year posed no obstacle to peaceful AngloIndian relations. The Croatoans, for their part, saw the English party coming and viewed it as a threat. The English had not attacked them before, but they well knew the damage that soldiers could do. By  all the peoples of Ossomocomuck knew this. The English were aggressive and violent, and they would deprive a village of its food. The Croatoans prepared to defend their village from the English invaders, a response, on their part, that shows just how unpredictable they believed the English could be.30 So, as the English came ashore, the Croatoans prepared for battle. “They

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seemed,” White wrote, “as though they would fight with us.” There was no attempt to talk, no expression of faith that diplomacy could accomplish anything. Violence seemed to be the only answer. But the warriors looked closely. They saw that the invaders began their march, in White’s words, “with our shot towards them.” The Croatoans knew the damage English guns could do. A score of Englishmen armed with guns was more than they could handle. As the English continued to advance, the Croatoans “turned their backes, and fled.” They would leave their crops and their village to the intruders. They would leave all that behind.31 They ran, but as they did they heard a voice calling to them in their own language. This was not the voice of an Englishman, struggling to string together Algonquian sounds—it was one of their own. They had not recognized Manteo among the foreigners; he had adopted enough English material culture and costume to appear utterly English to the Croatoans. The costs of his relationship to the English must have been tremendously high. But, again, stories of travelers are common in Algonquian cultures, and the Croatoans knew that crossing, whether through the woods or into another world, could take its toll on the traveler and change him in profound ways.32 After this inauspicious landing, the Croatoans did their best to make Manteo and the newcomers feel welcome. The Croatoans came back toward the English party, “threwe away their bowes and arrowes,” and, White wrote, “some of them came unto us, embracing and entertaining us friendly.” They remained concerned about the newcomers’ intentions. They would invite the Englishmen into their village, the Croatoan weroance Menatoan told Manteo, only if the newcomers promised “not to gather or spill any of their corne, for that they had but little.” The Croatoans knew how desperate Lane’s need for food had become the year before, and they did not want to be plundered, especially during a period of drought. Through Manteo, White assured his reluctant hosts “that neither their corne, nor any other thing of theirs, should be diminished by any of us, and that our comming was only to renew the olde love, that was betweene us, and them, at the first, and to live with them as brethren, and friendes.”33 The Croatoans listened as Manteo translated their response. The newcomers wanted to be one with the Croatoans, to become kin. The English answer was acceptable, and what they heard “seemed to please them well.” The Croatoans invited the English party “to walke up to their Towne.” They provided a sumptuous feast, to welcome the newcomers as friends and

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allies, and to render the English familiar. Unlike the followers of Pemisapan and Granganimeo, however, the Croatoans expressed no interest in trade with the newcomers. Very clearly they wanted nothing more from White’s colonists than a promise to do them no harm.34 The Croatoans had suffered from English violence in the recent past. They asked the English, “earnestly,” White said, “that there might be some token or badge given them of us, whereby we might know them to be our friendes, when we met them any where out of the Towne or Island.” The English must have answered that their fury fell only on those who had offended them, and that their friends had nothing to fear. The Croatoans knew better, and the tension at the village began to increase. They told the English “that for want of some such badge, divers of them were hurt the yeere before, being founde out of the Island by Master Lane his companie.” In case the English did not believe them, the Croatoans, White noted, “shewed us one, which at that very instant laye lame, and had lien of that hurt ever since.” The Croatoans knew that the English “mistooke them, and hurt them in steade of Winginoes men,” but they wanted from the newcomers a pledge that no more of these tragic accidents would occur.35 If the English responded to this request, White said nothing about it. The discussions between the Croatoans and the English party resumed the following morning, August . The Croatoans tried to accommodate the colonists. They told White that Howe had been killed “by the remnant of Winginoe’s men, dwelling then at Dasamonguepunke, with whom Winchese kept companie.” They told White as well how Wanchese led the attack on the small party left on Roanoke by Grenville the year before, and how these lost colonists vanished into the ocean. White needed the Croatoans’ assistance, they could see. He asked them “to certifie the people” of Secotan, Aquascogoc, and Pomeiooc, “that if they would accept our friendship, we would willingly receave them againe, and that all unfriendly dealings past on both parties, should be utterly forgiven, and forgotten.” White asked the Croatoans to invite the peoples of Ossomocomuck to meet the English at Roanoke. The “chiefe men” of Croatoan told White that they would see what they could do, well aware that White was in no position to dictate whom he would or would not “receave.” The message the Croatoans carried would not have translated well. No Indian community was inclined to render itself tributary to the English, to recognize White as a weroance, or to view the newcomers as an attractive ally. The Carolina

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Sounds was a place much more hostile to the English in  than it had been two years before, and this group of settlers was considerably weaker than Lane’s small military force.36 The Croatoans may have made an effort to deliver White’s message, but they could have told the English colonists that “the Weroances and chiefe Governours” of the Algonquian towns in Ossomocomuck had no interest in meeting with White on Roanoke Island or anyplace else. White waited, nonetheless, but nobody came. The Algonquians in the region had already drawn their conclusions about the newcomers, and believed that the interests of their people would be best served by keeping their distance. The history of the first Roanoke colony, and the murder and beheading of Pemisapan, taught the people of Ossomocomuck that encounters with the English were encounters with death. White had given the weroances seven days to appear at Roanoke or to send a message by way of the Croatoans. White seems genuinely to have expected “the Weroances of Pomeioke, Aquascoquoc, Secota, and Dasamonguepunke” to “come in, or to send their answers.” On August , White decided that he had waited long enough, and that “the remnant of Wingino his men” must pay for driving off Grenville’s men and killing George Howe. White would “differre the revenging thereof no further.” Manteo accompanied the English force, White said, as “our guide to the place where those savages dwelt.”37 And so the haggard and frightened colonists, just past midnight on the morning of August , “passed over the water” to surprise Wanchese and his supporters at Dasemunkepeuc. The colonists were troubled. White and his fellow Englishmen had hoped to establish peaceful relations with the people of Ossomocomuck. For this they needed the assistance of skilled and capable cultural brokers like Manteo. But the legacy of Anglo-Algonquian bitterness left from Lane’s colony was too great for Manteo to overcome, and for others in the region to forgive and forget. White and his colonists found themselves that summer in the midst of native peoples who did not want them around and, the English felt, against whom they must launch an assault in order to save themselves. Led by Manteo, the English force hoped “to acquite their evill doing towards us.” Manteo “very secretly conveyed” White and his men “to that side, where we had their houses betweene us and the water.” There was no escape. It was still dark, White wrote, when “having espied their fire, and

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some sitting about it, we presently sette on them.” The Algonquians were surprised. Some of the “miserable soules” fled into the surrounding reeds in search of cover. Several were shot.38 One of the men sitting around that campfire at Dasemunkepeuc recognized a leader of the English party. After recovering from his initial shock, and dodging English bullets and blades, he called out to Edward Stafford, and “ranne to him . . . whereby he was saved.” Those whom the English attacked recognized Manteo as well, and called out to him. Only then did the attackers learn that tragically they “were deceaved, for those Savages were our friendes, and were come from Croatoan.” Menatoan, their weroance, was dead, as were many of his followers. They had crossed over to the mainland to harvest the crops left behind by Wanchese and his followers, who had fled after the killing of Howe. Manteo, who led the English into battle, and who, according to White, “behaved himselfe toward us as a most faithfull English man,” had failed to recognize his own people around the fire at Dasemunkepeuc. “The mistaking of these Savages,” White wrote, “somewhat grieved Manteo.” Fearing treachery, the English and their ally had once again fallen upon Indians who posed no threat. Manteo had killed his own people. Still, Manteo managed somehow to blame the victims. He “imputed their harme to their owne follie,” White continued. Manteo told his kin and countrymen “that if their Weroans had kept their promise in coming to the Governour, at the day appointed, they had not knowen that mischance.” If only they had played by English rules, as he had.39 In  Manteo was one of “two savage men of that countrie” carried into England. Now he approached closely, but not yet entirely, the place of a “faithfull English man.” In the wake of the attack on Dasemunkepeuc, after the English had gathered “all the corne, Pease, Pumpions, and Tabacco, that we found ripe,” along with a handful of survivors that included Menatoan’s wife and “yong childe,” one wonders whether Manteo considered, even for a moment, who he was. A Croatoan? An Englishman? Governor White, who left us the only account of affairs at the  colony, did not dwell on Manteo’s feelings, so we shall never know. But White did offer at least one answer to these questions a few days after the attack, though not without revealing the tremendous ambiguity that enveloped persons such as Manteo. On August , White wrote, “our Savage Manteo, by the commandement of Sir Walter Ralegh, was christened in Roanoak, and called Lord thereof, and of Dasamongueponke, in reward for his faithfull service.”40 What all this meant to Manteo is difficult to tell. He had earned a title,

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and a position of leadership, for the assistance he had given to the English colonists. Surely he recognized the emptiness of the powers Ralegh had bestowed upon him. Those who had followed Wanchese had abandoned Roanoke Island the year before and moved once again after the slaying of Howe. Manteo was a native lord without vassals, bearing a title that meant nothing in Ossomocomuck. Yet Manteo’s baptism was much more than an empty gesture. Manteo’s experience, between  and , shows that Indians could play a role in the Anglo-American, New World empire men like Ralegh hoped to plant on American shores. Ralegh and his close supporters believed that “the naturall inhabitants” could be made civil, that the Indians could learn enough of the English and their way of life to accept baptism and Christianity. Of all the Algonquians the English encountered on the Carolina Sounds, only Raleigh the Indian and Manteo did all that the English wanted, and in so doing came to occupy unique, but very lonely places, in the early Atlantic world. Manteo understood the war songs of the Moratucs but could behave like a civilized Englishman; he could speak Algonquin but understand as well the cultural and religious significance of baptism; if Europeans recognized him as Indian, his own people on Croatoan did not recognize him when he returned in , after three years among the English. He may have found himself in a narrow world, bound in a difficult place between what he had once been and what the English wanted him to become. In an ambivalent world where Manteo could behave as “a most Faithfull English man” and kill Indians, where he could serve as Ralegh’s “Lord of Roanoak” while remaining a “savage,” where did he fit? Indeed, who was Manteo?41 Ralegh, the Hakluyts, Harriot, and White all believed that English settlement in America, with the assistance of Indian allies, could be a peaceful enterprise. As Harriot wrote, “by carefulnesse of our selves, neede nothing at all to be feared.” They did not reckon on the havoc their arrival would wreak in Ossomocomuck. They did not anticipate the devastating consequences of disease or the coincidence of their arrival and drought conditions on the Carolina Outer Banks. They did not anticipate English pressure on Algonquian subsistence resources and the emerging belief among Algonquians in the region that the English were the source of their community’s problems. Nor did they recognize the incompatibility of their hopes for the New World with the realities of life on the frontier, as the soldiers sent to do the actual work of colonizing failed to share the philanthropic concerns

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of Harriot or Hakluyt. Had all gone according to English plans, the space Manteo occupied would have remained most treacherous. As it was, the fragile middle ground that emerged in  as natives and newcomers exchanged goods rapidly disappeared. After the killing of Pemisapan, little room remained for people in the middle like Manteo.42

 

L C, L I

I

t is here that the story of the Roanoke ventures, and of the killing of an Indian and its consequences, moves slowly but certainly into the realm of myth, where what we wish we knew far exceeds that of which we can be certain. On August , , Governor White’s daughter Eleanor gave birth to Virginia Dare, “the first Christian borne in Virginia.” Meanwhile, Simon Ferdinando had finished unloading the colonists’ supplies and refitting and repairing his ships for the return to England. On August , the colonists, who had become increasingly edgy and frightened in the wake of the Dasemunkepeuc attack, demanded “with one voice” that White “returne himselfe to England, for the better and sooner obtaining of supplies, and other necessaries for them.” White resisted. He had a grandchild now, and must have found the prospect of leaving his daughter behind heart-wrenching and extremely difficult. He feared that people at home would think ill of him for leading colonists to a country where he did not intend to stay himself. Furthermore, White knew that the colonists intended to leave Roanoke Island “to remove . miles further up into the maine presently.” If he were absent, White said, his “stuffe and goods, might be both spoiled, and most of it pilfered away in the carriage, so that at his returne, hee should be either forced to provide himselfe of all such things againe, or els at his coming againe to Virginia, finde himselfe utterly unfurnished.” White was now grasping at straws, and those who followed him to “Virginia” knew it. Only when the exasperated colonists promised “to make him bonde under all their handes, and seales, for the safe preserving of all his goods for him at his returne to Virginia, so that if any part 

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thereof were spoiled, or lost, they would see it restored to him,” did he finally relent and board the ship.1 By any standard it was a horrific journey home. White sailed on the smaller of the two ships returning to England. At the outset, one of the bars that ran through the capstan broke, causing the other two bars to spin around rapidly, injuring most of the fifteen sailors “so sore, that some of them never recovered from it.” The ship drifted. Soon the men ran out of fresh water, and with most of the crew incapacitated, White limped into Ireland in mid-October. He was not able to deliver to Ralegh “his letters and other advertisements concerning his last voyage and state of the planters” until late in November.2 As White struggled home, the queen, in October, ordered that no ships leave English ports. She feared the Spanish Armada, and the prospect of a Spanish invasion. White lobbied persistently, however, and in , before the Battle of the Armada, was allowed “two small pinnesses” with which to relieve the colonists. The expedition was a disaster. The pilots of the two ships pursued a number of prizes, but were attacked themselves by a much larger French ship. In the ensuing battle, White “was wounded twise in the head, once with a sword, and another time with a pike, and hurt also in the side of the buttock with a shot.” He was lucky to make it back to port.3 Not until  was White able to sail, at long last, for Roanoke. Three ships, the Hopewell, the John Evangelist, and the Little John, left Plymouth that March, sailing at a leisurely pace across the Atlantic. The expedition traded with Indians on Dominica. At Cape Tiburon, White wrote, “we found the bones and carkases of divers men, who had perished (as wee thought) by famine in those woods, being either straglers from their company, or landed by some men of warre,” a bleak symbol of the many lost colonists and doomed sailors whose stories have never been recorded.4 Finally, in August, nearly five months after leaving England, the expedition anchored off Hatorask. White saw “a great smoake rise in the Ile of Roanoak neere the place where I left our Colony in the yeere , which smoake put us in good hope that some of the Colony were there expecting my returne out of England.” The next morning, August , White and some of the company climbed into the ship’s boats to cross to Roanoke. White instructed the gunner on board the Admiral to “make readie  minions and a Falkon well loden, and to shoot them off with reasonable space betweene every shot, to the ende that their reports might bee heard to the place where wee hoped to finde some of our People.” They pushed off, but

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did not get far before they saw “another great smoake to the Southwest on Kindrikers mountes,” on the Outer Banks near the present-day town of Rodanthe. They spent the day investigating, but found “no man nor signe that any had bene there lately.”5 They started out toward Roanoke again the next day. Seven men drowned when “a very dangerous Sea” capsized one of the boats as it entered the Sound, an inauspicious beginning. The sailors were disillusioned, White said, and “were all of one mind not to goe any further to seeke the planters.” He kept after them, and persuaded them to continue. Nineteen men in two boats, led by White, arrived off Roanoke on the evening of August .6 That night, White wrote, was “exceeding darke.” He and his men, however, did see “toward the North end of the Iland ye light of a great fire thorow the woods, to which wee presently rowed.” They announced their arrival with the call of a trumpet. They sang English songs, “and called to them friendly.” But no one answered his calls. Perhaps the songs became more desperate, more forlorn, as they went unanswered. White looked into the darkness as he sang, and began to doubt that anyone was there.7 They came ashore the next morning, August . It was Virginia Dare’s third birthday. Her grandfather, John White, hoped to find her. They went immediately to the site of the fire, and found that it had been caused naturally like the one they had seen on the Outer Banks two days before. They moved through the woods “to that part of the Island directly over against Dasamongwepeuk.” At the village where Edward Nugent had beheaded Pemisapan, and where White and his men had attacked and killed Manteo’s own people, they could see no signs of life. White saw no evidence of the Algonquians he knew had earlier threatened the colonists. He and his men followed the shoreline, moving to the north, until they came to the site of the settlement. They saw in the sand the fresh footprints of Algonquians who had heard the English songs and the sound of their cannons and had fled by morning. They feared the English, and when they left the island, they deprived White of his last, best opportunity to find out what had happened to the colonists. Surely they knew. The fate of the “Lost Colonists” was no mystery to the Algonquians of the Carolina Sounds. Instead of finding the people he had left behind, White found a sign carved by his countrymen. “As we entred up the sandy banke” he wrote, White saw that “upon a tree, in the very browe thereof were curiously carved these faire Romane letters CRO.”8 White knew what this meant. The letters, he said, signified “the place, where I should find the planters seated,

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according to a secret token agreed upon betweene them and me at my last departure from them.” The colonists would write the name of the place they moved to, for at the time of his departure in  “they were prepared to remove from Roanoak  miles into the maine.” If the colonists left in distress, they would carve a cross over the name. On a post in the palisade, however, White saw that “. foote from the ground in fayre Capitall letters was graven CROATOAN without any crosse or signe of distresse.”9 Among the grass and weeds that had overgrown the settlement, White and his men found iron bars and other heavy objects that the colonists had apparently left behind. They found evidence that Wanchese’s followers had returned to the island after the departure of the colonists, dug up the chests that the English had buried, and taken what they considered of value. White found strewn “about the place many of my things spoiled and broken, and my bookes torne from the covers, the frames of some of my pictures and mappes rotten and spoyled with rayne, and my armor almost eaten through with rust.” The sight of his destroyed property upset White, “yet on the other side,” he wrote, “I greatly joyed that I had safely found a certaine token of their safe being at Croatoan, which is the place where Manteo was borne, and the Savages of the Iland our friends.” The colonists, in White’s view, were not lost. They had found shelter among the last Algonquian allies willing to tolerate their presence.10 White wanted to go to Croatoan to search for the colonists, but he never made it. Bad weather, worse luck, and the lure of privateering conspired to frustrate his hopes and push the English ships out into the Atlantic. White never found his daughter and grandchild, and the men and women he left behind in  became the famous “Lost Colonists” of Roanoke.11 It has long been one of the great mysteries in American history: the disappearance of  men, women, and children. Dozens of books have been written by historians seeking to solve the riddle of the Lost Colony. All assume that the story of these English colonists mattered in some elemental fashion. Their disappearance was meaningful. It was significant. That these colonists vanished demanded an explanation, and many have since been offered for the colonists’ fate. William Byrd, who traversed the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina early in the eighteenth century, believed that the colonists “were either Starved or cut to Pieces by the Indians.” Byrd’s exceedingly bleak explanation did not differ significantly from that offered two and a half centuries later by that eminent historian

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of the Elizabethan period, A. L. Rowse: “No doubt,” he wrote, “the colonists must have been scalped and eaten.”12 But considerable doubt does indeed exist, and almost nobody believes that the natives of Ossomocomuck attacked the colonists on Roanoke Island and massacred them there. In Paul Green’s pageant, The Lost Colony, as the harried settlers prepare to leave the fort and find safety from hostile Indians with Manteo’s people, they are surprised by news that a Spanish ship has anchored at the Hatorsask Inlet. The frightened colonists decide to flee. Their leader reminds them, however, that “we leave the fort only to return again. We do not give up the settlement.” The “Historian,” a critical narrator in Green’s play, then enters and announces to the audience that the Lost Colonists disappeared, “out of our sight forever—some of them slaughtered by the Spaniards, others to die in the forest, and still a few others to live forgotten with the Indians.”13 We do know that the Spaniards sought out the location of Ralegh’s colonists. Grenville’s sweep through the West Indies in , and Drake’s raid on St. Augustine the following year, announced to the Spanish that the English had established a base somewhere in the vicinity. In , the Spanish sailor Alonso Ruize was captured by an English privateer named William Irish. He sailed aboard Irish’s fleet up the coast of la Florida past the Carolina coast, where Ruize saw “signs of horned cattle with a branded mule,” evidence in his view of the presence nearby of an English outpost.14 Only in  did the Spanish find firm evidence of an English base hidden on the Carolina Sounds. Vicente González, a Spanish captain, had explored the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay when, in an effort to avoid high winds that threatened to blow him out to sea, he entered the inlet the English called Port Ferdinando. There González found “signs of a slipway for small vessels, and on land a number of vessels made with English casks, and other debris indicating that a considerable number of people had been here.” González saw no signs of life when he sailed past Roanoke Island, evidence perhaps that the colonists White left there had already departed.15 That González merely chanced upon evidence of an English settlement demonstrates that Spanish concern about the English outpost was episodic at best, and that locating it was not a high priority for the Spaniards. They certainly would have searched more diligently for Ralegh’s colonists had they considered the Carolina coast more important from a strategic perspective. While Spanish spies and diplomats chattered ceaselessly about English designs on the West Indies, the rumored English outpost was the

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least of the concerns confronted by imperial officials on the ground in the Americas and West Indies. The Spanish did not attack or injure the Lost Colonists, in short, because they simply did not feel they were worth the trouble of looking for.16 The Lost Colonists, we are reasonably certain, thus did not die manning the palisades of their fort on the island. They were neither eaten by savages on Roanoke Island nor roasted at the stake by blood-thirsty Papists. They left Roanoke, and they went someplace else. But where did they go? Playwrights like Green, antiquarians, archaeologists, and historians, too, have attempted to answer this question. All their answers have one deceptively simple element in common: in all of them, the fate of the Lost Colonists is decided by Algonquians—native people who either attack these frightened English men and women or provide them with shelter. Yet students of the past who have been drawn to this story too often still focus primarily on the fate of the colonists. We can ask about them, too, but we must keep in mind that in the absence of some as-yet-undiscovered archaeological gold mine, or the uncovering, in some archive, of some previously unnoticed document, what happened to these colonists will remain a mystery. We might, however, gain some insight if we remind ourselves to view Roanoke as above all an Algonquian story. Because facts are so few, mythical retellings of the Lost Colonists’ fate have always flourished. Many of these do little more than evoke tired stereotypes of native peoples as either noble savages or ignoble psychopaths. The “White Doe” legend, a tale well known in North Carolina and often repeated, is a good example. A. Denison Dart, for instance, noted in his version of the story that at the birth of Virginia Dare “the grim old Indians and their dusky squaws looked with wonder and admiration on this little stranger, calling her the ‘White Doe.’” O. R. Mangum believed that Virginia Dare and her fellow colonists moved to Croatoan Island, Manteo’s home, where they found “a refuge from the dangers of starvation, or a treacherous death from hostile tribes.” Among the Croatoans, Mangum continued, Virginia Dare “grew into fair maidenhood, but was changed by the sorcery of a rejected lover into a White Doe, of immortal beauty, who haunts continually the place of her birth, and at times was seen gazing wistfully over the sea.”17 Of course. The White Doe became a haunting presence on Roanoke Island. She remained in that form until, Mangum said, “she was slain by a rejected lover, a young Indian chief, in the hope that if he shot her with an enchanted arrow she would be restored to him in human form.” It was,

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in the end, either a terribly forlorn hope or a really bad idea, for the arrow killed the Doe and with it poor Virginia Dare. Numerous iterations of the White Doe legend exist, some simple, some more complex, some emphasizing one part of the story or another. The differences in detail matter less than the one important factor they all have in common, for the White Doe legend allowed those who took an interest in the history of English colonization at Roanoke to continue talking and writing about English people long after they had disappeared. Even after they had vanished, the Lost Colonists remained at the center of the story.18 For his part, John White never doubted that the colonists moved south to Croatoan Island. The Indians there, White believed, would have willingly supported the English population because of Manteo’s influence and because the colonists and Croatoans, White believed, were still “friends.” There is indeed some evidence that at Croatoan English settlers and Algonquian villagers managed to construct a peaceful Anglo-Indian community that avoided the violence and bloodshed that characterized so much of English settlement in America. An English signet ring has been unearthed by archaeologists at Buxton, near the historical location of Croatoan, as has a casting counter that matches similar items unearthed at the Fort Raleigh site. Perhaps these objects are the remains of a small English settlement at Croatoan, but it is just as likely that they had been traded to the Indians by the English. Their provenance is not at all clear.19 Yet the post White found read “CROATOAN,” and it made sense for at least some of the English party to move down the Outer Banks. Given the prevailing currents in the Atlantic, Croatoan offered a vantage point for awaiting the arrival of English supply ships. These two facts, and the alleged sighting of Croatoan Indians later with blue and gray eyes, suggested that the Lost Colonists had indeed found a home among Manteo’s people. There are problems, however, with the Croatoan story. The island’s carrying capacity was limited, and the Croatoans would have found it difficult to provide food for  English men, women, and children who arrived at their village late in the summer. After all, when White arrived in , they extracted from him a pledge not to take their corn. With this in mind, a number of historians have suggested that only a small contingent of English colonists went to Croatoan to await White’s return. The rest, presumably, went elsewhere. Still, if the colonists did follow Manteo to Croatoan, and encouraged the “Lord of Roanoac” to abandon his post on the island, then they would have shared in his people’s history.

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And that history is one distinctly difficult to recover. The documentary evidence allows us little more than snapshots of the Croatoans at different points in time. We know little about the dynamics of community life. All we can tell for certain is that the Croatoans struggled to survive in the wake of European colonization. By  they called themselves the Hatteras Indians, and they lived at a village on the Sound side of Hatteras Island located near present-day Buxton.20 Archaeologists have found eight Croatoan sites on Hatteras, but when John Lawson visited early in the s, they had only one town, known as Sand Banks. By Lawson’s count, they had sixteen “fighting men,” indicating a total population of between sixty and eighty individuals. Lawson visited Roanoke Island, where he saw the ruins of the English fort. He saw as well “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 hoop’d with the same metal.”21 As he moved along the shore, observing the remnants of the peoples of Ossomocomuck, Lawson thought that the gospel must be carried by Englishmen to “these savages.” We must, he wrote upon his return to England in , “shew a tenderness for these Heathens under the weight of infidelity,” and “cherish their good deeds, and with Mildness and Clemency, make them sensible and forewarn them of their ill ones.” The English must “let our dealings be just to them in every respect, and shew no ill example, whereby they may think we advise them to practice that which we will not be conformable to ourselves.” Encouragement must be given “to the ordinary people, and those of lower rank” among the English especially, that they treat the Indians well. Only then would they see the justice of the English, and intermarry with them. The Indians, Lawson hoped, would intermarry “with the Christians, and their idolatry would be quite forgotten, and, in all probability, a better worship come in its Stead.”22 This was, of course, a major component of the English vision for the New World, and Lawson differed little in his sentiments from Harriot and Hakluyt, who preceded him by twelve decades. Indians had potential. If treated well, they could become more like us. As they abandoned their savagery, and accepted Christianity, the English hoped, those important factors that distinguished them from civilized people would fade from view. Like Manteo, in a sense, they would approach as closely as they could the position of “most faithfull” Englishmen and women. It did not work out. Lawson was tortured to death several years later. The Iroquoian Tuscaroras and their Algonquian allies, the latter of whom may

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have included the descendants of Pemisapan and Wanchese, had concluded by the early eighteenth century that the English were the source of their communities’ problems. On the Outer Banks, Lawson noted that the process of assimilation was not nearly as tidy as the English had once envisioned. The Hatteras Indians told Lawson “that several of their Ancestors were white People, and could talk in a Book, as we do; the Truth of which is confirm’d by gray Eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians, and no others.” These Indians reported to Lawson seeing regularly a ghost ship, which “does often appear amongst them, under Sail, in a gallant Posture, which they call Sir Walter Raleigh’s Ship.” The Lost Colonists, Lawson believed, “were forced to cohabit” with the Croatoans “for Relief and Conversation; and that in process of Time, they conform’d themselves to the Manners of their Indian Relations. And thus,” he gloomily concluded, “we see, how apt Humane Nature is to degenerate.”23 Lawson would have expected the presence of the English colonists to have uplifted Manteo’s people. Instead, he believed, the reverse had occurred. Because he was more interested in the fate of the colonists than the Indians among whom they might have settled, Lawson turned his attention in other directions, thereafter ignoring the Coastal Algonquians. Like their neighbors, the Hatteras Indians lost population. The reasons are not hard to find, and the story is depressingly familiar. Traders from Virginia and the colony of Carolina, founded in , began to penetrate the region in the latter part of the seventeenth century. They carried with them disease and alcohol, both of which did alarming damage in native communities. Indeed, Lawson wrote, “most of the Savages were much addicted to Drunkenness, a Vice they never were acquainted with, till the Christians came amongst them.” Intoxicated Algonquians engaged in acts of violence and destruction that could devastate their communities. Planters followed the traders. Disease, alcohol, and the encroachment of Englishmen on native lands impoverished the Indians. By the time of Lawson’s visit, the Hatteras were truly a marginal people.24 Yet they continued to live as they always had done. Lawson wrote that the Indians who lived by the ocean “take abundance of fish, some very large,” preserving them by drying “upon Hurdles, having a constant Fire under them,” similar to those depicted by John White over a century before. The coastal Algonquians Lawson observed still fished at night by torchlight, another practice described by White. They had experienced change, no doubt. They directed traditional subsistence activities toward participation

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in the colonial economy. Algonquians, Lawson reported, built fish weirs for the colonists “for a small matter.” The dried fish they took for their own use and sold the surplus to nearby settlers. They spoke some English and some, “more civilized than the rest . . . wear hats, Shooes, Stockings, Breeches, with very tolerable Linnen Shirts, which is not common amongst these heathens.” When Lawson visited them early in the eighteenth century, native peoples were struggling to preserve the core of their communities.25 It only got worse. In , the conflict known as the Tuscarora War began. Native peoples in North Carolina lashed out against the abuses of traders, slavers, and the farmers and planters who encroached upon their lands. The Hatteras, who “always had been friendly with the whites . . . and cherished a friendship with the English because of their affinity,” fought for the colonists against the Tuscaroras and their allies. By  the Hatteras were refugees, and the colonial government noted that they had “made their escape from the Enemy Indians and are now at Colonel Boyd’s house” on the southern shore of Albemarle Sound. It is a revealing piece of information. Obviously, their participation in the conflict had cost them much, and the Hatteras indeed struggled during the war. Like Indian auxiliaries who fought for other colonial forces, they suffered both on the fields of battle and from other ravages of war. The small numbers of English colonists would have found Hatteras lands easy picking. At the same time, with their cornfields undefended and the men away, their native opponents struck them. In this sense, having Boyd as an ally helped: as a member of the colony’s executive council, he had influence with the colonial government, and these beleaguered Algonquians needed a broker to act in their behalf. The provincial council ordered Boyd “to supply the Said Indyans with Corne for their Subsistence untill they can returne to their own habitations againe.” The next year, the Hatteras Indians still relied upon relief granted by the colonial government. In response to a petition from the Hatteras “praying some Small reliefe from the Country for their services being reduced to great poverty,” the council voted to supply them with sixteen bushels of corn.26 A  map of North Carolina showed the Hatteras Indian town, which consisted of “about  or  . . . who dwell among the English.” The village community soon thereafter broke into its constituent parts, the extended family. These few survivors moved to the mainland and settled amongst the polyglot Algonquian community at Mattamuskeet. There they lived, “the remains of the Attamuskeet, Roanoke and Hatteras Indians,” a missionary

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noted in , “mixed with the white inhabitants.” By the time the noted anthropologist Frank Speck encountered the “remnants of the Machapunga Indians of North Carolina,” as he called them, he found that “all actual traces of native culture had been lost among these descendants.” The museum pieces he had hoped to find, Speck suggested, had been corrupted.27 And so we have come, in a sense, full circle. The English colonists, afraid and worried for their future, move down the Outer Banks and settle among Manteo’s people. Manteo by this point was a Christian, almost, but not quite, a “most faithfull English man.” In time, the material aspects of their lives would come to resemble those of their hosts. By the time John Lawson visited, the population of the community had been drastically reduced. Lawson saw some gray-eyed Indians, reflections perhaps of the Lost Colonists who had, for all intents and purposes, gone native. But the Hatteras Indians themselves were undergoing significant change from disease, warfare, poverty, and the encroachment of outsiders onto their land. As they became increasingly poor they relied upon the colonial government for food. They eventually settled on the reservation that government established at Mattamuskeet. There, they listened to a missionary sponsored by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and presented their children for baptism as Christians. We can speak of Lost Colonists, but we ought to keep in mind that their fate may well be intimately connected with that of Manteo’s people, and that there is no historically justifiable way to view the English story in isolation from that of the Algonquian peoples of Ossomocomuck. But of course we need not assume that the colonists relocated to Croatoan. It is entirely possible that they went elsewhere: that a different group of Indians, in a different location, may have determined their fate. While later English colonists would plant themselves at Jamestown, Plymouth, and Boston, Ralegh’s settlers dug in on Roanoke and visited Dasemunkepeuc, Secotan, Hatorask, and Choanoac. The land was never enough theirs to warrant renaming. The colonists left Roanoke Island, an environment over which they never succeeded in imposing their will, and ventured into a world where Indian rules even more clearly prevailed.28 After his arrival in  at the site English settlers would later call Jamestown, Captain John Smith began to hear bits and pieces of information that led him to believe that at least some of Ralegh’s colonists still survived and that they lived in native communities somewhere to the south of the

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English colony of Virginia. Wahunsonacock, who held Smith captive late that year, told the English adventurer of “a countrie called Anone, where they have abundance of Brasse, and houses walled as ours.” Well to the south, Smith learned, at a place called Ocanahanon, he might find men clothed like himself. Another English colonist, George Percy, at the same time reported seeing in one Powhatan community a light-skinned child with blond hair. Ralegh’s colonists, or their descendants, it seemed, were out there somewhere.29 Three years later, in England, William Strachey learned additional information about the whereabouts of Ralegh’s Lost Colonists from Wahunsonacock’s emissary, Machumps. At “Peccarecannick and Ochanahoen,” Strachey learned, “the People have houses built with stone walls, and one story above another.” The English people who had taught the natives to construct houses in this manner, and who “breed up tame Turkeis about their howses,” and look for copper in the mountains, had “escaped the slaughter at Roanoak” that, Strachey believed, had occurred shortly after the Jamestown colonists arrived at Chesapeake Bay in the spring of . Seven of the survivors, “fower men, twoo Boyes, and one young Maid,” remained at a town called Ritanoe, under the protection of a weroance named Eyanoco.30 Both Strachey and Smith learned that Wahunsonacock massacred the large majority of Ralegh’s colonists, and that only a handful survived. Wahunsonacock, the chronicler Samuel Purchas later reported, admitted to Smith “that he had bin at the murder of that Colonie: and shewed to Captain Smith a Musket barrel and a brasse Morter, and certaine pieces of Iron which had bin theirs.”31 Once again we have an explanation for the fate of the Lost Colonists, and once again that fate is shaped by Indian hands. Smith sent men to look for the rumored survivors. Wowinchopunk, weroance of the Paspaheghs who lived close to Jamestown, sought the friendship of the English colonists. To curry Smith’s favor, early in  Wowinchopunk sent men to accompany an exploring party to search for the location of Ocanahanon. According to the map that resulted from the expedition, the Englishmen explored the Roanoke River and learned of the copper deposits at a place they called Ritanoc. They learned that at a village farther south, “Pakerikanick,” “-men clothed that came from Roonock to Occonohowan” remained. Smith’s men learned that some of White’s colonists survived, and derived something of an explanation for their fate, but they never succeeded in locating them.32

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The “Instructions” the leaders of the Virginia Company of London drew up for their new governor, Sir Thomas Gates, in May , show that Smith had shared with them what he had learned about the fate of Ralegh’s colonists. At “Peccarecamincke,” the Company told Gates, “you shall finde foure of the English alive, left by Sir Walter Rawely, which escaped from the slaughter of Powhatan of Roanocke, upon the first arrival of our Colonie, and live under the protection of a weroance called Gepanocon, enemy to Powhatan by whose consent you shall never recover them.”33 Smith was not satisfied with the incomplete evidence his men had gleaned through their explorations with Wowinchopunk. He eagerly took advantage of opportunities offered by other weroances who sought to win English approval. These Algonquian leaders guided small groups of Englishmen interested in finding out what had happened to White’s party. The Warraskoyacks, for instance, late in  led Michael Sicklemore toward Choanoac, a town Smith knew was important from having read Lane’s account of the  colony. Sicklemore must have spoken with the Choanoacs. From them he “found little hope and lesse certaintie of them were left by Sir Walter Ralegh.” The land looked devastated, “the river . . . not great, the people few, the country most overgrowne with pynes.”34 At nearly the same time, Nathaniel Powell and Anas Todkill followed their Quiyoughquohanock guides into the heart of the Mangoak territory. Powell and Todkill told Virginia Company officials in London that they found “Crosses & Leters, the Characters and assured Testimonies of Christians newly cut in the barkes of trees.” This seemed certain evidence that English people were in the vicinity, that they wanted to be found, and that they wanted to be redeemed from the wilderness.35 But what were these English stragglers doing out there? They were not all dead—that much is clear from the information the Virginia Company gleaned from Smith’s men. White’s colonists survived, quite simply, by accepting assimilation into Native American communities. These Englishmen and women, about whom we know almost nothing, accepted the roles native peoples offered or imposed upon them. In a sense, they followed a course opposite to that of Manteo: they became Algonquian, submerging their own English stories beneath those of the native communities who lived in Ossomocomuck. Still, we are left with the question of how and why these small groups of survivors came to live within the communities that they did. How do we account for blond Algonquians, gray eyes, and the presence, here and there, of small groups of people wearing clothes and

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building houses of stone? And why did the Indian communities that housed these English people provide them with shelter? What was in it for them? The majority of White’s colonists, one story goes, left the island and moved to the territory of the Chesapeakes. This is one common explanation for their fate. Lane’s party in late  and early  found that area a promising site for settlement, and the Chesapeakes friendly and eager for trade. Some historians believe that if White had his way, he would have established his “Cittie of Ralegh” there in . With no sign of their governor, however, and relations with the peoples of Ossomocomuck beyond repair, it is entirely possible that the colonists White left behind relocated to the lands of that Algonquian community that had welcomed them two years before.36 The Chesapeakes had successfully resisted the growing power of Wahunsonacock. As the leader of the Powhatan chiefdom extended his influence in the decades before the English arrived at Jamestown, the Chesapeakes frustrated his attempts to control them. They did not want to pay him tribute, or recognize Wahunsonacock as their lord. The English party could help the Chesapeakes maintain their autonomy. The English carried guns, weapons that could still inspire awe amongst Algonquians who were not familiar with them. And the newcomers possessed montoac in the form of the objects that they carried and in their ability to do things that ordinary men and women could not do. Self-interest and a need for allies to defend them from an expansive power provided ample motive for the Chesapeakes to welcome the colonists into their villages. For twenty years, William Strachey reported, the English colonists “had peaceably lyved and intermixed with those Savadges.” Strachey thought little about what this meant. Perhaps the English colonists joined households within the palisades at Skikoac. If so, they could not have remained apart. Throughout the Eastern Woodlands, native communities had established and deeply understood cultural practices for assimilating outsiders. We have seen some of this in Granganimeo’s initial meeting with Amadas and Barlowe in . The Chesapeakes, in this case, would have made White’s colonists kin, and they would have been attached to one or another of the families, clans, and lineages within the community. It was a deeply ritualistic process, with the outsiders, in essence, surrendering their previous identities and accepting full immersion into the community. If the English learned what was expected of them, the transformation would be complete and thorough-going. In Chesapeake eyes, the colonists became Algonquians.

Lost Colonists, Lost Indians

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Much is made in historical accounts of the birth of Virginia Dare and another child during the summer of . There were indeed women and children among the English colonists, but men still significantly outnumbered women. These men, if they successfully joined Chesapeake society, would have married Chesapeake wives and fathered children socialized in a Chesapeake community. Because Algonquian communities in both Virginia and North Carolina appear to have been matrilineal, meaning that descent was traced through the mother rather than the father, the children resulting from these unions would have been accepted as Chesapeakes. White’s colonists would have lived by Algonquian rules, altering the rhythm of their lives very significantly as they did so. By early , however, Wahunsonacock concluded that the newcomers posed a significant threat to his chiefdom. His priests told him, Strachey wrote, “how that from the Chesapeack Bay a Nation should arise, which should dissolve and give end to his Empier.” Ralegh’s colonists, and the Chesapeakes among whom they lived, seemed to Wahunsonacock to fit this description. Thus “according to the auncyent and gentile Custome,” Wahunsonacock “destroyed and put to the sword, all such who might lye under any doubtfull construccion of the said prophesie, as all the Inhabitants, the weroance and his subjects of that province and so remayne all the Chessiopeians at this daie; and for this cause extinct.” Only a small number of colonists survived. They scampered into the interior, fleeing the fury of an Algonquian empire-builder, and found shelter with whomever they could.37 It is possible that events unfolded like this, but we cannot know for sure. None of the English sources stated clearly that the colonists moved to the Chesapeake. Despite Strachey’s claim, the Chesapeake Indians did not entirely disappear. John Smith, in , estimated that the community still had one hundred warriors, indicating a total population of at least . In any case, there are other possibilities. Governor John White had said that the colonists intended to move fifty miles into the interior after he left. If they moved west rather than north, and ascended Albemarle Sound rather than Chesapeake Bay, this relocation could have placed them in the territory of the Weapemeocs.38 Led by Okisco when the English first arrived in Ossomocomuck, the Weapemeoc villagers divided sharply over how best to respond to the newcomers’ presence. Most of the Weapemeocs, Ralph Lane believed, joined in the conspiracy that Lane feared Pemisapan had organized. Indeed, the

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Weapemeocs had suffered as did other Algonquians. One of the earliest English attacks fell upon a Weapemeoc village. These communities would have been as susceptible to disease as any of the other Algonquian villages visited by the English. They probably confronted Lane’s demands for food as well. When Lane ascended the Chowan River, he sailed past the Weapemeoc villages. During his hurried return trip to Roanoke in the spring of , his men sustained themselves by taking the harvest of Weapemeoc fishing weirs. The towns themselves were abandoned, the food supplies carried off with the villagers. When the Weapemeocs saw Lane and his men coming, they fled. Okisco, the English believed, was different. After Lane’s return he came to Roanoke Island to submit himself and his people to the authority of “the great Weroanza of England” and to agree “from that time forwarde . . . to acknowledge her Majestie their onely Soveraigne.” The metropolitan promoters of English settlement at Roanoke and at subsequent English colonies hoped that their settlers would succeed in cultivating native allies like this. Only through the establishment of peaceful relations with local native peoples could the sponsors of these colonizing ventures achieve their imperial objectives. Okisco’s submission, then, was a welcome sign to colonists whose relations with other Algonquian communities had deteriorated badly.39 Okisco came to Roanoke at Menatonon’s command, but we must not overlook his own motives for accepting the queen and Sir Walter as his superiors. A pro-English weroance in an environment of increasing AngloAlgonquian tension, Okisco would have found his position tenuous at best. Many of his own people, according to Lane, turned against him and joined in the plot against the English. At the very least we can conclude that, as Okisco accepted English authority, the Weapemeocs rejected him. Lane observed that Okisco and his remaining followers fled into the interior rather than join Pemisapan’s plot. He was a leader with few followers, a deposed weroance who saw in the acceptance of English authority an opportunity, however desperate, to secure protection against the hostility of his own people.40 These considerations may have led Okisco, the following year, to welcome White’s colonists into his village at Chiapanum. The English settlers could provide Okisco with some protection and perhaps a few trade goods, and more when and if White returned. But settlement at Weapemeoc could, as well, have led to the destruction of White’s colonists. Okisco obviously

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had many enemies, and these would not have appreciated the close proximity of a group of English settlers, whom they would have seen as the authors of the misery they had survived the year before. If the Roanoke colonists were attacked, as English observers learned from a variety of scattered sources, it is entirely possible that the parties responsible for the destruction came not from the Powhatan chiefdom but from among Okisco’s opponents. It is possible, as well, that internal strife had left the Weapemeocs weakened and vulnerable to the outside forces who attacked them and their English guests. In either case, the English placed their reliance upon a weakened weroance who could not protect them. We are left with a few English survivors who seem to have found shelter farther west, in native villages along the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers.41 There are problems with this account. There is, of course, no archaeological evidence to support the notion that White’s settlers lived among the Weapemeocs. Nor do any of the written sources lead us necessarily to conclude that the Lost Colonists went there. We still are left, moreover, with the word “CROATOAN” carved on that post at Roanoke. If the colonists had moved into Weapemeoc territory, why did they not indicate this to White? Perhaps they feared that, if they directed White to Albemarle Sound, he could come across the wrong Indians, the hostile Weapemeocs. Better to guide him in slowly, from distant Croatoan. But White would not have come alone, and he knew the indigenous politics of the region better than anyone else in his expedition in . As governor, White made his mistakes, but he was no novice.42 What we are left with is at best an educated guess, informed speculation. We cannot know with any certainty what happened to the Lost Colonists. You can believe what you want. White’s colonists may have gone to Croatoan, or to the Chesapeake, or to Okisco’s beleaguered village on Albemarle Sound. They could have gone to any of these places, or they may have gone someplace else. In , a tourist “engaged in a motor tour in coastal North Carolina” made an astonishing discovery. Wandering away from the highway, he found a -pound stone near the eastern shore of the Chowan River, bearing inscriptions in English that appeared to be very old. The discoverer, who at the time wished to remain anonymous, carried the stone to Emory University in Atlanta, where he left it in the care of Dr. Haywood Pearce and his colleagues.43

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On the front of the stone, Pearce reported, a Latin cross appeared above the lines Ananias Dare & Virginia went hence Unto Heaven 

Beneath these lines were instructions for anyone finding the stone to carry it to Governor White, an announcement that his son-in-law and grandchild had died four years after his departure. Of more interest were the seventeen lines etched on the back, a letter from Eleanor Dare to her father. After White left, the inscription read, the colonists relocated to the eastern shore of the Chowan River. There they experienced “onlie misarie & Warre” for two years. After two more years only “foure & twentie” of the colonists survived. The remaining lines read as follows: Salvage with message of ship unto us / Smal space of time they affrite of revenge rann al awaye / we bleeve yt not yov / soone after ye salvages faine spirits angrie / suddaine murther al save seaven / mine childe—ananias to slaine with much misarie—burie al neere foure myles easte this river uppon smal hil / names writ al ther on rocke / putt this ther alsoe / salvage shew this unto yov & hither wee promise yov to give greate plentie presents.44

The “Dare Stone,” Pearce contended, offered to shed new light on the fate of the Lost Colonists. It was a stunning discovery. If the inscriptions were accurate, the colonists moved to the lower reaches of the Chowan, where they settled along the eastern bank. After a massacre there in , only seven of the colonists remained alive. Not everyone was persuaded, however. As the editors of the Journal of Southern History pointed out, in the same issue in which Pearce’s initial report appeared, ample reason existed for “the members of the historical guild” to “assume an attitude of wholesome skepticism.” The editors suggested that the “identity and status of the finder, the exact location of the discovery, the timely disclosure so near the celebration of the settlement at Roanoke Island, the presence of the stone in a region some distance from rock exposure, the mechanics of the inscribing process, and the unprecedented spelling and usage of certain words in the inscription, are some of the problems upon which the cautious will expect more light.”45

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Over the following months, more “Dare Stones” appeared, forty-six in all. The story inscribed on the additional stones contradicted in part the story told on the first. Most of the additional stones were found by William Eberhart, some in Greenville County, South Carolina, and the rest in Hall, Habersham, and Fulton Counties in Georgia. All the stones provided additional bits of evidence on the fate of the Lost Colonists. Stone , for instance, which Eberhart found in Greenville County in the spring of , included an inscription stating that “heyr laeth Daniel Brobye hee murther bye salvage .” The back of the same stone included the words, “Foure lae heyr They Die of moche miserie.” Several months later Eberhart found another stone with a message from Eleanor Dare for her father. “It has bene  yeeres sithence yov hab departe maie God brynge you hither. Eleanor Dare .”46 There were obvious problems with the Dare Stones as a source of evidence. Nobody, for example, could explain how so large a number of engraved stones could lie undiscovered for so long, yet show up in scattered locations across the South over the short span of several months. This alone should have raised more than a few red flags. Nobody could offer an adequate explanation as to why Indians would have lugged twenty-pound stones around a vast expanse of the Southern backcountry, distributing them hither and thither, or why Eleanor Dare would in the first place bother to carve messages for her father into stone and then have them dropped in the woods in what eventually became the state of Georgia and South Carolina. Few seemed suspicious enough when Stone  turned up late in the summer of . Eleanor Dare, on this stone, told her father that “wee ben heyr  yeares in primaeval splendor.” Whatever the fate of the Lost Colonists, for Eleanor Dare to have described any part of her life as one of “splendor” should have seemed incredibly unlikely.47 Yet, for reasons that are not clear, people wanted to believe in the veracity of the Dare Stones. Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia, which housed and shamelessly promoted the entire collection, convened a conference in  to look into their authenticity. Eminent Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison chaired the panel of investigators. He came to Brenau, visited the sites where the stones were found, and even found time to enjoy “a picnic luncheon . . . served on a high hill, where Eleanor is supposed to have been buried, and from which a view of Atlanta, ten miles in the distance, was enjoyed.”48 The historians believed that the stones were authentic, and they pieced

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together something of a narrative from them that differed from that contained in the first stone alone. Soon after White’s departure, the colonists moved to Croatoan. There several dozen died. The survivors, seventy-one in all, moved to Greenville County, where in  they fell victim to an Indian massacre. Only a handful escaped. They fled farther south, arriving on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, where they lived under the protection of an Indian “King” who showed them “moche mercye.” Eleanor died there in .49 Of course the discovery of these stones was too good to be true, a fraud, intended to capitalize on the public’s interest in the fate of the Lost Colonists as the th anniversary of their disappearance approached. Though the Dare Stones were fraudulent, however, the notion that White’s colonists moved farther into the interior and placed themselves under the protection of a friendly weroance is certainly within the realm of possibility. The fifty miles that White estimated the colonists would move could have placed them along the fertile banks of the Chowan River, in the territory of Menatonon, a weroance who had never taken any hostile action against Ralegh’s colonists.50 Whether the colonists lived at Choanoac, or in a settlement of their own tributary to Menatonon or his successor, they would have enjoyed access to fertile soil and, if they behaved themselves appropriately, the protection of a powerful weroance. As time progressed, they would increasingly have become members of the community, governing their lives according to Choanoac social norms and expectations. To enjoy the protection of the Choanoacs, the English would have had to act like Choanoacs. There is evidence suggesting that White’s colonists did settle among the Choanaocs. Smith sent his men to explore the lower Chowan River, the heart of Menatonon’s territory, precisely because he learned of the presence of Englishmen in the area. Four decades later, Edward Bland traveled through the territory of the Choanoacs and Mangoaks. Bland had been sent by Governor William Berkeley of Virginia “to go, and speake with an Englishman” who reportedly lived among the Iroquoian Tuscaroras, “and to enquire for an English woman cast away long since, and was amongst those Nations.”51 Bland never found the English man and woman he sought, suggesting that something had indeed happened to White’s colonists. The Choanoacs had their rivals. They occupied a critical point in the east-west flow of trade goods. Coastal peoples sent foodstuffs, beads, and European trade

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goods into the interior, which Choanoac middlemen exchanged with people farther to the west. Trade goods—beads, foodstuffs, furs, and copper— moved along a line from the interior to the coast. The English needed protection from these coastal peoples. Certainly through Manteo they would have told Menatonon that provisions and trade goods were on the way, and that once their governor returned they could provide Menatonon with an ample quantity of presents. The colonists could strengthen the position of the Choanoacs in regional trade networks. Of course White and the colonists were never reunited, and the colonists were never resupplied. The colonists, living under the protection of Menatonon or his successors, would necessarily have had to conform themselves to the expectations of the Choanoacs among whom they lived. We can imagine these Englishmen and women, living their lives and abandoning cherished assumptions about how the world ought to be, as they learned to live as Choanoacs. If they succeeded, they would have become, in the eyes of the Choanoacs, full members of the community. That is how the Choanoacs would have viewed the colonists, but after the arrival of additional English colonists on the James River in the spring of , Wahunsonacock saw them as a threat. We know that the Powhatan chiefdom and the Choanoacs had contended for control of the interior, particularly with regard to copper, a critical indicator of status in Algonquian societies. At times they fought, and at times they traded. But once the English arrived at Jamestown Wahunsonacock may have viewed the colonists settled in his territory and the white people at Choanoac as levers Menatonon’s people could use to undermine his power. If English settlers in the Powhatan core area aligned themselves with their “lost” countrymen and their Choanoac protectors, a critical rival would gain important influence in Wahunsonacock’s back yard and jeopardize his access to English trade in the region. So in  the Powhatans fell upon White’s colonists and their Choanoac hosts. Most of White’s colonists died, but a few survived. They fled into the interior, finding shelter in different towns, places like Peccarecameck and Ocanahanon.52 Yet it may not have happened like this at all. The Lumbee Indians, who today live in the southern part of the state of North Carolina in and around the town of Pembroke, have claimed at different periods in their history that they are the descendants of White’s Lost Colonists. It is still a widely held belief.

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The Lumbees, by all accounts a community of mixed racial descent, live in Robeson County, where they emerged as a product of the motley history of the North Carolina frontier. As native peoples struggled in the aftermath of catastrophic epidemics, and as they confronted the enormous pressure land-hungry whites placed upon their lands, the surviving Indians retreated into the interior. In the backcountry, in the pine barrens and in the swamps—on the marginal lands of little value to those who aspired to become tobacco planters—Indians from numerous battered native communities, along with small numbers of runaway slaves and marginalized and impoverished whites, forged new communities that confounded the expectations of their neighbors as to what an Indian ought to be. They never ceased viewing themselves as Indian, but they struggled, and continue to struggle, to convince outsiders that they were something much more than “free people of color.”53 That is what the Lumbees were considered to be in North Carolina through to the end of the American Civil War. No one owned them, but they lacked the right to vote and to swear an oath in a court of law when one of the parties was white. Aided by the patronage of two well-connected white supporters, Hamilton McMillan and Stephen B. Weeks, the Lumbees persuaded the North Carolina legislature in  to recognize them as Indians, bestowing on them the tribal name “Croatan.” They claimed, Weeks wrote, “descent from the Lost Colony.” Indeed, he continued, “their habits, disposition, and mental characteristics showed traces of both savage and civilized ancestry. Their language,” he continued, “is an English of three hundred years ago, and their names are in many cases the same as those borne by the original colonists.”54 McMillan and Weeks may have been driven by nostalgia and by a pride in their county’s history, but the Croatans, who would not take the name Lumbee until well into the twentieth century, had their own reasons for claiming descent from White’s colonists. In  they petitioned the United States Congress for federal recognition as an Indian tribe. Living on the margins of Southern society as the Jim Crow system developed and gained strength, they reminded Congress that “your petitioners are a remnant of White’s lost colony and during the long years that have passed since the disappearance of said colony, have been struggling unaided and alone to fit themselves and their children for the exalted privileges and duties of American freemen, and now for the first time ask your honorable body to come to their assistance.”55

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Descent from Englishmen, the Lumbees hoped, offered them the possibility of escape from the rigid history of race in the American South. The mechanics of the process—how, precisely, White’s colonists moved into the interior and became Lumbees, neither they nor their supporters could spell out completely, but the message they hoped to send was simple: our stories cannot be separated from yours, and we are actors in the same historical drama as you. Present at the creation, the Lumbees could not be denied their rights as citizens. In  the Episcopal bishop of North Carolina, Joseph Blount Cheshire, vociferously rejected the notion that the Lost Colonists had assimilated themselves into a Native American community. Reflecting the grotesque racial attitudes of his time and region, Cheshire warned his audience to “never let any one persuade you to believe for one moment that a colony of one hundred and eighteen Christian English people, men and women, husbands and wives, parents and children, an organized Christian community—your kinsmen and mine—were, within the short space of no more than twenty years, from  to  when the Jamestown settlement was made, swallowed up and amalgamated with half-naked heathen Indian savages, so that no remnant was left which could be recognized by their white brethren of Virginia.” John Smith, William Strachey, and others, Cheshire pointed out, learned “that the Roanoke Colony had been exterminated by Indians, and so they were.” North Carolinians, he said, must “not degrade the memory of those early pioneers in the settlement of America by supposing that they at once forgot their Christian nature, and voluntarily and promptly sunk into heathen barbarism, within less than one generation.” The Lost Colonists, Cheshire believed, were better off dead than red, and had found a fate nobler than assimilation. “The descendants of those first Christian inhabitants of our land,” he concluded, “are not to be sought in the mongrel remnants, part Indian, part white, and part negro, of a decaying tribe of American savages.”56 Cheshire could not abide the notion that English colonists could have “gone native.” He believed wholeheartedly in the superiority of white people over all others. Savages might become civilized and Christian with proper teaching and catechesis, but to suggest that English Christians might peel off their civility and refinement insulted the memory of Ralegh’s colonists. From the time of the first English settlements in America, large numbers of colonial promoters expressed their faith in the capacity of Indians

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for improvement. English colonial promoters hoped to carry the light and life of the Gospel to native peoples who, from the Christian perspective, lived in complete and utter darkness. That Indians would become civil, Christian, and assimilated was the goal and the expectation of most colonial promoters. We know that missionary activity could at times be unspeakably cruel and was almost always insensitive to the cultural values of the converts. We know to keep in mind the complexity and ambiguity of native people’s apparent acceptance of Christian principles and beliefs.57 But we also know that cultural change was not a one-way street, and that native peoples at times forced their colonizers onto a “middle ground,” where Europeans necessarily had to pay attention to Indian mores and customs. The history of early eastern North America shows that the historical trajectory Cheshire so forcefully rejected occurred with much greater regularity than he would ever have cared to recognize.58 Ralegh’s colonists were lost only to those Europeans who searched and failed to find them. Indian people knew what happened to them, but only small traces of what they knew reached the Englishmen who wrote the documents upon which historians rely. From these scattered references, there seems little doubt that Wahunsonacock attacked the colonists and their Algonquian hosts, perhaps along the Chesapeake but more likely within Ossomocomuck. Some of the colonists survived. If they were lucky they found shelter in native communities, into which they necessarily would have assimilated in order to survive. The descendants of these few colonists would have been socialized in native village communities in the Eastern Woodlands. They became Algonquians and were no longer English men and women. The mystery of the Lost Colonists, then, disappears to a great extent when we choose to turn the story around. White’s surviving colonists, those who escaped the consequences of the murder of Wingina, shared in the fate of the Indian peoples who sheltered them. The native peoples of the land Algonquians called Ossomocomuck, but which became Virginia, and then Carolina, and finally North Carolina, suffered the same sorts of dislocations and losses that Indians elsewhere in early America experienced: population loss from disease and warfare, the loss of their lands and the foundation of traditional economies, and a resulting descent into poverty. The Weapemeocs, for instance, who lived on the north shore of Albemarle Sound and the eastern bank of the lower Chowan River, found their lands

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subject to English encroachment beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century. In , they sold a parcel of these lands to the colonists. By early in the eighteenth century, two Algonquian bands occupied the former Weapemeoc territories, the Poteskeets in the east and the Yeopim to the west. The former, in , complained to the colony’s executive council that local colonists prevented them from hunting on their own lands “and threaten to break their guns.” The Poteskeets told the executive council that “they cannot subsist without the liberty of hunting on those their usuall grounds.” It is a revealing complaint. The Poteskeets engaged in trade with their neighbors, acquiring enough European guns to make the English colonists nervous. How they got those guns is not mentioned in the records, but the Poteskeets lived by the waterside. By hunting fowl and fishing they may have produced a surplus that they could use for exchange. We know that native peoples elsewhere in early America engaged in traditional subsistence routines, but put these old skills to new uses and directed this activity toward participation in the colonial economy.59 Some of these guns came from the colonial government, which probably armed the young men as allies during the Tuscarora War. Fighting as Indian auxiliaries, it seems, allowed Algonquian men one of the few opportunities they had to fulfill their aspirations to become warriors.60 In the wake of the war, however, these same colonists could not tolerate armed Indians in the vicinity. They wanted natives disarmed, even if doing so threatened Poteskeet subsistence. Those same colonists, moreover, pressed relentlessly upon Poteskeet hunting grounds, further compromising their ability to find adequate game supplies. The colony’s leaders, in this instance, granted relief, but the settlers kept up their pressure. By  only twenty families, impoverished and living a hand-to-mouth existence, were left at Poteskeet.61 In  the Yeopim controlled at least , acres on the Sound’s north shore, but over the ensuing years they sold these lands to the colonists who coveted them. In February , the chief and the great men of the community, who all bore English names, petitioned the executive council for the right “to sell or exchange their lands as may best suit their conveniency and that the Sales or exchange made by them so made may be good and valid to the purchaser.” Records of transactions such as these fill the pages of the public records of colonies, counties and towns in early America. We might assume that sales such as these were fraudulent. Unscrupulous colonists, in other times and places, deployed a variety of nefarious tactics to obtain Indian consent to deeds that transferred title, a “deed game,” as one

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historian described it, that left native peoples landless. The transactions followed the niceties of English law—one had to show title, and had to obtain the approval of the Indians—but there were different means to that end. Colonial crooks obtained native consent through coercion, fraud, and intimidation. Colonists could cheat Indians, obtain the signatures of intoxicated leaders to contracts that deprived a people of its lands, or obtain through bribery or other means the signature (or mark) of Indians who had no right to sell the land in question.62 It is also possible that the Algonquians who made their marks on the resulting deeds did not understand these transactions in the same way the English did. Native peoples did not have a concept of a private, transferable interest in the land, and they may have viewed these transactions as agreements to share it. We know that these contrasting and incompatible understandings of tenure and land came head to head elsewhere in early America.63 But there is another possibility. Elements of choice and elements of coercion came together quite often in early America. Native leaders, faced with encroachments on their remaining lands that county and colony magistrates could not or would not prevent, found themselves faced with a Hobson’s choice. They could sell lands for the small amounts that would-be purchasers offered, or face losing those lands outright to aggressive frontiersmen who would settle on them forcibly if necessary. This stark reality confronted native leaders throughout early America.64 We must keep in mind one final point about native land sales in eastern North America. We must not overlook the consequences of poverty. The encroachment of settlers on land belonging to Algonquian communities altered its game potential. English livestock foraged in Indian cornfields. The territorial aggression of neighboring whites destroyed the foundations of the aboriginal economy in early America. Indians sold land—the only commodity of value over which they exerted any control—to obtain the necessities of life. The resulting sales devastated the Yeopim, and after  they disappear from the colony’s records, after their lands quickly slipped from their grasp.65 But what does it mean that the Poteskeets and Yeopims disappeared? Certainly their population declined. The epidemics of the contact period, like that described by Thomas Harriot, gave way to ailments of a chronic nature. We know from research on a Narragansett cemetery in Rhode Island, dating to the last quarter of the seventeenth century, that the Algonquians who lived there suffered from tuberculosis and a host of gastroenteric and

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infectious diseases. The human remains from graves reveal men and women whose bodies had begun to break down, and who had suffered the emotional and physical insults that came with poverty, loss of land, and the dramatic changes in way of life occasioned by colonization.66 But even then not everyone died. Town historians and regional antiquarians long have written their books of local lore, frequently remarking on the passing of the last Indian in town. Native peoples faded away. But we know they did not disappear. They changed. Indians, living among local whites, practiced agriculture and husbandry like their non-Indian neighbors. They no longer conformed to what colonists expected of Indians. Because they did not look “Indian” to their English neighbors, and because their material existence was not dissimilar to that of non-Indians, they became invisible. Furthermore, as native peoples intermarried with Africans, African Americans, and poor whites, the people living in Algonquian communities began to look physically more like others on the margins of colonial society. And once there, they frequently found themselves ensnared by the colony’s emerging system of African slavery. When John Bentley applied for headrights in , he listed his wife and two daughters, but also “a Negroe boy A Negroe Woman an Indian Boy.” To work his plantation, Valentine Bird could call upon the labor of eleven African slaves, one Algonquian woman, and a white indentured servant. South Carolina exported more Indian slaves to the West Indies than it imported African slaves, and at least some of these could have been coastal Algonquians.67 For the most part they worked in the fields alongside African and English bond laborers, but some had been around the colonial economy long enough to acquire the skills associated with a trade. Henry Norman, for instance, complained late in the seventeenth century that an Indian servant named George West had run away. West evidently had planned his escape for some time. He took both men’s and women’s clothing, suggesting that he did not abscond alone. He also took with him the tools of his trade: axes, squares, compasses, planes, augurs, chisels, saws, and files. Perhaps West and his partner hoped to build for themselves a new life, working as urban artisans in Charleston or elsewhere. Perhaps he hoped to disappear as an Indian and blend into the city’s population. If he succeeded, he may have managed to avoid the exactions that fell upon so many of his countrymen and women.68 The Choanoacs, too, lost population in the decades after John White left



 

his colonists behind on Roanoke Island. The same diseases that hit the Weapemeocs befell the Choanoacs as well. They continued to pursue traditional subsistence routines, combining hunting and fishing with a form of agriculture based on the cultivation of maize, beans, and squash. As the seventeenth century progressed, they found it increasingly difficult to get by. Though the evidence is scare, the remaining records suggest that the Choanoacs began to suffer from the effects of white encroachment on their lands. They tolerated their English neighbors until . That year they joined with Indians who earlier had been targeted by Nathaniel Bacon’s violent frontier insurgents in raids against the Carolina and Virginia frontier. These Algonquians had a long list of grievances. With their lands encroached upon, they found it increasingly difficult to find food. English livestock fed on Algonquian crops. If Algonquians in Virginia complained of frontier violence and, on occasion, enslavement at the hands of frontier whites, there is little doubt that the Choanoacs experienced these problems as well. Englishmen determined to acquire more land defrauded Indians and used threats of violence to compel them to sign deeds. They employed corrupt interpreters who aided in these schemes of dispossession. Algonquians were losing their land, their autonomy, and the ability to live as they were accustomed. So when the frontier thugs led by Bacon threatened Algonquian villages along the fall line, the Choanoacs attacked.69 The English counterattacks devastated the Choanoacs, and thereafter they accommodated themselves to the English presence. They became, like the Yeopims and Poteskeets, English tributaries. They had little choice. Tributary status afforded them some protection. When the Choanoacs complained in , for instance, “that they are much injured by the English seating soe near them,” the colonial government “ordered that noe more entrys or settlements of land be made higher than the plantations which are already seated,” and “that what Entrys are alreddy made and not yett settled shall be void.” But these protections were minimal. Indians whom colonial authorities did not fear could seldom demand justice, despite heroic efforts to do so.70 Thomas Hoyter, the “king of the Chowans,” was willing to sell some of his people’s lands along the Chowan River, but he complained loudly and frequently when he felt that the colonists had violated the terms of the agreements he had negotiated with them. His followers were good allies, providing vital services to the colony. During the Tuscarora War, the Choanoacs

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joined “eight expeditions against the Indyan enemy of this province.” The Choanoacs paid dearly for this service, Hoyter told the colonial government, for “during the time they were in the Countrys Service they Suffered Considerable loss in their plantations and Stocks loosing Seaventy five head of hoggs, a Mare & Colt their Corne destroy’d by horses & Cattle their fences burnt & fruit trees destroyed by all which and the wearing out of their clothes they are reduced to very great poverty.”71 Hoyter’s plaintive letter reveals the extent to which the forces of colonialism had transformed the Choanoacs. They raised livestock, planted crops, tended orchards, and fenced their fields. They had modified their relationship with the environment, and the resulting changes involved more than merely what they ate and how they obtained their food. Algonquian hunters did not harvest game; they conducted rituals, and if these were properly done, the animals surrendered themselves. Algonquian fishermen cast tobacco on the water, an offering and another ritual, to ensure that their fish weirs would work. They claimed no right to subdue the earth or assert mastery over plants and animals. They attempted to live in balance. They made requests. Even in their farming, Algonquians conducted rituals to appease Kiwasa and ensure an abundant harvest. All this was of course very different from how English farmers and husbandmen looked at the land and the animals that they tended. The newcomers viewed the relationship between human and other-than-human beings in a different light, drawing inspiration and guidance from a religious text that granted mankind dominion over the earth and all that lived on it. It is difficult to know how far Hoyter and other Choanoacs traveled down this road, and the relationship, if any, between changes in Choanoac subsistence and worldview. Though there is no evidence that they had abandoned the communal ownership of the land, Hoyter and his associates, by the second quarter of the eighteenth century, spoke “English tolerably well,” involved themselves in the colonial economy, and bartered and exchanged goods with local colonists and, presumably, other Indians. The Choanoacs made use of colonial courts to sue their white neighbors for debts and damages, evidence that they had not only found in their relationship with colonial forces an instrument to protect their interests, but as well that they had accepted the validity of a debt as a legal contract. Choanoacs, of course, also found themselves defendants in debt cases. Evidence is scarce but we know that in other locations Indians unable to pay their debts found themselves and their children in servitude.72

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Under the colonial regime, the Choanoacs also faced assaults on the spirit. They listened to English missionaries sponsored by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and Hoyter convinced one missionary that he was “very inclinable to embrace Christianity” and willing to consider sending his son to school “to have him taught to read and write by the way of a foundation in order to further proficiency for the reception of Christianity.”73 The appeal of Christianity was more than spiritual. The instruction offered by missionaries provided an entry into the world of literacy. An understanding of land titles and letters, deeds, and other documents, could mean the difference between a sliver of autonomy and complete dispossession. Indeed, the Choanoacs seem to have well understood their rights under English law, but with their bounds ignored, and the economic basis of their existence under siege, they had only one resource that they could sell to acquire the things they needed to survive: their land. The leaders of the community began selling parcels of land, a hundred acres here, another hundred there. By , the Moravian missionary August Gottlieb Spangenberg wrote that “the tribe of Chowans is reduced to a few families.” Like that of other North Carolina Indians Spangenberg saw, their condition was “deplorable,” for “their land had been taken away from them.” Perhaps the dominant aboriginal power in Ossomocomuck two centuries earlier, and critical players in the series of events that ended with Pemisapan’s head in Edward Nugent’s hand, the Choanoacs, as a collective community, would soon disappear from the historical record. A lost tribe, Menatonon’s descendants blended with others on the margins of colonial society.74

E

I

f we are to relate the history of English efforts to plant and nurture an empire on American shores, it makes sense, at the end, to return to Sir Walter Ralegh. He did not forget about the Lost Colonists, at least not entirely. In  he sent out a small party under the command of Samuel Mace to trade with any natives they might encounter and search for whatever remained of John White’s expedition. Mace sailed along the Outer Banks, and spent the summer somewhere near Port Ferdinando, but we have no evidence that he met or spoke with any of the people of Ossomocomuck. It had been a decade and a half since John White’s colonists arrived at Roanoke. Mace’s men brought home samples of medicinal plants. These they found in abundance. But they found no signs of English colonists.1 Ralegh may have sponsored other efforts to find the colonists, but we know nothing about these attempts. There simply is not adequate evidence on which to rely. Ralegh’s interest in “Virginia” in any case had begun to flag as he looked to develop his plantations in Ireland. John White settled on one of Ralegh’s estates there after he returned home in , remaining a tenant for the remainder of his life. But Ralegh still dreamed of an American stronghold, one that could enrich the English empire while dealing destruction to the queen’s Catholic enemies. He became increasingly obsessed with what he considered the “Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana.”2 Meanwhile, his colonists, or the few who survived, became members of the Algonquian communities in which they lived. Ralegh believed that he could maintain peaceful relations with the native 

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Epilogue

peoples of Guiana and fashion them into an instrument of English imperial policy. The English would harvest the new world’s riches and settle English people there, which he believed the Indians would tolerate because the colonists would bring to the people certain benefits. According to the author of a promotional tract entitled Of the Voyage to Guiana, perhaps by Ralegh’s friend and assistant Lawrence Keymis and possibly Thomas Harriot, “the offers to be made to the Guianans” included a pledge “that we will defend them,” that “we will help them to recover their country” from the Spanish, that “we will instruct them in liberal arts and civility,” and finally, “that we will teach them the use of weapons . . . for the service in the wars.”3 But we must be careful here, for it is easy to give Sir Walter too much credit. Without doubt, he attempted to treat the native peoples he encountered generously, but he never would have offered an answer to the problems that accompanied English settlement—disease, the eventual encroachment of colonists on Indian lands, and the resulting conflict. Even during his short sojourn along the Orinoco River, Ralegh complained of the difficulties he faced in restraining his men from plundering his prospective allies. We cannot give to Ralegh all credit for peaceful Anglo-Indian relations, for the natives he encountered had considerable experience with Europeans. They fed Ralegh and his men as the English ascended the river because doing so best served the interests of their community. If peace prevailed in Anglo-Indian relations, we must attribute it at least as much to the desire of native peoples in Guiana to make use of Ralegh, whom they saw as a potentially valuable ally in their struggles against European and Native American foes, as to any exceptional farsightedness or commitment to racial justice on the part of Sir Walter. That Ralegh traded with them, established the reciprocal basis for an alliance, exchanged emissaries, and pledged through his interpreters to protect them from their enemies offered evidence that here was a foreigner whose friendship was worth cultivating. Of course Ralegh never realized his dream in South America. His final encounter with America ended badly. He first sailed in , but did not return to Guiana as quickly as he had hoped. He failed to generate the financial support necessary for a full-scale expedition, and Queen Elizabeth was not interested in helping him. His fortunes fell farther with her death in . Unjustly charged with treason by the new king, James I, Ralegh was sentenced to death. The punishment was not immediately carried out and

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Ralegh became a prisoner in the Tower of London until , when James at last permitted him to make a voyage to Guiana. The sentence remained, and should Ralegh clash with the Spanish he would face immediate execution on his return home. Ralegh fell ill on the Atlantic crossing. He recovered slowly, but by December  he was well enough to patrol the coast to watch for a Spanish fleet. His son, Walter, and Lawrence Keymis led the expedition into the interior. There things went very wrong. In February Ralegh received word from Keymis that his son had died in an assault on the Spanish settlement at San Thome. Aware of what this meant for his patron, Keymis committed suicide; his unnecessary and unfortunate assault had doomed Ralegh. The loss of his son and his trusted friend left Ralegh in despair. He returned home, broken and defeated, to await his fate. The king and his advisers, under pressure from the Spanish crown, ordered that the sentence of death be carried out. In October , Ralegh was led to the scaffold. The executioner brought the axe down twice. The profusion of blood, witnesses observed, testified to Ralegh’s vitality. The large crowd that had gathered to witness the execution groaned at last when the executioner stood before them with Sir Walter Ralegh’s head in his hand. We might stop here. With Ralegh’s death came the end of an era. His rabid anti-Catholicism and hatred of the Spanish were no longer in fashion. Subsequent English colonization efforts would be undertaken not by wealthy courtiers but by ventures of the joint-stock variety: men with common interests pooling their resources to fund overseas settlement. In Ossomocomuck, of course, Ralegh’s death meant nothing. Probably no Algonquians ever heard of his death, or would have cared much if they did. Nor would they have heard of his courageous demeanor on the scaffold or of his banter with the executioner, the man who in a few moments would cut off his head. But Roanoke need not be seen as the story of Ralegh and his colonists. Roanoke is an Algonquian story. As for Pemisapan’s people, they disappear from the historical record for several decades after the killing of George Howe. In , the Virginian Francis Yeardley traveled to Roanoke Island. “The great Commander of those parts,” Yeardley wrote, received the adventurer’s party “civilly, and showed them the ruins of Sir Walter Raleigh’s fort, from whence I received a sure token of their being there.” Yeardley acquired more than souvenirs. He purchased the island and a strip of the

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Epilogue

adjacent mainland from the “great Commander,” in return for payment and a promise to build the weroance a “fayr house, the which I am to furnish with English utensils and chattels.” The Roanoke weroance apparently respected Yeardley or hoped to benefit by his presence in the region. He visited the Englishman often, and left his only son to receive an education that would enable him “to speak out of a book and to make a writing.” The “great Commander,” whom Yeardley never named, “expressed himself desirous to serve that God the Englishmen served, and that his child might be so brought up.”4 We can imagine how memories of earlier English voyages to Roanoke conditioned the behavior of the “great Commander” toward Yeardley. We do not know that Pemisapan’s people preserved the story of how their weroance, three-quarters of a century earlier, had grown weary of the powerful newcomers and moved away from them, how the English treacherously attacked him at Dasemunkepeuc and took his head as a trophy, but such stories may have survived, passed around the fire and from one generation to another as a beleaguered people studied their past in an effort to understand their present and their future. They may have preserved in their oral traditions stories of the illnesses that swept through Ossomocomuck after the newcomers first arrived, of the strange astronomical phenomena that accompanied their arrival, and of the technology that allowed the Englishmen to do things that ordinary men and women could not do. As increasing numbers of Englishmen began pushing into North Carolina in the seventeenth century, weroances once again felt the need to maneuver to protect their peoples from the destructive forces that they remembered European settlement could bring. The “great Commander” sought alliance with Yeardley, a close relationship through which he could acquire a patron, a broker, and an interpreter. Through his son, he could learn about the newcomers and what they wanted, and how their presence in his territory could help or harm the members of his community. Wingina, of course, before he became Pemisapan, tried to establish a relationship with the newcomers that was similar in important ways to what the “great Commander” hoped to achieve. Wingina allowed the English access to his territory, and sent emissaries to accompany the newcomers home to England. He experimented with the rituals of the colonists’ religion in order to secure the benefits that he believed the English received. He sought peace and an alliance. Wingina became Pemisapan after the colonists’ diseases slashed their way

Epilogue

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through his community, and as their technology left him and his people debating whether the colonists were “gods or men.” When English demands for food surpassed what he could safely provide during a period of sustained drought, Pemisapan withdrew to the mainland and decided to feed the colonists no longer. Ralph Lane concluded that Pemisapan had orchestrated a massive Indian uprising, and to preempt this threat Lane ordered the assault that led to the weroance’s death. This murder doomed Lane’s colony, and eliminated any possibility that White’s colonists would be able to remain on Roanoke Island in . We know nothing of the fate of the “great Commander” who greeted Yeardley, or of his son. We can, however, reconstruct something of the community’s history. By the early s they were part of the polyglot community known as the Machapunga or Matamuskeet, after the town on the mainland where they lived. These survivors were few in number, but they were not willing to acquiesce in their own subjugation. They treated roughly those settlers who encroached on their lands. These settlers demanded that the colonial government take “some speedy and effectual method . . . for restraining the insolency and continued abuses of the Matchepungo Indians by killing and destroying our hoggs and beating one of our neighbours for endeavouring to prevent the same.” The settlers believed that they lived “in such dayly jeapordy of our lives” that the colony’s Executive Council must take action to defend them from “these barbarous heathen.”5 These early North Carolina settlers failed to recognize what must seem obvious to those familiar with the long history of Anglo-Indian relations: what the colonists saw as aggression the Mattamuskeets saw as an attempt to protect a way of life that had come under siege. Encroachments on Mattamuskeet land by the English and their voracious livestock threatened Algonquian subsistence and Algonquian lives. Despite the periodic directives of colonial officials, the frontier population, according to one missionary, treated the Algonquians in a manner “more barbarous and unkind than the savages themselves.”6 So when the Iroquoian Tuscaroras began their attacks on the colony in September , the Mattamuskeets joined them. At first the colony’s leaders felt they had little to fear from the small coastal bands. That soon changed. Early in , according to acting governor Thomas Pollock, fifty Mattamuskeets attacked “the inhabitants of Alligator River, and, as they conjectured had killed and taken  or  of the inhabitants the rest having escaped.” The Mattamuskeets killed or carried away another twenty

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Epilogue

English colonists on Roanoke Island. English forces from South Carolina, aided by their much more numerous Indian allies, pursued the hostile Mattamuskeets, but Pollock feared that “it may be to no purpose, they having advantage of such dismal swamps to fly into.”7 The Mattamuskeets fought longer than the Tuscaroras, enduring destructive raids by the English and their native allies in  and . Not until February  did the Mattamuskeets arrive at a peace with the colonists, through which they were guaranteed a reservation near Mattamuskeet Lake, the former Lake Paquippe.8 Not all of them settled there. Some of the Mattamuskeets may have accompanied the Tuscaroras on their exodus north. But most accepted a home on the reservation, where they lived on the margins of Carolina society. They fished in coastal waters, hunted in the wetlands, and planted corn and other crops where they had sufficient land. As a community they struggled to survive. Under the leadership of John Squires, described in the surviving English records as “King” or “Chief ” of the Mattamuskeet Indians, and his two close advisers John Mackey and Long Tom, they asserted their right to preserve their lands along the Carolina coast and, in effect, to continue to exist as a separate people.9 Squires probably helped mediate disputes between members of his community. He represented the Mattamuskeets in their relations with outsiders. Though we cannot tell how his followers viewed him and what community functions he performed, we do know that the very small number of Mattamuskeets respected him deeply. His plantation of  acres along New Mattamuskeet Creek, where he grew rice, tended his orchards and his other crops, fished, and hunted, became the center of Mattamuskeet life, not unlike the central villages depicted by John White a century and a half before.10 Squires and the Mattamuskeets faced nearly constant pressure from neighboring whites to sell their reservation. Squires sold  acres to Henry Gibbs in  “for and in consideration of the Sum of Tenn pounds good Lawfull money of the Province of North Carolina.” In  and , more sales took place, a couple of hundred acres here and a couple of hundred there. In July  Squires sold to Francis Credle for “one hundred pounds Current money” his own land, “with all Woods, orchards, Gardens and fences together with all profits Comoditys and hereditaments unto the Same belonging or in wise appertaining the Same being the plantation whereon I the said John Squires do now reside.”11 Squires led the community starting at the end of the Tuscarora War.

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Despite the deeds he, Mackey, and Long Tom signed, they preserved a small central core of the Mattamuskeets’ land base, approximately , acres. Charles Squires succeeded his father at some point late in  or early in , but he clearly was not his father’s equal. In , along with George, Joshua, and Timothy Squires, “chief men of the Malimuskeet Indians,” he deeded the Mattamuskeet reservation in its entirety to “William Stevenson, Pedlar and trader,” in return for the sum of  pounds. The community repudiated the transaction, and forcefully rejected the variety of leadership offered by John Squires’s sons, but no effective alternative emerged. Nine years later, Charles Squires sold for  pounds the remaining ten thousand acres of the reservation, along with the “messuages, Plantations, houses, outhouses, Estates Rights and Emoluments thereunto belonging.”12 Significant cultural changes followed on the heels of the loss of the reservation. Only a handful of Mattamuskeets continued to reside in the area. By early in the nineteenth century, women headed the households that remained. Mattamuskeets likely took the dangerous jobs deemed suitable for men on the margins. They fought in colonial and revolutionary armies, or put to sea as whalers, mariners, and marines. Many of these men did not return home. The women who remained behind faced a new assault. Their families were now under siege. The story of Joshua Longtom can help to illustrate the point. The “base born” son of “Jane alias Jenny Longtom Indian,” tenyear-old Joshua was “supposted to have been begotten by a wight father.” Stephen Fletcher, a white sea captain who coveted the boy’s labor, told the Hyde County Court in  that the boy “is going at random with out that control & nutrition So essential to his own future good & that of the Community at large.” Offering to take Joshua in by “Lawfull Indenture,” the county court bound the boy to Fletcher “to learn the art of Seaman & mariner . . . Untill he attains the age of Twenty one years.”13 Joshua Longtom’s experience was not unique. Nine-year-old Jordan Longtom was apprenticed to Captain Little John Pugh at the same  session of the County Court. Simpson Mackey, “a base born person of Cullor,” was bound to Thomas Spencer. His brother, Shadrach Mackey, found himself bound to a planter named Washington Gibbs. The labor of children, the mixed-race descendants of Algonquians, Africans, and Englishmen, became a commodity distributed by county leaders to those willing to mouth the requisite platitudes about educating and training their servants. Removed from the care and the protection and the love of their parents,

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Epilogue

and isolated from each other and whatever there was that remained of the Mattamuskeet community, these children, and scores of others, found themselves in a poor position to carry on and sustain a culture. Aboriginal cultures did not disappear in early America; they were destroyed. We know that some Mattamuskeets remained in Hyde County. In  Marina Mackey, a descendant of one of the boys apprenticed in , was brought before the Hyde County Court on the charge that she “did unlawfully intermarry with a certain male slave named Riley.” Mackey, as a “free woman of colour,” could not legally marry the African American slave with whom she “did unlawfully cohabit and live together as man and wife.”14 Her case was unique. Those Mattamuskeets who remained, classified legally as free people of color, attempted to remain invisible. Despite laws against marrying slaves, they intermarried with others on the margins, poor whites and free blacks, so that by the early twentieth century, according to anthropologist Frank Speck, the appearance of the members of the community ranged “from individuals with pronounced Indian characteristics, through people with noticeable white or Negro features, the latter sort predominating in the younger generations.” They were, in Speck’s view, a “remnant,” a lost tribe. Because of the community’s isolation, Speck hoped to find traces of Algonquian culture still in practice. He hoped to find a people, remote from the modern world, living elements of an earlier existence. Perhaps they were. They were fishing, hunting fowl, getting by. They had changed. There was no doubt about that. Change has been one of the few constants in Native American history. Speck knew this, but still he was disappointed. Speck found that not one member of the community “knew a single word of the Indian language and not one knew of any definite Indian customs or traditions, not even the name of their tribe.” All that, Speck believed, had been lost.15 We choose the stories that we want to tell, and there is no reason why we cannot alter our focus. There is virtue in telling the stories of ordinary people, confronting the challenges that punctuate an otherwise ordinary life. We can write, if we choose, about the efforts of the English to plant colonies on American shores: of the failed attempts of Frobisher and Gilbert, and Sir Walter’s Roanoke ventures. These are worthwhile stories. As an undergraduate, they drew me to the field of history. But we must

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recognize that there is a flip side to stories such as these. There are the Indians, the “savages” who confronted these erstwhile colonizers. It is often difficult to unearth their stories. There is little written evidence, the raw material upon which historians rely. But there is imagination, that tool without which we cannot sympathize with others, without which we cannot even approach an understanding of how events we did not experience affected others remote from us in time and space. I have tried in these pages to imagine a familiar story differently, to recast Sir Walter Ralegh’s efforts to plant an American outpost on Roanoke Island. I have tried to tell a story not of the first short-lived English colony in America, or of the birth of the first English child on these shores, or of English dreams of glory and liberation, but rather of an event much smaller in scope though no less significant: the killing of an Indian, and its consequences, of the head in Edward Nugent’s hand. We know that many factors contributed to the failure of Sir Walter Ralegh’s Roanoke ventures. The men who commanded the ships at sea hoped to enrich themselves through privateering, and they pursued this endeavor at the expense of the colonists Ralegh had directed them to transport or to resupply. The dangerous waters of the Carolina Sounds took their toll, consuming ships and supplies as masters struggled to avoid terrible storms and treacherous shoals. War between England and Spain further limited the ability of Ralegh to support the men and women settled at his American outpost. The colonists, for their part, did not plant their own food and thus pressed relentlessly upon Wingina’s people for their supply. Historians have discussed all these factors, and we have mentioned them as well. They all rely for their explanatory power, at one level or another, upon assessments of what the English did or did not do. If only Ralegh’s men had done this, or had avoided that, historians have argued, things might have turned out differently. Because the resulting story so clearly focuses upon the English, whatever successes and failures that occurred are attributed to their actions. All these explanations, as a result, overlook an important and fundamental truth: Ralegh’s Roanoke ventures failed because those native people in Ossomocomuck who initially had welcomed the newcomers decided to withdraw their support and assistance from strange people whom they now viewed as a mortal threat to their way of life. That difficult decision, in turn, emerged from the anguished conversations and rich debates that took place in the Algonquian village communities that

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Epilogue

lined the waters of the Carolina Sounds, among those awed and those in mourning; amongst the affrighted, the aggrieved and the injured, and among those who hated the Englishmen and those who merely looked forward to a better day, one which they hoped might dawn on a world without newcomers.

   

Prologue 1. Edward Graham Daves, “Ralegh’s New Fort in Virginia—,” Magazine of American History  (): –; O. R. Mangum, “The Lost Colony Found,” Wake Forest Student  (): ; Stephen B. Weeks, “The Lost Colony of Roanoke: Its Fate and Survival,” Papers of the American Historical Association  (): ; Joseph Blount Cheshire, “Baptism of Virginia Dare,” North Carolina Booklet  (): . 2. Cameron Binkley and Steven Davis, Preserving the Mystery: An Administrative History of Fort Raleigh National Historic Site (Washington, D.C: National Park Service, ), –; William S. Powell, Paradise Preserved (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), , –. 3. Paul Green, The Lost Colony: A Symphonic Drama in Two Acts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –. 4. The play has evolved over time, and in recent versions the producers have worked to present a more sympathetic depiction of the Indians in the area. Progress has been made, but there is still plenty of work remaining to be done. 5. As of , the National Park Service did offer an “interpretive program” at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site treating the native peoples of the Carolina Sounds. The discussion, however effective, is divorced from the larger historical narrative. The NPS rangers divide the story of the Roanoke Ventures into a number of chapters which they present over the course of the day in short talks offered to visitors at the historical site. Visitors are not likely to view the entire series, unless they spend a full day at the site. Very few do so. The programs consist of the following “interpretive” talks: “: The Scouting Expedition”; “–: The Exploration Expedition”; and “: The Colony.” Three other programs treat “The Algonquians”; the history of a Freedmen’s Colony located on the island after the American Civil War; and, finally, a presentation on Paul Green’s Lost Colony pageant. See “Summer  Program Descriptions,” In the Park (Summer ): .





Notes to Pages xii–xiii

6. Walter Clark, On Roanoke Island (Goldsboro, N.C.: Nash Brothers, ), –. 7. Winston’s remarks included in Thomas Pasteur Noe, Pilgrimage to Old Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island, North Carolina (New Bern, N.C.: Owen and Dunn, ), n.p. 8. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner, ed Ray Allen Billington (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, ), . For a recent lucid and well-argued revision of Turner, see Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). 9. There certainly could have been more such Indian victories over small pockets of European peoples at scattered points along the American coast. Early European activity in the Americas is described well in David B. Quinn, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements: The Norse Voyages to  (New York: Harper and Row, ). 10. How to do this has been a topic of major discussion among historians of early America. See Richter, Facing East, for one suggestion, but see as well the following collections of essays by James Axtell: Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, ); After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, ); and The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, ). The literature on how best to write Native American history during the early period is voluminous. A small but important sampling of this literature would include Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ); James H. Merrell, “‘The Customes of Our Countrey’: Indians and Colonists in Early America,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Philip Morgan and Bernard W. Bailyn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); and Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ). Useful works on other Indian communities that informed my own approach to this subject include Charles S. Hudson, Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ); Camilla Townshend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (New York: Hill and Wang, ); John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Knopf, ); Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, ); David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community Among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Matthew Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ); Bruce

Notes to Pages xiv–



G. Trigger, The Children of Aaetaentsic: A History of the Huron People to  (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, ); and Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, – (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). 11. On the history of the Roanoke Colonies, see David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, ); Lee Miller, Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (New York: Penguin, ); Michael Leroy Oberg, Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, – (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), chap. ; idem., “Between ‘Savage Man’ and ‘Most Faithful Englishman’: Manteo and the Early Anglo-Indian Exchange, –,” Itinerario  (): –; and idem., “Gods and Men: The Meeting of Indian and White Worlds on the Carolina Outer Banks,” North Carolina Historical Review  (): –. 12. On this point, see the important book by James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). 13. The Waterside Theater, home of the “Lost Colony” pageant, was constructed without a full archaeological survey of the location. For the attempts to locate the site of the Lost Colony, see Jean Carl Harrington, Search for the Cittie of Ralegh: Archaeological Excavations at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, North Carolina, Archaeological Research Series  (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, ), ; and David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, – (London: Hakluyt Society, ), . 14. Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, –. 15. Talcott Williams, “The Surroundings and Site of Raleigh’s Colony,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association (), ; Harrington, Search, ; and Binkley and Davis, Preserving the Mystery. For a discussion of the fort site, see Ivor Noël Hume, The Virginia Adventure, Roanoke and James Towne: An Archaeological and Historical Odyssey (New York: Knopf, ). 16. On the problems of writing Native American history, or what some practitioners call ethnohistory, see James H. Merrell, “Some Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly rd ser.  (): –; and Daniel K. Richter, “Whose Indian History?” William and Mary Quarterly  (): –.

Chapter . Ossomocomuck 1. David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, – (London: Hakluyt Society, ), , . 2. Ibid., , , . 3. Herbert R. Paschal, “The Tragedy of the North Carolina Indians,” in The North



Notes to Pages –

Carolina Experience: An Interpretive and Documentary History, ed. Lindley S. Butler and Alan D. Watson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . 4. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –, –; David Stick, Roanoke Island: The Beginnings of English America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), ; idem, The Outer Banks of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –; David Sutton Phelps, “Archaeology of the North Carolina Coast and Coastal Plain: Problems and Hypotheses,” in The Prehistory of North Carolina: An Archaeological Symposium, ed. Mark A. Mathis and Jeffrey J. Crow (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, ), ; Robert Dolan and Kenton Bosserman, “Shoreline Erosion and the Lost Colony,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers  (September ): –; Orrin H. Pilkey et al., The North Carolina Shore and Its Barrier Islands: Restless Ribbons of Sand (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ). 5. Christian Feest, “North Carolina Algonquians,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. , Northeast, ed. William C. Sturtevant (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, ); William G. Haag, The Archaeology of Coastal North Carolina, Louisiana State University Studies, Coastal Studies Series  (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ), ; Maurice A. Mook, “Algonkian Ethnohistory of the Carolina Sound,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences  (June ): . 6. John White, America : The Complete Drawings of John White, ed. Paul Hulton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press ), plates , ; Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages –; William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (London: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, ), . 7. Strachey, Historie, –; White, America , plates , , , . 8. White, America , plates ,  and p. ; Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 9. David Sutton Phelps, “Archaeology of the Native Americans: The Carolina Algonkians,” Final Report of the st Grant Year, May , -April , , of a Project Sponsored by America’s Four Hundredth Anniversary Committee and Funded by the American Quadricentennial Corporation with Funds provided by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation; Haag, Archaeology, , ; Talcott Williams, “The Surroundings and Site of Raleigh’s Colony,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association (): –. 10. H. Trawick Ward and R. P. Stephen Davis, Jr., Time Before History: The Archaeology of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –, –. 11. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 12. Strachey, Historie, ; Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), –. 13. Joseph M. Herbert, “A Woodland Period Prehistory of Coastal North Carolina,” in The Woodland Southeast, ed. David G. Anderson and Robert C. Mainfort,

Notes to Pages –



Jr. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ), ; Ward and Davis, Time Before History, –; Richard J. Dent, Jr., Chesapeake Prehistory: Old Traditions, New Directions (New York: Plenum Press, ), . 14. Paul R. Green, “Forager-Farmer Transitions in Coastal Prehistory,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, , – and passim; Martin D. Gallivan, James River Chiefdoms: The Rise of Social Inequality in the Chesapeake (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), ; David Sutton Phelps, Archaeological Salvage of an Ossuary at the Baum Site, Final Report of Research Accompanied Under a North Carolina Coastal Area Management Act Grant with Matching Funds from the Currituck County Board of Commissioners and the Currituck County Historical Association (Greenville, N.C.: East Carolina University Department of Sociology and Anthropology, ), ; Ward and Davis, Time Before History, –. See also Dale L. Hutchinson, Foraging, Farming, and Coastal Biocultural Adaptation in Late Prehistoric North Carolina (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ); Elizabeth Monahan Driscoll and David S. Weaver, “Dental Health and Late Woodland Subsistence in Coastal North Carolina,” in Bioarchaeological Studies of Life in the Age of Agriculture: A View from the Southeast, ed. Patricia Lambert (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ), . 15. Haag, Archaeology –, –; Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , –. 16. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, ; White, America , plate . White’s illustration probably should not be taken as a precise representation of life in the town, as it seems to be a composite of various scenes and activities he depicted in separate paintings. 17. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia (), in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith,  vols., ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), : –. 18. On the search for Pomeiooc, see Paul R. Green, The Archaeology of HY, “Pomieooc”: – Field Seasons (Greenville, N.C.: East Carolina University Department of Sociology and Anthropology, ); Paul R. Gardner, “Excavations at the Amity Site: Final Report of the Pomeiooc Project, –,” Archaeological Research Report , Archaeology Laboratory, East Carolina University, Greenville, N.C., , p. ; White, America , plate ; Herbert, “Woodland Period Prehistory,” ; Phelps, “Archaeology of North Carolina Coast,” –; Hutchinson, Foraging, . The Pomeioocs were allied with the Aquascogocs and a town called Neusiok on the Neuse River. See Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages,  and Douglas L. Rights, The American Indian in North Carolina, nd ed. (Winston-Salem, N.C.: John Blair, ), . 19. White, America , plate ; Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, ; Green, Pomeiooc, . 20. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; Strachey, Historie, –. 21. With, perhaps, the exception of the drawings of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. See Paul Hulton, “Images of the New World: Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues and John White,” in The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland,



Notes to Pages –

the Atlantic, and America, –, ed. Kenneth R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ), –. For a nuanced discussion of the difficulties inherent in drawing conclusions about Algonquian culture on the basis of White’s artwork, see Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan, expanded ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), . 22. White, America , plates , ; Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 23. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, ; Mook, “Algonkian Ethnohistory,” –; Stick, Roanoke Island, . On the identity of Wingina’s people as Secotans, see especially Lee Miller, Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (New York: Penguin, ), –. Miller agrees with the findings of anthropologists James Mooney, Frank Speck, and Maurice Mook, all of whom argued that Wingina led the Secotans. Seth Mallios has argued that the Secotans were enemies of Wingina’s people; see Mallios, “In the Hands of ‘Indian Givers’: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke and Jamestown,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, . In my earlier work, I followed Quinn in identifying Wingina’s people as Roanokes, and I will continue to do so here. All the scholarship cited above is problematic in my view on this point, in that it assumes a form of tribal identity that is too structured and inflexible to explain adequately the fluidity of Algonquian community politics. 24. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; White, America , plate . 25. Jay F. Custer, “Late Woodland Cultural Diversity in the Middle Atlantic: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in Late Woodland Cultures of the Middle Atlantic Region, ed. Jay F. Custer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, ), ; E. Randolph Turner, “Difficulties in the Archaeological Identification of Chiefdoms as Seen in the Virginia Coastal Plain During the Late Woodland and Early Historic Periods,” in Late Woodland Cultures, ; Dent, Prehistory, –; Gallivan, James River Chiefdoms, . 26. Stephen R. Potter, Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), –; Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), –. 27. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, ; White, America , plate ; Lewis R. Binford, Cultural Diversity Among Aboriginal Cultures of Coastal Virginia and North Carolina (New York: Garland, ), –. 28. Binford, Cultural Diversity, –; Phelps, “Archaeology of Native Americans”; Mook, “Algonkian Ethnohistory,” ; Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 29. An appreciation of this has been one of the most exciting developments in the story of Early America. For a sampling of the extensive literature on this subject, see P. Richard Metcalf, “Who Should Rule at Home? Native American Politics and Indian-White Relations,” Journal of American History  (): –; Eric S. Johnson, “Released from Thraldom by the Stroke of War: Coercion and Warfare

Notes to Pages –



in Native Politics of Seventeenth Century Southern New England,” Northeast Anthropology  (); Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects Unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ); Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans,” William and Mary Quarterly rd ser.  (): –. 30. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, –; White, America , fig. . 31. Strachey, Historie, ; Potter, Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs, . 32. Rountree, Powhatan Indians, ; Binford, Cultural Diversity, –. 33. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; Rountree, Powhatan Indians, –; Strachey, Historie, ; Alex W. Barker, “Powhatan’s Pursestrings: On the Meaning of Surplus in a Seventeenth Century Algonkian Chiefdom,” in Lords of the Southeast: Social Inequality and the Native Elites of Southeastern North America, ed. Alex W. Barker and Timothy R. Pauketat, Anthropological Papers of the American Anthropological Association  (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, ), , . 34. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –, , –. Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), . 35. Seth Mallios, “Gift Exchange and the Ossomocomuck Balance of Power: Explaining Carolina Algonquian Socioeconomic Aberrations at Contact,” in Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection, ed. E. Thomson Shields and Charles R. Ewan (Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, ), ; Gleach, Powhatan’s World, ; Phelps, “Archaeology of Native Americans”; Keith T. Egloff, “Spheres of Cultural Interaction Across the Coastal Plain of Virginia in the Woodland Period,” in Structure and Process in Southeastern Archaeology, ed. Roy S. Dickens, Jr., and H. Trawick Ward (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ), ; Edward Dubois Ragan, “Where the Water Ebbs and Flows: Place and Self Among the Rappahannock People, from the Great Hare Through the Great Awakenings,” Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, , ; Helen C. Rountree and E. Randolph Turner, III, Before and After Jamestown: Virginia’s Powhatans and their Predecessors (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ), . For one explanation for the location of Chaunis Temoatan, see Miller, Roanoke, –. 36. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, – (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), chap. . 37. Smith, Complete Works, . –; Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), ; Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; Binford, Cultural Diversity, , ; David Sutton Phelps, Archaeology of the Tillett Site: The First Fishing Community at Wanchese, Roanoke Island, Archaeological Research Report  (Greenville, N.C.: Archaeology Laboratory, Department of Sociology, Anthropology and



Notes to Pages –

Economics, East Carolina University, ), –; Gregory Alan Waselkov, “Shellfish Gathering and Shell Midden Archaeology,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, , ; David Griffith, The Estuary’s Gift: An Atlantic Coast Cultural Biography (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, ), . 38. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 39. Ibid., . 40. Ibid., –; Potter, Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs, –. 41. Smith, Complete Works, : ; Strachey, Historie, . 42. Rountree and Turner, Before and After Jamestown, –; Dent, Prehistory, ; E. A. Wrigley and Roger S. Schofield, The Population History of England, –  (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), , . 43. See the discussion in Dowd, Spirited Resistance, –. 44. Strachey, Historie, ; Beverley, History, –; John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, ed. Hugh Talmadge Lefler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –. See also Ake Hultkrantz, The Religions of the American Indians, trans. Monica Setterwall (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . 45. Lawson, New Voyage, ; Rountree, Powhatan Indians, ; Smith, Complete Works, : ; Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , –. 46. Strachey, Historie, ; Gleach, Powhatan’s World, . 47. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, ; Gleach, Powhatan’s World, ; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Allenheld, ), . 48. Strachey, Historie, –; Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , –. On water as a realm of the supernatural, see Hultkrantz, Religions, . 49. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; Beverley, History, ; Gleach, Powhatan’s World, ; John A. Grim, The Shaman: Patterns of Siberian and Ojibway Healing (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), –, . 50. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; Smith, Complete Works, : . See also Strachey, Historie, ; Beverley, History, . 51. Smith, Map, Complete Works, : ; Strachey, Historie, –; Beverley, History, ; Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . Though some have suggested that White’s artwork may depict ritual activity related to the Green Corn Ceremony, there is insufficient evidence for drawing such a conclusion. See John Witthoft, Green Corn Ceremonialism in the Eastern Woodlands, Occasional Contributions from the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan  (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), –. 52. Douglas H. Ubelaker, Reconstruction of Demographic Profiles from Ossuary Skeletal Samples: A Case Study from the Tidewater Potomac, Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology  (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, ), ; Christine Jirkowic, “The Political Implications of a Cultural Practice: A New Perspective on Ossuary Burial in the Potomac Valley,” North American Archaeologist ,  (): –.

Notes to Pages –

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53. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 54. Smith, Map, Complete Works, : ; Jirkowic, “Political Implications,” . 55. Smith, Map, Complete Works, : ; Ubelaker, Ossuary, ; Phelps, Tillett Site, –; Dent, Chesapeake Prehistory, ; Dale L. Hutchinson and Lorraine V. Aragon, “Collective Burials and Community Memories: Interpreting the Placement of the Dead in the Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States with Reference to Ethnographic Cases from Indonesia,” in The Space and Place of Death, ed. Helaine Silverman and David B. Small, Anthropological Papers of the American Anthropological Association  (Arlington, Va.: American Anthropological Association, ). 56. Ubelaker, Ossuary, ; Jirikowic, “Political Implications,” ; Ward and Davis, Time Before History, ; Phelps, “Archaeology of Native Americans”; Rountree and Turner, Before and After Jamestown, ; Gallivan, James River Chiefdoms, ; Dennis C. Curry, Feast of the Dead: Aboriginal Ossuaries in Maryland (Crowsville: Maryland Historical Trust Press, ), . 57. Phelps, “Baum Site,” ; Mark A. Mathis, “Mortuary Processes at the Broad Reach Site,” Report for Archaeology and Historic Preservation Section, North Carolina Department of Archives and History,  (slightly modified in ), http:// homepages.rootsweb.com/~jmack/algonquin/mathis.htm, accessed February , ; Hutchinson, Foraging, –. 58. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, –), : –; Elizabeth I. Monahan, “Bioarchaeological Analysis of the Mortuary Practices at the Broad Reach Site (Cr), Coastal North Carolina,” Southern Indian Studies  (): –; Hutchinson and Aragon, “Collective Burials,” , . 59. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, ; Grim, Shaman, ; Hultkrantz, Religions, ; Williamson, Powhatan, ; Bruce M. White, “Encounters with Spirits: Ojibwa and Dakota Theories About the French and Their Merchandise,” Ethnohistory  (Summer ): –. 60. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , . On hunting, see Dowd, Spirited Resistance, –; Grim, Shaman, ; Bruce M. White, “The Woman Who Married a Beaver: Trade Patterns and Gender Roles in the Ojibwa Fur Trade,” Ethnohistory  (Winter ): –; Calvin Luther Martin, In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), ; idem., The Way of the Human Being (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ). William Byrd, traveling along the Carolina-Virginia dividing line in the early eighteenth century, boiled in the same pot some venison and turkey that he and his companions had just hunted. Byrd’s Indian guide told the Englishmen that “if we continued to boil venison and Turkey together, we Shou’d for the future kill nothing, because the Spirit that presided over the Woods would drive all the game out of our Sight.” Byrd was not troubled by this “idle Superstition” that the animals might somehow care about how their remains were treated. See William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, ed. William K. Boyd (Raleigh: North Carolina Historical Commission, ), .

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Notes to Pages –

Chapter . Granganimeo 1. David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, – (London: Hakluyt Society, ), . 2. Ibid., . 3. On the size of the two English “barks,” see ibid., . On oral traditions from New England, see Robert Steven Grumet, Historic Contact: Indians Peoples and Colonists In Today’s Northeastern United States in the Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), . 4. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . On this point see the debate over the meaning of Captain James Cook’s arrival in Hawaii. See Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ) and Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ) and the critique in Gananath Obeyeskere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). For the North American context, I found useful Calvin Luther Martin’s heartfelt essay The Way of the Human Being (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ). 5. David B. Quinn, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements: The Norse Voyages to  (New York: Harper and Row, ), –; Seth William Mallios, “In the Hands of ‘Indian Givers’: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke and Jamestown,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, , ; Martin D. Gallivan, James River Chiefdoms: The Rise of Social Inequality in the Chesapeake (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), –. 6. Charlotte M. Gradie, “Spanish Jesuits in Virginia: The Mission That Failed,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography  (April ): ; Quinn, North America, . 7. Gallivan, James River Chiefdoms, ; Gradie, “Spanish Jesuits in Virginia,” –; Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), –; Eric Griffin, “The Specter of Spain in John Smith’s Colonial Writing,” in Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, ed. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), ; James Horn, A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America (New York: Basic Books, ), –; and Alex W. Barker, “Powhatan’s Pursestrings: On the Meaning of Surplus in a Seventeenth Century Algonkian Chiefdom,” in Lords of the Southeast: Social Inequality and the Native Elites of Southeastern North America, ed. Alex W. Barker and Timothy R. Pauketat, Anthropological Papers of the American Anthropological Association  (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, ), . 8. Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie, The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –, –, , –.

Notes to Pages –

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9. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , –. 10. Ibid., . 11. Ibid., . 12. E. G. R. Taylor, ed., The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts (London: Hakluyt Society, ), , , . On Hakluyt, see Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), –. 13. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –, , . 14. The privateering aspect of Ralegh’s Roanoke ventures is emphasized in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, ). 15. On this note, see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Paradox of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, ), chap. ; Michael Leroy Oberg, Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, – (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), –. 16. Taylor, ed., Writings of the Hakluyts, –; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, –; J. H. Parry, “Hakluyt’s View of British History,” in The Hakluyt Handbook, ed. David Beers Quinn (London: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, –; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. 17. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; Taylor, ed., Writings of the Hakluyts, . For Harriot’s presence aboard the  expedition, see John W. Shirley, Thomas Harriot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), – and David Beers Quinn, “Thomas Harriot and the New World,” in Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist, ed. John W. Shirley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . On White, see Paul Hulton, “Images of the New World: Jacques LeMoyne de Morgues and John White,” in The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, –, ed. Kenneth R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ), –. 18. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages ; Mallios, “In the Hands of ‘Indian Givers,’” . 19. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 20. Ibid., , –. On taking possession, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. 21. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 22. Ibid., . On the problem of the language barrier, see James Axtell, “Babel of Tongues: Communicating with Indians,” in Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –; and Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan, expanded ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), –. 23. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . On the pinnace, see William A. Baker, The Mayflower and Other Colonial Vessels (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, ), .

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Notes to Pages –

24. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 25. Ibid., –. 26. On this point, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “English Perceptions of Treachery, –: The Case of the American ‘Savages,’” Historical Journal  (): –. 27. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 28. Ibid., –. See also Edward Dubois Ragan, “Where the Water Ebbs and Flows: Place and Self Among the Rappahannock People, from the Great Hare Through the Great Awakenings,” Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, , , . 29. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. See also Seth Mallios, “Gift Exchange and the Ossomocomuck Balance of Power: Explaining Algonquian Socioeconomic Aberrations at Contact,” in Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection, ed. E. Thomson Shields and Charles R. Ewen (Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, ), ; Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World: American Indians and the Coming of Europeans,” William and Mary Quarterly rd ser.  (July ): –. 30. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; Taylor, ed., Writings of the Hakluyts, . 31. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; Ivor Noël Hume, The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to Jamestown, an Archaeological and Historical Odyssey (New York: Knopf, ), . 32. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages , ; David Stick, Roanoke Island: The Beginnings of English America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –. 33. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , . 34. Ibid., . 35. Mallios, “In the Hands of ‘Indian Givers,’” ; William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, ed. William K. Boyd (Raleigh: North Carolina Historical Commission, ), . 36. Christopher L. Miller and George R. Hammell, “A New Perspective on Indian-White Contact: Cultural Symbols and Colonial Trade,” Journal of American History  (): , , ; Gallivan, Chiefdoms, . 37. Gleach, Powhatan’s World, , –; Calvin Luther Martin, “The Four Lives of a Micmac Copper Pot,” Ethnohistory  (): ; Hamell and Miller, “Cultural Symbols and Colonial Trade,” ; Klein and Sandford, “Contact Era,” ; Gallivan, James River Chiefdoms, . 38. Bruce M. White, “Encounters with Spirits: Ojibwa and Dakota Theories About the French and their Merchandise,” Ethnohistory  (): , , ; Miller and Hamell, “Cultural Symbols and Colonial Trade,” ; Salisbury, “Indians’ Old World,” . 39. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 40. Ibid., –. 41. Beverley, History, –.

Notes to Pages –



42. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 43. Ibid., –. 44. Ibid.; Kupperman, “English Perceptions of Treachery,” , . 45. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 46. Ibid., . 47. For earlier Indian sojourners in England, see William C. Sturtevant and David Beers Quinn, “This New Prey: Eskimos in Europe in ,  and ,” in Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, ed. Christian F. Feest (Aachen: Herodot, ), ; and Neil Cheshire, T. Waldron, Alison M. Quinn, and David B. Quinn, “Frobisher’s Eskimos in England,” Archivaria  (): . On war leaders, see Gleach, Powhatan’s World, –. See also David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), ; Kupperman, Roanoke, ; Stephen R. Potter, Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), –; Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), . 48. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), –; Michael Leroy Oberg, “Between ‘Savage Man’ to “Most Faithful Englishman’: Manteo and the Early AngloIndian Exchange,” Itinerario  (): –. 49. George R. Hammell, “Strawberries, Floating Islands, and Rabbit Captains: Mythical Realities and European Contact in the Northeast During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of Canadian Studies ,  (–): –; Alden T. Vaughan, “Sir Walter Ralegh’s Indian Interpreters, –,” William and Mary Quarterly rd ser.  (June ): . 50. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; Beverley, History, . For the argument that Manteo and Wanchese crossed the Atlantic as captives see Harald E. L. Prins, “To the Land of the Mistigoches: American Indian Travelers in Europe in the Age of Exploration,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal  (): –. 51. Quinn, “Thomas Harriot and the New World,” . 52. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 53. John Norden’s Notes of London and Westminster, in William Brenchley Rye, ed., England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First (London: John Russell, ), –; Liza Picard, Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London (New York: St. Martin’s, ), –, –. 54. Vivian Salmon, “Thomas Harriot (–) and the English Origins of Algonkian Linguistics,” Historographia Linguistica  (): –; John W. Shirley, Thomas Harriot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), ; Kupperman, Indians and English, ; W. A. Wallace, John White, Thomas Harriot, and Walter Ralegh in Ireland, Occasional Paper  (Durham: Thomas Harriot Seminar, ), . 55. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages n.



Notes to Pages –

56. Ibid., –; G. R. Batho, Thomas Harriot and the Northumberland Household, Occasional Paper  (Durham: Thomas Harriot Seminar, ). 57. Catherine Albertson, Roanoke Island in History and Legend (Elizabeth City, N.C.: Independent Press, ), . Albertson’s view is repeated in its fundamentals by Giles Milton in Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, ), –. 58. On women, see Emanuel Van Meteren in Rye, ed., England as Seen by Foreigners, –. Bacon is quoted in Jack Schofield, “The Topography and Buildings of London, ca. ,” in Material London, ca. , ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), . 59. Samuel Kielher and Paul Hentzner in Rye, ed., England as Seen by Foreigners, –, –. 60. Picard, Elizabeth’s London, , ; Jeffrey L. Singman, Daily Life in Elizabethan England (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, ), ; Rosemary O’Day, The Longman Companion to the Tudor Age (London: Longman, ), . 61. Picard, Elizabeth’s London, –.

Chapter . Wingina 1. David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, – (London: Hakluyt Society, ), . 2. Ibid., , . 3. [William Herle?] to Queen Elizabeth,  December , ibid., . 4. Ibid., , ; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, ), –; Stephen Saunders Webb, The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . 5. John W. Shirley, Thomas Harriot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), , . For a detailed discussion of the cosmological significance of the arrival of Europeans in another setting, see Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). 6. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , ; Don Diego de Alcega to President and Officers of the House of Trade,  June , in Irene A. Wright, ed., Further English Voyages to Spanish America, –: Documents from the Archives of the Indies at Seville Illustrating English Voyages to the Caribbean, the Spanish Main, Florida, and Virginia (London: Hakluyt Society, ), –. 7. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages –, –. 8. Ibid., –, , , . Barlowe has been blamed by some historians for describing the New World in Edenic terms. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, for instance, argued that Barlowe’s account of the  reconnaissance voyage caused the settlers “to come unprepared for the actual hardships and limitations in settling this land.” The settlers, Kupperman argues, thought the land would be easy to live in. But this claim overlooks the destruction of the supplies that the colonists carried

Notes to Pages –



at Wococon. The evidence suggests that the Grenville expedition, before the accident, had managed to equip and supply itself with an abundance of provisions obtained through trade with the Spanish. See Kupperman, Roanoke, . 9. Kupperman, Roanoke, ; David Stick, Roanoke Island: The Beginnings of English America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –; David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . 10. This, of course, is a highly speculative reading of the events that occurred between the third and sixth of July in . For more on this period, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “English Perceptions of Treachery, –: The Case of the American ‘Savages,’” Historical Journal  (): –; and Michael Leroy Oberg, “Between Savage Man and Most Faithful Englishman: Manteo and the Early AngloIndian Exchange, –,” Itinerario  (): . 11. Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, ), –. See also Greg Dening, “Introduction,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Fredrika Teute, and Mechal Sobel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), ; Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ; Richard White, “‘Although I am Dead, I Am Not Entirely Dead, I have Left a Second of Myself ’: Constructing Self and Persons on the Middle Ground of Early America,” in Hoffman, Teute, and Sobel, eds., Through a Glass Darkly, –. 12. Oberg, “Between ‘Savage Man’ and ‘Most Faithful Englishman’,” –. On cultural brokers in Early America, see J. Frederick Fausz, “Middlemen in Peace and War: Virginia’s Earliest Indian Interpreters, –,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography  (); Nancy L. Hagedorn, “Brokers of Understanding: Interpreters as Agents of Cultural Exchange in Colonial New York,” New York History  (October ): –; idem., “Faithful, Knowing and Prudent: Andrew Montour as Interpreter and Cultural Broker,” in Between Indian and White Worlds: The Indian as Cultural Broker, ed. Margaret Connell Szasz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ); Alan Taylor, “Captain Hendrick Aupuamut: The Dilemmas of an Intercultural Broker,” Ethnohistory  (): –. 13. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, –. The expedition that Grenville anticipated was under the command of Amias Preston and Bernard Drake. At the last moment, it was redirected to Newfoundland to warn English mariners there of a breakdown in relations with Spain. When Harriot mentioned that the wreck of the Tyger left the colonists with provisions for only twenty days, he may have reckoned not from the date of the accident, but from the time when the colonists actually established themselves on Roanoke Island. One of Grenville’s motives in exploring the region was to ensure that he could leave the colonists at a place where the Indians would be willing to feed them. 14. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; John White, America : The Complete



Notes to Pages –

Drawings of John White, ed. Paul Hulton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), plates –. 15. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 16. Ibid., ; White, America , plates –. 17. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, ; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, ; Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), . 18. Seth Mallios, “Gift Exchange and the Ossomocomuck Balance of Power: Explaining Carolina Algonquian Socioeconomic Aberrations at Contact,” in Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection, ed. E. Thomson Shields, Jr., and Charles R. Ewen (Raleigh, N.C.: Office of Archives and History, ) argues that Acquascogoc was a village belonging to the Secotans, and that it was the Secotans and a distinct Roanoke tribe who had been enemies in the past (see –); Lee Miller, Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (New York: Arcade, ), –, –, asserts that the Algonquians on Roanoke and the Aquascogocs were both, in fact, Secotans, but she says little about the implications of the attack on relations between native communities. I disagree with both interpretations. 19. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 20. Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly rd ser.  (): –. The depiction of warfare as a smallscale affair may be carried too far. George Milner, in a provocative essay, has found that in the Eastern Woodlands “long-standing antagonisms evolving into multiple attacks each resulting in the death of only a few situationally vulnerable individuals” could be “punctuated by catastrophic massacres of many individuals.” See George R. Milner, “Warfare in Prehistoric and Early Historic Eastern North America,” Journal of Archaeological Research ,  (): . 21. On this note see Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). 22. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 23. Ibid.; Shirley, Thomas Harriot, . 24. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, ; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, –. 25. Lane to Sir Francis Walsingham,  September ; Lane to Sir Philip Sidney,  August , in Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , ; Shirley, Thomas Harriot, ; Michael Leroy Oberg, Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, – (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), –. 26. Lane to the Two Richard Hakluyts,  September , in Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 27. Oberg, Dominion and Civility, –. 28. Kupperman, Roanoke, –. For discussion of whether the fort at the current National Historic Site was part of a larger structure, see Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, –; Jean Carl Harrington, An Outwork at Fort Raleigh: Further Archaeological Excavations at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site (Richmond: Eastern

Notes to Pages –



National Park Monument Association, ); idem., Search for the Cittie of Ralegh: Archaeological Excavations at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, North Carolina, Archaeological Research Series  (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, ), –; Ivor Noël Hume, The Virginia Adventure, Roanoke to James Towne: An Archaeological and Historical Odyssey (New York: Knopf, ), . 29. On Harriot and his qualities as an observer, see B. J. Sokol, “The Problem of Assessing Thomas Harriot’s A briefe and true report of His Discoveries in North America,” Annals of Science  (): –. 30. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , –. Lee Miller has seen in these stories of spiritual travel evidence that a “revitalization movement” was underway among Wingina’s people. “A great revival is gripping the Secotan country,” she writes, “caused by calamity.” Here, as elsewhere in her provocative book, Miller makes a larger interpretive leap than the evidence will allow. See Miller, Roanoke, –. 31. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 32. Seth William Mallios, “In the Hands of the ‘Indian Givers’: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke, and Jamestown,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, , ; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, . See also Fredric W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), . 33. Bruce M. White, “Encounters with Spirits: Ojibwa and Dakota Theories About the French and Their Merchandise,” Ethnohistory  (Summer ): . 34. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., . 37. Ibid., –. 38. Ibid., . On the specific outbreak at Roanoke, see Peter B. Mires, “Contact and Contagion: The Roanoke Colony and Influenza,” Historical Archaeology  (): –. For the important scholarly debate about how and why native peoples proved so susceptible to epidemic diseases, see Alfred Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly  (): –; David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly rd ser.  (October ): –; idem., Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality Since  (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ); and Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, – (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). 39. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), . See also Michael Leroy Oberg, “Gods and Men: The Meeting of Indian and White Worlds on the Carolina Outer Banks, –,” North Carolina Historical Review  (): –. The literature on conversion is enormous. Among a number of important works that helped inform my own research, see White, “Encounters with Spirits”; Constance Crosby, “From Myth to History, or Why King Philip’s Ghost Walks Abroad,” in The Recovery

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Notes to Pages –

of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern United States, ed. Mark P. Leone and Parker B. Potter, Jr. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, ); David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity and Community Among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, – (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); and Harold W. Van Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians: Acculturation, Conversion and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, –,” New England Quarterly  (). 40. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 41. Ibid., . 42. Ibid., –. 43. Ibid., . 44. Ibid., –. On drought, see Dennis B. Blanton, “Drought as a Factor in the Jamestown Colony,” Historical Archaeology  (): –; idem. “The Climate Factor in Late Prehistoric and Post-Contact Human Affairs,” in Indian and European Contact in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region, ed. Dennis B. Blanton and Julia A. King (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ); and David W. Stahle et al., “The Lost Colony and Jamestown Droughts,” Science  (): –. 45. Harriot quoted in Maurice A. Mook, “Algonkian Ethnohistory of the Carolina Sound,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences  (June ): . Quinn thought that Harriot accompanied the group that settled on the Chesapeake. See Quinn, “Thomas Harriot and the New World,” in Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist, ed. John W. Shirley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . Shirley disagrees; see Thomas Harriot, –. Why, Shirley asks, would Harriot have maintained a separate house for himself at Roanoke if he planned on being absent from the outpost for an extended period? This question, it seems to me, misses the point. Lane would have wanted his best interpreter at Chesapeake, and that would have been Manteo. Lane could not have spared both Manteo and Harriot, so the latter must have stayed behind. 46. White, America , plate ; Helen C. Rountree and Thomas E. Davidson, Eastern Shore Indians of Virginia and Maryland (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), ; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, –. 47. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , . 48. Ibid., –; Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), –; Rountree, Powhatan Indians, . 49. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, ; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, ; Rountree, Pocahontas’s People, –. 50. Mires, “Contact and Contagion,” –. 51. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, ; Mallios, “Gift Exchange,” ; Robert Appelbaum, “Hunger in Early Virginia: Indians and English Facing Off over Excess, Want, and Need,” in Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, ed. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), –.

Notes to Pages –



52. Oberg, “Between ‘Savage Man’ and ‘Most Faithful Englishman’,” –; Kupperman, “English Perceptions of Treachery,” –; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, –. 53. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –, –. 54. Oberg, “Gods and Men,” –.

Chapter . A Killing and Its Consequences 1. David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, – (London: Hakluyt Society, ), ; Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), ; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, ), ; David N. Durant, Ralegh’s Lost Colony (New York: Atheneum, ), –; Camilla Townshend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (New York: Hill and Wang, ), –, –. 2. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 3. Ibid., . 4. Ibid., –. Lane’s account was written at least in part to justify his decision to abandon Roanoke Island in , in effect abandoning the post Ralegh had charged him with governing. 5. Ibid., –; Michael Leroy Oberg, “Indians and Englishmen at the First Roanoke Colony: A Note on Pemisapan’s Conspiracy,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal  (): . 6. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 7. Ibid., . 8. Ibid., –. 9. Ibid., . 10. Ibid., –. 11. Ibid., –. 12. Ibid., –. 13. Ibid., –. 14. Ibid., . 15. Ibid., –. 16. Ibid. –. 17. Ibid., –. 18. Ibid., –. 19. Ibid. . 20. Ibid., –. 21. Ibid., ; David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), ; Kupperman, Roanoke, . 22. Kupperman, Roanoke ; Seth Mallios, “Gift Exchange and the Ossomocomuck Balance of Power: Explaining Carolina Algonquian Socioeconomic Aberrations at



Notes to Pages –

Contact,” in Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection, ed. E. Thomson Shields, Jr., and Charles R. Ewen (Raleigh, N.C.: Office of Archives and History, Department of Cultural Resources, ), . 23. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages ; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, ; Kupperman, Roanoke, –; David Stick, Roanoke Island: The Beginnings of English America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . 24. Michael Leroy Oberg, “Gods and Men: The Meeting of Indian and White Worlds on the Carolina Outer Banks, –,” North Carolina Historical Review  (): ; Seth William Mallios, “In the Hands of the ‘Indian Givers’: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke and Jamestown,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, , –, . 25. Oberg, “Indians and Englishmen,” –. 26. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; Oberg, “Gods and Men,” . 27. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 28. Ibid., –, –; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, . 29. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., –; Mallios, “Gift Exchange,” . 32. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages . 33. Ibid., . 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., . 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., –. 38. Ibid., , –; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, ; Irene A. Wright, ed., Further English Voyages to Spanish America, –: Documents from the Archives of the Indies at Seville Illustrating English Voyages to the Caribbean, the Spanish Main, Florida and Virginia (London: Hakluyt Society, ), xxxii–xxxiii, . 39. Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, ; Oberg, “Indians and Englishmen,” passim. 40. Oberg, “Gods and Men,” . 41. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 42. Ibid., . 43. Ibid., .

Chapter . Vengeance 1. From an address by Lindsay C. Warren, Virginia Dare Day: Annual Celebrations by the Roanoke Colony Memorial Association (Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards and Broughton, ), . On these first lost colonists, see David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, – (London: Hakluyt Society, ), ; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Paradox of Early Virginia (New York: Norton, ), –; and James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –.

Notes to Pages –



2. Michael Leroy Oberg, Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, – (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), chap. ; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, –. 3. I, too, have entered the debate over Lane’s actions. See Michael L. Oberg, “Indians and Englishmen at the First Roanoke Colony: A Note on Pemisapan’s Conspiracy, –,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal  (): –. 4. On the Pequot War, see Oberg, Dominion and Civility, –; and idem, Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), –. On the brutality of the English assault against the Pequots in particular, see Adam J. Hirsch, “The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England,” Journal of American History  (): –; and Robert Dale Karr, “‘Why Should You Be So Furious?’ The Violence of the Pequot War,” Journal of American History  (): –. On Kieft’s War, see Oberg, Dominion and Civility, –; and Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), –. 5. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. Brutality, of course, was not remarkable to the English, nor was the killing of large numbers of people. Indeed, with his Irish experience, Lane was schooled in an environment where the English acted on the bloody principle that violence made for short wars. On Ireland, see W. R. Jones, “England Against the Celtic Fringe: A Study in Cultural Stereotypes,” Journal of World History  (): –; J. G. A. Pocock, “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject,” American Historical Review  (): –; Brendan Bradshaw, “Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation of Ireland,” Historical Journal  (): –; and Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly rd ser.  (): –. 6. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, ; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “English Perceptions of Treachery, –: The Case of the American ‘Savages,’” Historical Journal  (): . 7. On how this process occurred elsewhere, see Oberg, Uncas, –; James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: The Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. 8. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 9. Oberg, “Between ‘Savage Man’ and ‘Most Faithful Englishman’,” –. 10. Ibid. For an another view of Manteo, see Alden T. Vaughan, “Sir Walter Ralegh’s Indian Interpreters, –,” William and Mary Quarterly rd ser.  (): –.

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Notes to Pages –

11. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 12. Ibid., . See also Paul E. Hoffman, A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ), ; and Irene A. Wright, ed., Further English Voyages to Spanish America, –: Documents from the Archives of the Indies at Seville Illustrating English Voyages to the Caribbean, the Spanish Main, Florida and Virginia (London: Hakluyt Society, ), . 13. Ivor Noël Hume, The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Towne: An Archaeological and Historical Odyssey (New York: Knopf, ), . 14. Ibid. On the calculation of dates, see the documents in Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –, –. 15. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages , . 16. Ibid., , . 17. Ibid., . 18. Ibid., –. 19. Ibid., ; Vaughan, “Sir Walter Ralegh’s Indian Interpreters,” ; A. L. Rowse, Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge: An Elizabethan Hero (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), –; Alison Grant, Grenville (Devon: North Devon Museum Trust, ), . 20. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, ), ; David Stick, Roanoke Island: The Beginnings of English America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), ; Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , ; idem, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . 21. Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, ; Kupperman, Roanoke, . 22. Lee Miller, Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (New York: Arcade, ), , argued that White’s colonists may have comprised a separatist congregation. There may be something to this, but Miller appears to have overstated her case. Quinn suggested that White’s colonists may have been Protestants upset with religious conditions in England. “They might,” Quinn wrote, “be loyal members of the Church of England but more Protestant than the Establishment of the Church. They need not be regarded as Pilgrims such as those of  or even the rather radical reformists of the Massachusetts Bay Company when it was formed, but they were anxious all the same to move as a group so as to carry with them the type of religious observance that the Elizabethan puritans (with a small p) . . . preferred. Such a band of right-thinking (from their perspective) [people] would enable White to gather them round him from the City of London and its surrounding counties; it would give this the unity of purpose and determination to take the immense risk of launching out as colonists in North America.” See David Beers Quinn, “Investment in the Roanoke Colonies and Its Consequences,” in Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection, ed. E. Thomson Shields and Charles R. Ewen (Raleigh: Office of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, ), . See also Kupperman, Roanoke, . 23. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, .

Notes to Pages –

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24. Hume, Virginia Adventure, ; Seth William Mallios, “In the Hands of ‘Indian Givers’: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke, and Jamestown,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, , . 25. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 26. Ibid.; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, –. 27. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 28. Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), ; Noël Hume, Virginia Adventure, . On warfare, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The American Indian Struggle for Unity, – (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), and Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly  (): –. 29. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. For a discussion of these issues, see James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: Norton, ). 33. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., –. 36. Ibid., –. 37. Ibid., –. 38. Ibid., . 39. Ibid., . Much of the material in this chapter is adapted from my article “Between ‘Savage Man’ and “Most Faithful Englishman’: Manteo and the Early Anglo-Indian Exchange, –,” Itinerario  (): –. 40. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, . 41. Oberg, “Between ‘Savage Man’ and ‘Most Faithfull Englishman,’” –. 42. Ibid.; Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, .

Chapter . Lost Colonists, Lost Indians 1. David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, – (London: Hakluyt Society, ), –; Ivor Noël Hume, The Virginia Adventure, Roanoke to Jamestown: An Archaeological and Historical Odyssey (New York: Knopf, ), . 2. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –, ; David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . 3. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , ; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, ), –. 4. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –, . 5. Ibid., –. 6. Ibid., –.

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Notes to Pages –

7. Ibid., –. 8. Ibid., . Historians and archaeologists have closely scrutinized White’s text, searching for evidence of the actual site of the Lost Colony. For these efforts, see Jean Carl Harrington, Search for the Cittie of Ralegh: Archaeological Excavations at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, North Carolina, Archaeological Research Series  (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, ), –; Hume, Virginia Adventure, –. 9. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 10. Ibid., –. For a useful discussion illustrating the importance of this sort of “scavenging” for indigenous peoples, see Peter E. Pope, Fish Into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –. 11. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –. 12. William Byrd, William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, ed. William K. Boyd (Raleigh: North Carolina Historical Commission, ), ; A. L. Rowse, The Expansion of Elizabethan England (New York: Scribner’s, ), . 13. Paul Green, The Lost Colony: A Symphonic Drama in Two Acts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . 14. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, , ; Paul E. Hoffman, A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ), ; idem., Spain and the Roanoke Voyages (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, ), –. Hoffman thinks that Ruize sailed past the Carolina Sounds before White’s colonists arrived in the summer of  and that what he saw was stray livestock left after Grenville’s small party had been wiped out by Wanchese. 15. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, –; Paul E. Hoffman, “New Light on Vicente González’s  Voyage in Search of Raleigh’s English Colonies,” North Carolina Historical Review  (): ; John T. Hann, ed., “Translation of the Ecija Voyages of  and  and the Gonzalez Derrotero of ,” Florida Archaeology (): . 16. Hoffman, Andalucia, ; idem, Spain, –. 17. A. Denison Dart, “Raleigh’s Lost Colony,” Southern Workman  (): ; O. R. Mangum, “The Lost Colony Found,” Wake Forest Student  (): . 18. Mangum, “Lost Colony Found,” ; Robert E. Betts, “Raleigh’s Lost Colony,” Cornhill Magazine  (), –. 19. J. Frederick Fausz, “Patterns of Anglo-Indian Aggression and Accommodation Along the Mid-Atlantic Coast, –,” in Cultures in Contact: The Impact of European Contacts on Native American Cultural Institutions, A.D. –, ed. William W. Fitzhugh (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, ), ; Harrington, Search, . The discovery of the ring was covered widely in the local media. Archaeologist David Sutton Phelps suggested that here, at last, was evidence that the English had indeed settled at Croatoan Island. Phelps has yet to

Notes to Pages –



publish any of his research from the excavations on the Croatoan site, and has not made his field notes available for review. Other archaeologists are not convinced he is correct. The ring was found with objects dating to an archaeological context of circa –. Along with Croatoan pottery fragments, stone and bone tools, and other items of Algonquian manufacture, the ring was found with an early seventeenth-century English gunlock, two farthing coins minted under Charles II (r. –) and “numerous glass trade bead types not produced in Europe before the mid-s.” The ring appears to have been worn on a necklace, and may have come to Croatoan well after the period when White’s colonists could conceivably have been there. Email communication with archaeologist Charles Heath, August , , in author’s possession. I am indebted to Charles Heath of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Charles Ewen of East Carolina University for explaining to me some of the difficulties in interpreting the signet ring. 20. The environment of the Outer Banks was also shifting. What had been Croatoan Island in the s had become part of Hatteras Island by the early eighteenth century. 21. Nancy Gray, “Unearthing Clues to Lost Worlds: An Archaeological Dig on the Outer Banks of North Carolina Reveals Evidence of the Croatan Indians and Possible Links to the Lost Colony,” ECU Report ,  (); John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, ed. Hugh Talmadge Lefler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –, ; Douglas L. Rights, “The Lost Colony Legend,” Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of North Carolina  (September ): ; Gary S. Dunbar, “The Hatteras Indians of North Carolina,” Ethnohistory  (Autumn ): –. Dunbar is not convinced that the Croatoans and the Hatteras were the same people. 22. Lawson, New Voyage, . 23. Ibid., . 24. Ibid., . On alcohol, see Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ). There is a large and growing literature examining the history of native peoples who found themselves living “behind the frontier.” See the essays in Colin G. Calloway, ed., After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, ); Paul R. Campbell and Glenn W. La Fantasie, “Scattered to the Winds of Heaven—Narragansett Indians, –,” Rhode Island History  (); Michael F. Fickes, “‘They Could not Endure That Yoke’: The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children After the War of ,” New England Quarterly  (): –; Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ); Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ); Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Wendy B. St. Jean, “Inventing Guardianship: The Mohegan Indians and Their ‘Protectors,’” New England Quarterly  (); David J. Silverman, Faith



Notes to Pages –

and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity and Community Among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). See also Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, – (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ) and James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: The Catawbas and Their Neighbors (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). 25. Lawson, New Voyage, –, , –, –, –. 26. Samuel A’Court Ashe, History of North Carolina (Greensboro, N.C.: Charles L. Van Noppen, ), : ; Robert J. Cain, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, nd ser., vol. , Records of the Executive Council – (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History, ), –, ; Dunbar, “Hatteras Indians,” –. 27. William L. Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina,  vols. (Raleigh: P.M. Hale, ), : , ; Douglas L. Rights, The American Indian in North Carolina, nd ed. (Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, ), –; Frank G. Speck, “Remnants of the Machapunga Indians of North Carolina,” American Anthropologist  (April-June ): . 28. With, of course, the exception of the general label Virginia, which the English applied broadly to the entire region, no native space was renamed by Ralegh’s settlers. 29. Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter, –  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), : ; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, ; Kupperman, Roanoke, ; Ashe, History, : . 30. William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (London: Cambridge University Press, ), ; James Horn, A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America (New York: Basic Books, ), . Strachey has said that the colonists raised turkeys and gathered “Apes” in the mountains. Lee Miller argues that Strachey’s Apes is his corruption of the Algonquian word for “metal.” See Lee Miller, Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (New York: Arcade, ), . It is also possible, as Miller admits, that Apes is Strachey’s corruption of the Carolina Algonquian Uppowoc or the Powhatan uhpooc or Apoke, meaning tobacco. 31. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, Or Purchas His Pilgrimes,  vols. (reprint Glasgow: James Mac Lehose and Sons, ), : ; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, –. 32. Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, –; Barbour, ed., Jamestown Voyages, : , –. 33. Instructions to Sir Thomas Gates, May , in David B. Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to ,  vols. (New York: Arno Press, ), : . 34. John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia (), in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), : .

Notes to Pages –



35. A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation Begun in Virginia (London: I. Stepney, ), ; Miller, Roanoke, –; Horn, Land as God Made It, –. 36. See Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, –. 37. Strachey, Historie . 38. Smith, Complete Works, : . 39. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, ; Michael Leroy Oberg, Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, – (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), –. 40. Thomas C. Parramore, “The ‘Lost Colony’ Found: A Documentary Perspective,” North Carolina Historical Review  (January ), –. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., . 43. Haywood J. Pearce, “New Light on the Roanoke Colony,” Journal of Southern History  (May ), . 44. Ibid., –. 45. “Historical News and Notes,” Journal of Southern History  (May ): . 46. H. J. Pearce, “The Dare Stones,” Brenau Bulletin  (November ), n.p. 47. Ibid.; and “Historical News and Notes,” Journal of Southern History  (), . 48. Pearce, “The Dare Stones.” 49. Ibid. 50. Boyden Sparkes, “Writ on Rocke: Has America’s First Murder Mystery Been Solved?” Saturday Evening Post, April , , –, –. 51. Edward Bland, The Discovery of New Brittaine (London: Thomas Harper, ), . 52. Horn, A Land as God Made It, –; E. Randolph Turner, III, “Native American Protohistoric Interactions in the Powhatan Core Area,” in Powhatan Foreign Relations, –, ed. Helen C. Rountree (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), –. 53. On the Lumbees, see Karen I. Blu, The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Gerald M. Sider, Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Southern United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, ). 54. Stephen B. Weeks, “The Lost Colony of Roanoke: Its Fate and Survival,” Papers of the American Historical Association  (): ; Blu, Lumbee, –. 55. Douglas LeTell Rights, “The Lost Colony Legend,” Archaeological Society of North Carolina Bulletin  (): –. 56. Joseph Blount Cheshire, “Baptism of Virginia Dare,” North Carolina Booklet  (): . 57. There is a large literature on this subject, most of it focused on the New England Algonquians. See, for instance, Daniel R. Mandell, “‘To Live More like My Christian Neighbors’: Indian Natick in the Eighteenth-Century,” William and



Notes to Pages –

Mary Quarterly rd ser.  (October ): –; Robert James Naeher, “Dialogue in the Wilderness: John Eliot and the Indian Exploration of Puritanism as a Source of Meaning, Comfort, and Ethnic Survival,” New England Quarterly  (); David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity in Seventeenth-Century Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly rd ser.  (April ): –; and Harold W. Van Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians: Acculturation, Conversion, and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, –,” New England Quarterly  (). On religious conversion among the Iroquois, see David Blanchard, “To the Other Side of the Sky: Catholicism at Kahnawake, –,” Anthropologica  (): –; and Daniel K. Richter, “Iroquois vs. Iroquois: Jesuit Misions and Christianity in Village Politics, –,” Ethnohistory  (): –. 58. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). 59. James H. Merrell, “‘The Customes of the Countrey’: Indians and Colonists in Early America,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –. 60. See the discussions of this phenomena in Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), ; Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, –. 61. Records of the Executive Council,  March / and  November , , –; Maurice A. Mook, “Algonkian Ethnohistory on the Carolina Sound,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences  (June ): –. 62. See chapter  of Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonists, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). For land transactions in general, see the fine study by Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). 63. I have explored this problem in “The Onondagas’ Declaration of Independence,” paper presented at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture Conference, Santa Barbara, California,  June , but see also the protest of Loron Sauguaarum against the Casco Bay Treaty of  in E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York State,  vols. (Albany, N.Y.: Weed and Parsons, ), : –. 64. See Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land, –. 65. Saunders, ed., North Carolina Records, : , : ; Records of the Executive Council, , . 66. Patricia Rubertone, Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, ), –. 67. Kristen M. Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), –; Alan Gallay,

Notes to Pages –



The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, –  (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), –; Albemarle County Court Records, /, in Mattie Irma Edwards Parker, ed., North Carolina Higher Court Records (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, ), : . 68. Petition to Philip Ludwell, ca. –, in Parker, ed., North Carolina Higher Court Records, : –. 69. On Bacon’s Rebellion, see Oberg, Dominion and Civility, chap.  and Samuel Wiseman, Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record: The Official Account of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, –, ed. Michael Leroy Oberg (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, ). 70. Parker, ed., North Carolina Higher Court Records, . 71. Council Journal,  August , in Saunders, ed., North Carolina Records, : –; Mook, “Algonkian Ethnohistory,” –. 72. Michelle LeMaster, “In the ‘Scolding Houses’: Indians and the Law in Eastern North Carolina, –,” North Carolina Historical Review  (April ): –; Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, –; John Brickell, The Natural History of North Carolina (Dublin: James Carson, ). 73. Giles Rainsford to John Chamberlayne, in Saunders, ed., North Carolina Records, : ; Shannon Lee Dawdy, “The Meherrin’s Secret History of the Dividing Line,” North Carolina Historical Review  (): . 74. Diary of Bishop Spangenberg, September , , in Saunders, ed., North Carolina Records, : . On Choanoac land sales and the encroachment of settlers on what remained, see Records of the Executive Council, , , , , , , –; Mook, “Algonkian Ethnohistory,” .

Epilogue 1. David B. Quinn, “Thomas Hariot and the Virginia Voyages of ,” William and Mary Quarterly  (April ): ; John Brereton’s Relation, in David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, eds., The English New England Voyages, – (London: Hakluyt Society, ). 2. Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, ed. Neil L. Whitehead (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ). 3. Quoted in ibid., . 4. Francis Yeardley to John Farrar,  May , in William L. Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina,  vols. (Raleigh, N.C.: P.M. Hale, ), : . 5. Robert J. Cain, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, nd ser., vol. , Records of the Executive Council, – (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, ), –. 6. Hugh T. Lefler and William S. Powell, Colonial North Carolina: A History (New York: Scribner, ), –. 7. Thomas Pollock Letter,  April , in Saunders, ed., North Carolina Records,

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Notes to Pages –

: ; Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, – (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), –. 8. Lefler and Powell, Colonial North Carolina, . 9. For Squires as king at Mattamuskeet, see the records of the Executive Council meetings held November , , and April , , in Records of the Executive Council, , . 10. Patrick Garrow, ed., The Mattamuskeet Documents: A Study in Social History (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, ), –. 11. Garrow, ed., Mattamuskeet Documents, App. –, pp. –. 12. Ibid., App. –, pp. –. 13. Ibid., App. –, pp. –. 14. Ibid., App. , p. . 15. Frank G. Speck, “Remnants of the Machapunga Indians of North Carolina,” American Anthropologist  (April-June ): –.



–, –; resistance by, ; rivalries among, , , –; social organization of, , , , ; spiritual advisers among, , ; spirit travelers and, ; subsistence, –, –; time measured by, –; vengeance sought by, –; villages, , ; warfare, , , –, . See also Aquascogoc; Choanoac; Croatoan; Pomeiooc; Roanoke; Secotan; Weapemeoc Algonquians, New England,  Amadas, Philip, xiv, , , : Aquascogoc attacked by, –; arrival of, , , ; instructions, ; Pemisapan wounded by,  Andacon,  Apassus,  Aquascogoc, , , : attacked by English, –; destruction of, ; support for Wanchese, – Arundell, John,  Astronomy,  Aviles, Pedro Menendez de,  Azores, 

Ahone, – Accomack Indians, – Albemarle Sound: Algonquian villages on, , , ; Amadas raids, ,  Albertson, Catherine,  Algonquians, Carolina: aboriginal culture of, –, ; arrival in Ossomocomuck, –; attacked by Lane, xiv; body ornamentation of, –; burial practices of, –; conversion to Christianity, , –, ; culture destroyed, –; dispossession of, –; effect of settlement on, –, –, ; and empire, ; English motives, understood by, ; enslavement of, –; exchange among, ; first contact and, , ; fishing, ; gender roles, –; Green Corn Ceremonialism among, ; health of, ; hostility toward English, –; housing of , ; invisibility of, ; Late Woodland period, ; land use, ; Lost Colonists and, –, –, –, –, ; maize grown by, ; myths, –; place-names, –; poverty of, , –; reaction to Lane’s expeditions, ; religious life of , –,

Bacon, Francis, – Bacon, Nathaniel, Bacon’s Rebellion, , 





Index

Barlowe, Arthur, xiv, , , : account, , –, –, ; arrival of, , , ; departure from Roanoke, ; first contact observed by, ; learns of early shipwreck –; Roanoke Island described by, , ; Scicoak described by, ; Secotan and, ; trade with Roanokes, –; visits Roanoke, – Bentley, John,  Berkeley, Sir William,  Beverley, Robert, , , ,  Bideford, – Bland, Edward, searches for Lost Colonists, – Boyd, Colonel,  Brebeuf, Jean de,  Brenau College, – Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Harriot), ,  Brobye, Daniel,  Buxton (N.C.),  Byrd, William: Algonquian religion, n; Algonquian trade, ; and fate of Lost Colonists, – Cape Tiburon,  Carolina Outer Banks, geography of,  Cartagena,  Catholicism, English hatred for,  Chapman, – Chaunis Temoatan, , ,  Chepanoc,  Chesapeake Bay, : English outpost at, – Chesepeoc, –; resistance to Wahunsonacock, ; Lost Colonists at, –; survival of, ; trade sought with English,  Cheshire, Joseph Blount, racism of, – Chiefdom, defined, – Children, Algonquian,  Choanoac, : Bacon’s Rebellion and, ; dispossession of, –; enemies of, –; enslavement of, ;

exchange networks of, –; Lane’s expedition against, –, –; Lost Colonists at, –; missions among, ; and Pemisapan’s conspiracy, –, –; population decline of, –; poverty of, –; power of, ; Sicklemore visits, ; Skiko and, –; as tributaries, – Chowan River,  Christianity and empire,  “Cittie of Ralegh,” ,  Clark, Walter, xi–xii Cofar, – Combec,  Copper, , –,  Cossine,  Cottea, – Credle, Francis,  Croatan Indians. See Lumbees Croatoan Indians, ; allegiance to Wingina, , ; attacked by Lane, ; killed by mistake, –; Lost Colonists with, –; Manteo’s visit to, –; welcome English, –. See also Hatteras Indians Croatoan Island, , ; English signet ring found at, , n; Lost Colonists at, , – Dare, Eleanor, ; and Dare Stones, – Dare Stones, – Dare, Virginia, ; meaning of name, ix–xi, –; birth of, xiv, , ; as “White Doe,” – Dart, A. Denison,  Dasemunkepeuc, xiv, , ; abandoned after death of Howe, –; attacked by Lane, –, , ; attacked by White, –, ; name defined, ; Pemisapan relocates to, ; support for Wanchese, , ; Wanchese flees to, –; Wingina’s village at –, , –, , , –

Index Daves, Edward Graham, ix–x DeBry, Theodor, , , ,  De Verrazzanno, Giovanni,  Disease, effects of, –, , –; as English weapon, –, –,  Dominica,  Don Luis. See Paquinquineo Drake, Bernard, n Drake, Sir Francis, xiv, ; arrival of, , ; attacks Spanish , , ; captives deposited by, ; evacuates colonists, – Drought, , ,  Durham House, ,  Eberhart, William,  Elizabeth, I, Queen, xiv, ,  England: anti-Catholicism of, , –; Christianity of, ; early activity in Ossomocomuck, –; economic conditions in, –; imperial program of, – English colonists: alliance with Roanokes, –, –; Aquascogocs attacked by, –; arrival of, ; divisions among, –; fearfulness of, , ; immunity to disease, –; indiscretions of, ; as invited guests, ; laziness of, ; power of, ; technology of, , –; trade goods carried by, –, ; views toward native warfare, –; violence of, ; weapons carried by,  Ensenore: accommodation of ; death of, , –, ; effect on Pemisapan, –; fears of English stated by,  Erecano,  Exchange, –: alliances and, , ; Choanoac role in, –; and empire, ; English goods in, –, ; importance to Algonquians, , –; montoac and –, –; and Pemisapan’s conspiracy, ; reciprocity and, 



Ferdinando, Simon, ; “Lost Colonists” and, , ; wreck of Tyger and,  Fletcher, Stephen,  Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, x, xvi; interpretive programs, xi, n; reconstructed fort, xv–xvi; Waterside Theater, n Frobisher, Martin, ,  Galileo,  Ganz, Joaquim,  Gates, Sir Thomas,  Geary, James A.,  Gibbs, Henry,  Gibbs, Washington,  Gilbert, Sir Humphrey,  Gonzalez, Vicente, – Granganimeo, , , , ; accommodation by, , ; alliance sought by, –, ; ambassadors sent with English, –; confidence of, ; death of, –, , ; English greeted by, –, –; Grenville visited by, ; invites English to Roanoke, , ; Manteo questioned by, ; power of English recognized, –, ; trade goods sought by, ; wife greets English, –; wife protects English, – Great Hare, – Green Corn Ceremony, –, n Green, Paul, and Lost Colony pageant, x–xi, – Greenville County (S.C.), – Grenville, Sir Richard: in Bideford, –; captive taken by, –; commands  expedition, –, –; departure for England, ; Outer Banks explored by, –; raids Spanish possessions, –; relief expedition led by, xiv, xvi, –, ; searches for colonists, –; wreck of Tyger and,  Guiana, Ralegh’s activity in, –



Index

Hakluyt, Richard (the Elder): peace with Indians sought by, ; and Roanoke Colony,  Hakluyt, Richard (the Younger):  expedition and, ; and English empire, –, ; relief expedition, –; on Roanoke failure, ; trade goods, – Harrington, Jean C.,  Harriot, Thomas, xiv, , , , , ;  expedition and, ; Algonquian religion and, –, ; Algonquian warfare and, , ; Brief and True Report, , ; disease described by, –, , –; economics of colonization, ; first contact described by, ; historical reputation of, –; Indian potential recognized by, –, , ; Lane criticized by, ; language skills of, ; maize described by, ; Menatonon described by, ; peaceful relations sought by, –; preaching by, –; priests described by, ; reliance on Indians, –; Roanoke origins described by, –; subsistence routines, ; teaches Manteo and Wanchese, –; wreck of Tyger, ; writings lost, – Hatarask: English arrival at, , , –; Roanokes and English at, – Hatteras Indians, ; alcohol abuse among, ; continued survival of, –; Lost Colonists among, –; poverty of, ; relocation to Mattamuskeet,  Hatteras Island,  Hispaniola,  Hopewell (ship),  Howe, George, death of, –, – Hoyter, Thomas, – Huguenots,  Hunting, –; rituals, – Hurons, 

Hurricanes, , – Hyde County (N.C.) Court,  Indians: importance to Roanoke story, xv–xvi; as relics of past, xi–xiii. See also Algonquians; Carolina Iopassus,  Irish, William,  Jamaica,  Jamestown, , – John Evangelist (ship),  Journal of Southern History,  Keymis, Lawrence, – Kieft’s War,  Kiwasa, –,  Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, n Lane, Governor Ralph, xiv, , n; abandons Roanoke, –; appointment as governor, ; attacked by Moratucs, ; attacks Dasemunkepeuc, –; Choanoac expedition, –; confusion of, ; fortifications by, ; informed by Skiko, –; plans for colony, ; Menatonon held hostage by, –; Menatonon’s power described by, ; Pemisapan’s conspiracy described by, –; reliability as source, , ; respect for Ensenore, ; returns to Roanoke Island, ; Roanoke River expedition led by, –; sends party to Chesapeake Bay, –, ; violence of, , , – Late Woodland Period,  Lawson, John, ; death of, ; Hatteras Indians and, –; Roanoke Island visited by,  Little John (ship),  Localism,  London, – Long Tom, – Longtom, Jenny, Jordan, Joshua, 

Index Lost Colonists: among Hatteras Indians, –; among Weapemeocs, –; assimilation into Indian communities, –, –, –; Dare Stones and, –; disappearance of, –; fate of: xiv–xv, ; importance in American myth, ,; Jamestown colonists search for, –; killing by Wahunsonacock, , , ; Lumbee Indians and, –; relocation to Chesapeake Bay, –; traces found by Spanish, –; and White Doe Legend, – Lost Colony. See Roanoke Island,  Colony Lost Colony, The, x–xi,  Lumbee Indians: Lost Colonists and, –; racism toward, – Lyon (ship),  Mace, Samuel,  Machapunga Indians, described by Speck,  Machumps,  Mackey, John, Marina, Shadrach, Simpson, – Mallios, Seth, n; on Secotan identity, n Mandoages. See Mangoaks Mangoaks, , ; at Choanoac, ; implicated by Skiko, ; and Pemisapan’s conspiracy, –, , ; territory of ,  Mangum, O. R., ix–x,  Mann’s Harbor, ix, xiv Manteo, ; aboard Tyger, ; accompanies Lane to Choanoac, –, –; at Aquascogoc, –; after Howe’s death, ; baptism of, x, –; at Chesapeake outpost, –; close relationship with English, –, ; Croatoans killed by, –; at Dasemunkepeuc, –, –; fragile position of, –, , –; Granganimeo



visited by, ; guides English forces, –; as Lord of Roanoac, , –, ; Lost Colonists and, , ; at Pomeiooc, ; searches for Wanchese, ; taunted by Moratucs, ; travels with English, –, –; understanding of English, , ; visits Croatoan, –; visits England, – Manteo (town, N.C.), xvi Masioming,  Massawatoc,  Mattamuskeet Indian settlement: colonists attacked by, –; dispossession of, –; enslavement of, –; Hatteras survivors at, –; population decline, ; poverty of, –; racism faced by, ; Roanoke Indians at, ; women,  Mattamuskeet Lake,  McMillan, Hamilton,  Meherrins,  Menatoan, Croatoan weroance, killing of,  Menatonon: alliance sought by, , ; authority of, , ; as Lane’s hostage, –; Lost Colonists sheltered by, –; power of, ; ransom paid by, ; Skiko’s assistance to, – Middle Woodland Period,  Miller, Lee, n; on Secotan identity, n Milner, George, on Algonquian warfare, n Montoac: amorality of, –, ; and Chesapeake Indians, –; disease and, , ; English trade and, –, –, ; English understanding of, ; importance of, –, , , ,  Moratucs: attack Lane’s party, –; and Pemisapan’s conspiracy, , –; territory invaded by Lane, –



Index

Morison, Samuel Eliot, Dare Stones authenticated by, – Mount Pleasant peoples,  Nansemonds,  Narragansett Indians, – National Park Service, n Norman, Henry,  Nottoways,  Nugent, Edward, xiii–xiv, xvi, , , ; murders Pemisapan, ,  Ocanahanon, Lost Colonists at, ,  Okisco: authority of, ; Lost Colonists, and –; loyalty to Menatonon, , , ; opponents of, ; submits to English, , ; weakness of, – Opechancanough,  Opossians,  Orinoco River,  Osocan, ,  Ossomocomuck: bounds of, ; creation of, –; disease ravages, ; drought conditions in, ; early exploration of, –; effects of English settlement in, –, –, ; English arrival in, –, –; exchange in, ; fishing in, ; geography of, –, , ; Grenville’s arrival in, – ; Indian decline in, ; languages of, ; Lawson visits, ; localism in, ; Lost Colonists killed in, ; native leadership in, ; natives hide from Grenville, ; ossuary burial in, ; Pemisapan’s murder and, ; place names in, –; religious life in, –; rivalries in, ; warfare in, , , –, ,  Ossuaries, ,  Outer Banks. See Carolina Outer Banks Pamlico River,  Paquinquineo, slaughter of Jesuits by, , 

Paquippe, ,  Parliament, Ralegh’s patent confirmed by,  Paspahegh, ,  Pasquenoke,  Patawomeck Indians, creation stories of, – Pearce, Haywood, – Pearls, ,  Peccarecannick, –,  Pembroke (N.C.),  Pemisapan, ; abandons Roanoke Island, –; alleged plot against English, –, ; boasting by, –; enemies of, –; and Ensenore’s death, –; Ensenore’s influence over, –; hostility toward English, –; informants killed by, –; murder of, –, , ; significance of, –; warns Lane about Choanoacs, –. See also Wingina Penn, William,  Pequots,  Percy, George,  Percy, Henry, duke of Northumberland,  Phelps, David Sutton, n Piemacum, , , , – Pocahontas,  Pollock, Thomas, – Pomeiooc Indians, , ; relation with Aquascogoc, ; relations with Wingina, , ; ritual life, of, ; town of , –; visited by English, ; war with Secotan, ,  Popogusso, ,  Port Ferdinando,  Poteskeets, dispossession of – Powell, Nathaniel,  Powhatan Indians (of Virginia), , , ; name changes among, ; religious beliefs of, ,  Preston, Amias, n Privateering, 

Index Puerto Rico, – Pugh, Captain Little John,  Quinn, David Beers,  Quiyoughquohannocks,  Ralegh, Sir Walter, x, –; antiCatholicism of, , ; conviction of, ; execution of, ; in Guiana, –; imperial program of, xiii–xiv, , –, –, , –, –; Lost Colonists sought by, ; patent received by, ; promotional efforts of, –; supplies sent by, ; Weapemeoc submission to, ; Wingandacoa defined by,  Raleigh (Algonquian captive), – Rickahokinge,  Riley (slave),  Ritanoc,  Rituals: alliances and, ; of death, – ; effects of disease on, ; importance of, –, ; origins of,  Roanoke Indians, ; abandon Dasemunkepeuc, –; abandon Roanoke Island, –, ; alliance with English, –, –, ; alliance with Secotan, ; approach English, –; beliefs about English, –; clothing and ornamentation, –; creation story of, –; disease strikes, –, –, –; dispossession of, –; divisions of , –; English fed by, ; English rituals embraced by, –; English seek alliance with, ; English technology and, –; English welcomed by, , ; Europeans, early contact with, ; exchange networks of, ; fishing and, ; Harriot welcomed by, –; initial reaction to English, , ; meaning of English to, , ; problem with naming, ; religious life of, , –; revitalization movement among, n; trade with English, –, ; villages



of, xvi, , ; Wanchese sheltered by, ; war with Pomeioocs,  Roanoke Island: changing shape of, ; Lawson visits, ; place in American myth, ix–xvi; search for site of Lost Colony at, xv–xvi, ; sources for study of, xv; Wingina’s village on,  Roanoke Island,  reconnaissance expedition, xiv; attacked by Indians, ; council with Granganimeo, ; departure of, –; English arrival, –, –; exchange at, –; Ralegh’s patent and, –; Roanoke Island visited by, – Roanoke Island,  colony, xiv; abandonment of, –; Aquascogoc attacked by, –; arrival of, , ; Chesapeake outpost, –; Dasemunkepeuc attacked by, –; disease at, –; effects of, , –; English plans for, –; Ensenore’s death and, ; failure of, –; Grenville’s explorations at, –; Harriot’s work with Algonquians at, –; Lane’s Choanoac expedition, –; Pemisapan’s abandonment of, , ; philosophy of warfare at, ; plot against, –; provisions ruined, –, , ; removal to Mattamuskeet, –; Roanoke River expedition from, –; setters at, ; violence of, ; Wanchese abandons, –; Weapemeoc submission to, –; Wingina’s invitation to, , ; wreck of the Tyger at,  Roanoke Island,  colony, xiv; Algonquian hostility toward, –; arrival of, –; Dasemunkepeuc attacked by, –; death of Howe, –; expedition to Croatoan, ; Lost Colonists of, ; plans for relocation of, ; separatism at, , n; type of colonists sought, ; Virginia Dare born at, ;



Index

White’s departure from, ; White’s search for,  Roanoke Island,  voyage, and search for Lost Colonists, – Roanoke Island, Grenville’s Party at, –: attacked and killed, –; sought by White,  Roanoke Island Historical Association, commemoration efforts of, x Roanoke Island Memorial Association, ix; monument erected by, x Roanoke River,  Robeson County (N.C.),  Roebuck (ship),  Rowse, A. L.,  Ruize, Alonso,  St. Augustine, ,  Sand Banks,  Santo Domingo,  Saponis,  Secotan Indians, , , ; identity of, ; relations with Aquascogoc, ; relations with Wingina, ; support for Wanchese, ; war with Pomeioocs, –; visited by English, ; White’s depiction of, –,  Shallowbag Bay,  Shamans, – Sicklemore, Michael,  Skicoak, English settlement at, ,  Skiko: information given about Pemisapan, –; possible execution of, –; ransom paid for, ; taken hostage by Lane, , ; use of English power by, – Slavery, and Algonquians, – Smith, John, ; Chesapeake Indians and, ; Chowan River explored by, –; Eastern Shore Indians and, –; Lost Colonists sought by, –, –; Powhatan gender roles of by, ; Powhatan seasons of by, –; rituals observed by, ; subsistence routines of by, 

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,  Spain: activity in Ossomocomuck, –; Armada, , ; brutality in America, –; fate of Lost Colonists and, –; interest in Roanoke ventures, –, – Spangenberg, August Gottlieb,  Speck, Frank, ,  Spencer, Thomas,  Squires, Charles, John, Joshua, Timothy, – Stafford, Edward,  Stevenson, William,  Stow, John,  Strachey, William, ; Algonquian women described by, ; creation myths recorded by, ; fate of Lost Colonists, , –; houses described by, ; religion recorded by, – Stukely, Thomas,  Tanaquiny,  Tarraquine,  Tetepano,  Tillitt site,  Thames River, – Tobacco,  Todkill, Anas,  Tripanicks,  Turner, Frederick Jackson, frontier thesis of, xii Tuscaroras, ; Lawson killed by, –; Lost Colonists among, –; war with English colonists, –, –, – Tutelos,  Tyger (ship), , , wreck of, , , ,  Villalobos, Francisco Marques de, ,  Virginia Company of London,  Von Wedel, Leopold, 

Index Wahunsonacock, –, , ; Lost Colonists killed by, , , , ; manner of warfare, ; rivalry with Chesapeake Indians, ; wealth of,  Wanchese, ; abandons Dasemunkepeuc, –; abandons English, –; aboard Tyger, ; attacked by English, –; attacks Grenville’s party, –; fears return of English, ; flees from English, ; followers kill Howe, , ; hostility toward English, , –, , , , , –; understanding of English, , ; visits England, – Wanchese (N.C.), Town,  Warfare, Algonquian manner of,  Warraskoyacks, ,  Waterside Theater, n Weapemeoc Indians, , ; attacked by Amadas, ; dispossession of, –; divisions within community, –; Lost Colonists among, –; Pemisapan’s conspiracy and, –, ; towns of, , , ; submission to English authority, –, ,  Weeks, Stephen B.,  Weroances: appearance of, ; powers of, –, , , , respect for after death,  West, George,  White Doe legend, – White, John, xiv, , ; attacks Dasemunkepeuc, –; at Chesapeake outpost, ; expedition to Croatoan, –; and fate of Grenville’s party, –, –; as governor, –; Indian potential recognized by, –; Lost Colonists sought by, –, ; paintings by, , –, , , –; pettiness of, –;



plans for  colony, ; relocation of Lost Colonists and, ; return to England, –; returns to Roanoke in , –; settles Roanoke, –; voyage in ,  Williams, Roger,  Williams, Talcott,  Wingandacoa,  Wingina, , , , ; alliance with Croatoans, ; authority over neighbors, , , , ; becomes Pemisapan, ; beliefs about disease, –; challenges faced by, , ; enemies attacked by English, –; English alliance sought by, –; English diseases observed by, -; English power respected by, –; English watched by, , ; Europeans, early contacts with, –; followers of, ; murder of, xiii, xv; Paquinquineo, knowledge of, ; power of English respected by, ; prays to English God, ; reconnaissance voyage and, –; relations with Pomeiooc, , ; religious advisers of, –; responsibilities as weroance, –, , –, ; rivalry with Choanoacs, ; travels with English, –; Wanchese sheltered by, –; wives, ; wounds suffered by, . See also Pemisapan Winston, Francis, xii Wococon, , ,  Women, Algonquian: agriculture and, ; captured by Amadas, ; clothing, –; diplomatic role of, , ; life expectancy,  Wowinchopunk, – Yeardley, Francis, – Yeopim Indians: disappearance of, –; dispossession of, –

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           

I have been thinking and writing about Roanoke for more than a decade, but it was not until the summer of  that I decided to write a book about the native peoples who first encountered Sir Walter Ralegh’s colonists and, in the end, determined their fate. Numerous books on the attempts to plant an English settlement at Roanoke Island exist, some written for a popular audience and some more scholarly in tone, but none of them, to my mind, adequately place the Algonquian peoples of the Carolina Outer Banks—a region the native peoples called Ossomocomuck—at the center of the story. This seems to me a shame, and a missed opportunity, for Roanoke always has struck me as much more a Native American than an Anglo-American story. This book is at heart the story of the killing of one Indian leader, a long time ago, along the North Carolina coast, and the consequences of that violent act. It is a story based on numerous assumptions. The evidence remaining from Ralegh’s Roanoke ventures is surprisingly rich, but even a close reading of the surviving documents, reports, and narratives leaves the historian of the region’s Algonquian people trying to fill in many blanks. In writing about the killing of an Indian, and its consequences, I have felt compelled to speculate, to imagine how the native peoples of Ossomocomuck understood the changes that English settlement produced. Writing this book has forced me to think about what it is we can know about the Native American past, and how far the historian can and should go in his or her effort to reconstruct and imagine a history that is recorded only in fragments in the documents on which all of us rely. 



Acknowledgments

Writing this book also has allowed me to reflect on the meaning of historical events. Like many historians, I suspect, I have at times asked my students to explain the significance of this or that person, place, or thing on their examinations. Ralegh’s ventures and the story of the Lost Colonists are almost always described briefly in the textbooks publishers produce for high school and college students, but the murder and beheading of the Indian leader with whom these English settlers interacted goes without mention, even though it surely affected the lives of his people and, I suggest in the pages that follow, Sir Walter’s dream of establishing an AngloAmerican empire. We make choices about the stories we want to tell, and in this book I have tried to turn a familiar tale around, and examine how Indians on the Carolina Outer Banks understood the significance of a number of small but critical events in a fashion very different from the English writers who recorded them. So many people helped me sort out and think through the issues raised in telling such a story as this. A long conversation with Mary Mapes provided me with insights that have informed this project in so many ways. Susan Ferentinos of the Organization of American Historians invited me to join her and two other scholars as part of a team tasked with offering the National Park Service suggestions on how to update and improve interpretive programs and the visitors’ experience at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. The time spent on Roanoke Island convinced me that a book placing native peoples at the center of the story was needed, and this project has benefited from the conversations I had with Susan and my two colleagues at Fort Raleigh, Lindley Butler and Tom Beaman. While on Roanoke Island I met Doug Stover, the National Park Service historian at the Fort Raleigh National Historic site. Doug and his immensely dedicated and talented colleagues showed me a side of Roanoke that I had not seen before, and I am sure this book is better for it. Numerous other friends and colleagues have helped in ways small and large. I am fortunate to teach in an extremely collegial and supportive history department at SUNY-Geneseo. David Tamarin, Kathy Mapes, Jordan Kleiman, Jim Williams, Bill Cook, Carol Faulkner, Meg Stolee, and Bill Gohlman all listened to my ideas, while Joe Cope offered suggestions on where to find answers to many of my questions about sixteenth-century England. Harriet Sleggs runs a truly outstanding interlibrary loan department at Geneseo’s Milne Library, making it possible for a historian living in Rochester to write about Indians on the Carolina coast. SUNY-Geneseo

Acknowledgments



provided financial support for my research travel, a flexible evening schedule in the fall of  that gave me days uninterrupted for writing, and a generous sabbatical that allowed me to complete the manuscript. Charles Ewen of East Carolina University took time out of his schedule to educate me about recent archaeological work on the Outer Banks, and Charles Heath, now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, helped me understand the issues involved in interpreting the significance of the gold signet ring found near Buxton on Hatteras Island several years ago. Peter Mancall, Jon Parmenter, and Daniel Richter all read the manuscript and improved it greatly by their comments and suggestions. Stephen Saunders Webb also listened to my thoughts about Roanoke, and allowed me to try out an early chapter on the students in his early American history seminar at Syracuse University. Ed Ragan, one of Steve’s most recent students, shared with me his knowledge of the Powhatan chiefdom. All of them helped to make this a better book. So did Bob Lockhart at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Bob and his colleagues at Penn were always ready with support and advice, and I have benefited immensely from the time and energy they have devoted to this project. My family have tolerated the long hours and erratic habits that writing a book requires, and their support has enabled me to complete it. I have thought about my family—Leticia, Nathan, Adam, Eliana, and Adriana— often as I have worked on this book, for they have taught me well that the most significant events in our own lives are not those that we ask our students to recall, or that are recorded in the books written by historians, but those that affect us and those we love. We are all richer for remembering these events.