Shortly after the hurricane surge, therefore, the relatively few English survivors could have been scattered at distant locations. Those on the Outer Banks would have remained with the friendly Croatoans, while the mainland survivors may have been hopelessly separated and eventually integrated with other coastal tribal groups. The surviving colonists and Indians at Croatoan would have migrated to the mainland, at least temporarily, until their fields on the Outer Banks could be planted again. What became of this mixed group is open to speculation. Some may have migrated up the Neuse River, as the “Legend of the Coharie” claims, and then continued along the coast to the south. Any surviving Lost Colonists in this group would have become well integrated with the Croatoans, and in time there could have been mixed offspring among them. Eventually a number of Croatoans would return to the Outer Banks. Perhaps a few of them were young, first generation mixed offspring, ancestors of those Hatteras Indians who a century later would tell John Lawson about their ancestral claims to Raleigh’s colonists.
It is certainly possible that a few of the original adult Lost Colony hurricane survivors were still alive by 1600. If any of the eleven original English children survived the 1589 surge, they would most likely be alive by 1600 and now be grown to young adulthood. If the two-year-olds, Virginia Dare and the unnamed Harvie child, did not perish with those on the pinnace, it seems doubtful that they could have lived through the hurricane surge. If they did survive, they would have been thirteen years old by 1600. Any of the eleven original children who still lived would now have spent half their lives in Virginia, and through integration with the native peoples, their English “identities” would have been significantly erased. It is also very possible that, after more than a decade of integration, there could have been admixed English/Indian offspring from them as well. Given the matriarchal structure of many Algonquian tribes, including the Croatoans, these mixed offspring would be raised as native tribal members by the women.
According to the “Legend of the Coharie” a few of those original surviving colonists had lived through the 1589 tidal surge and the sickness that ensued, as well as the skirmish with the Tuscarora along the Neuse River. The legend names young George Howe, Jr., whose father had been killed by Indians at Roanoke on July 28, 1587, as a prominent survivor. George Howe, Jr., would have been in his twenties by 1600. This small group of surviving colonists and Indians, the legend claims, dwelt along the mainland coast south of the Neuse–Coree territory—for a number of years and slowly migrated southward towards Cape Fear. As discussed previously, there is reason to believe that the colonists’ mainland settlement in 1588 was located in present-day Carteret, Pamlico, or Beaufort counties. A Croatoan/Coree alliance would have provided a safe corridor through Coree territory for the migrating group and also could explain James Sprunt’s observation that the Cape Fear Coree had knowledge of the colonists more than two generations later.
Events occurred in 1602 and 1603 which could provide support, however slight, for the scenario that the Indians at Cape Fear may have known about the surviving Lost Colonists and what happened to them. By about 1600 Raleigh’s attention had returned at least temporarily to Virginia. He may have been planning another expedition to America at this time, but nothing apparently came of it until 1602, when he dispatched Samuel Mace on a voyage to America with a twofold mission. The primary mission seems to have been commercial. Mace was to collect enough natural commodities such as sassafras and china root as well as whatever marketable items could be obtained through trade with the local Indians to make the expedition commercially profitable. Mace was also instructed to proceed farther up the coast towards Hatarask, the inlet at Roanoke, to locate possible survivors of the 1587 colony, who had by that time been missing for fifteen years.
Mace apparently sailed up the Atlantic coast to a point “fortie leagues to the Southwestward of Hatarask, in thirtie-foure degrees or thereabout,”3 which would indicate that he reached Cape Fear. (The town of Southport, North Carolina, near the mouth of the Cape Fear River, is located at 33.9244 degrees north latitude.) Interestingly, Mace spent an entire month in that area accumulating the marketable plants, as well as commodities traded from the Indians to cover Raleigh’s expenses for the voyage, but he made no attempt to continue north, as instructed, in search of survivors of the 1587 colony. According to what little information is available, bad weather was said to have been the reason for his failure to search farther north.
It is not known whether Samuel Mace brought back any information concerning the Lost Colonists from his 1602 voyage, but the following year Raleigh commissioned two ships commanded by Bartholomew Gilbert and Samuel Mace with the expressed intention of searching for the 1587 colonists. Gilbert apparently went ashore near the entrance to the Chesapeake, but was attacked and killed by Indians, and the remainder of his crew, consisting of just eleven men, returned to England in September. Nothing is known about the 1603 Samuel Mace voyage. Queen Elizabeth had died on March 24, 1603, and by the time Mace returned to England, Raleigh had been arrested for treason and had been imprisoned in the Tower of London since July 19. The Gilbert-Mace voyage was the last that Raleigh commissioned to Virginia.
Quinn speculated that Mace’s 1603 voyage may have turned up valuable information concerning the survivors of the 1587 colony and their whereabouts. His hypothesis was based on the circulation of printed material in London at about this time containing references to survivors of the colony “weakly planted” among the Indians and producing mixed English-Indian offspring. The first reference was in George Weymouth’s treatise to King James I which advocated the establishment of towns in America “in those parts thereof which long have been in possession of our English nation … but weakly planted with the English and they more weakly defended from the invasions of the heathen amongst whom they dwell.”4
The second reference was the play Eastward Hoe, written about 1604, which contained the following lines about settling in America: “A whole Country of English is there … bred by those that were left there…. They have married with the Indians and make them bring forth as beautiful faces as any have in England….”5 Quinn logically concluded that these two references would have made no sense either to King James or to London audiences unless information about Lost Colonists dwelling among the Indians had been widely circulated previously.
Quinn decided that Mace must have obtained the information during the 1603 voyage, about which—as mentioned—nothing is known. It is important to recall, however, that Quinn was a firm believer in the theory—now refuted—that all or most of the 1587 colony settled at the Chesapeake Bay after abandoning Roanoke. Therefore, Quinn incorrectly assumed that the information about the colonists could not have been acquired during the 1602 voyage, since it is known that Mace ventured no farther north than Cape Fear, some 240 miles short of the Chesapeake Bay.
It is suggested here that the information about survivors and offspring may have come from Mace’s 1602 voyage. During the month Mace spent in the Cape Fear area, it is certain that he traded and interacted with the coastal Indians, possibly Sprunt’s Corees, and could have learned from them that survivors of the English colony and their mixed offspring were living among a group of Hatteras Indians. Perhaps Mace even returned with stories about the “beautiful faces … bred by those that were left there” fifteen years earlier. This conclusion might also provide a plausible explanation for the fact that Mace spent an entire month in the Cape Fear area in 1602 and made no attempt to venture farther north in search of the colonists. If he learned that nothing remained of the 1587 colony but admixed offspring, he may have decided that any further search was pointless.
In 1605 another reference to the Lost Colony surfaced from an unusual Anglo-French commercial venture, which was commissioned to establish trade contacts along the entire Atlantic coast from the Spanish-claimed territories to present-day Maine. The expedition was backed by a merchant in London, Pierre Beauvoir, and led by John Jerome and Bertrand Rocque. It
consisted of two vessels, the Castor and Pollux and a pinnace, and a mixed English and French crew. There was also a physician/herbalist aboard to examine and collect medicinal herbs. They were instructed to proceed to Trinidad to acquire tobacco and then sail up the Atlantic coast to Croatoan where it was hoped they could make contact with some of the 1587 colonists, who might assist them in finding medicinal plants and especially milkweed, which was believed to be a valuable source of textile fiber.6
The intended stopover at Croatoan seems to indicate that in 1605 it was thought that some of the 1587 colonists were still alive and that they—or information about them—could be found at Croatoan. The source of their evidence about the Lost Colonists and Croatoan is not known, however, and it is possible that it came from White’s account of his 1590 voyage, which by this time had been published by Hakluyt. As shown previously, Croatoan was uninhabited in 1590 as a result of the effects of the hurricane the previous year, but it is almost a certainty that Croatoan would have been reoccupied again by 1605. Whether any of the 1587 colonists could have been among those occupants is impossible to say.
The Castor and Pollux sailed on to St. Helena Sound—formerly Santa Elena—and began trading with the Indians there, while the pinnace lagged behind and was attacked by Indians at Guale, present-day Cumberland Island, Georgia. Captain Jerome and his pilot were killed, two others captured, and the remaining four escaped aboard the pinnace and caught up to Rocque at St. Helena Sound. The Spanish, however, had been alerted to their presence and in March, Spanish ships under Francisco Fernández de Écija captured the Castor and Pollux and the pinnace in St. Helena Sound and imprisoned the crew. Three of the captives, including Rocque, were interrogated and they told the Spanish that they did not know how many Englishmen might be found at Croatoan, but that they were sent by another Englishman named Walter Raleigh and came to settle fifteen (actually eighteen) years ago.7
Based on the information obtained from the interrogations, Florida Governor Pedro de Ybarra dispatched Francisco Fernández de Écija to search for the English alleged to be at Croatoan. His search of the coast started at Santa Elena near present-day Parris Island in Port Royal Sound, South Carolina. From there he proceeded northward perhaps as far as Cape Fear, but he was unable to continue and turned back to St. Augustine.
With the death of Queen Elizabeth, Raleigh’s fortunes changed dramatically. Accused of plotting against the new monarch, James I, Raleigh was tried and convicted of treason and would spend the next thirteen years in the Tower. His rights of discovery in Virginia reverted to the crown, but some of his former friends, particularly Thomas Smyth and Richard Hakluyt, would be associated with what was to become the first permanent English colony in America. London and Bristol merchants and investors, including Smyth and Hakluyt, petitioned and were granted a royal charter to colonize between 34 and 41 degrees north latitude, which was referred to as “South Virginia.” A Plymouth group, including Humphrey Gilbert’s sons and Raleigh’s adversary John Popham, who had presided as chief justice over the treason trial, received a charter for the territory between 38 and 45 north latitude, known as “North Virginia.” The Plymouth Company got a head start and attempted to establish a trading settlement on the Kennebec River in present-day Maine, but it soon failed. Nothing further was accomplished by the Plymouth Company until 1620 when the permanent colony was settled at present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts. In late 1606 the London Company sent three ships and more than 100 colonists to South Virginia under the command of Christopher Newport and Bartholomew Gosnold, and they would established a permanent settlement on the James River.
The Spanish had been worried about an English settlement to the north for two decades, and they had conducted a number of unsuccessful searches for it. Francisco Fernández de Écija, who had searched for English colonists in 1605, would finally locate the English colony. That would not happen until several years later, however, and the colony he discovered was Jamestown.
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PART II: THE JAMESTOWN INTELLIGENCE
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13
John Smith’s A True Relation and the “Zúñiga Map”
1607–1608
It was not until the Jamestown settlement was established in 1607, a full twenty years after John White bade farewell to his colonists at Roanoke, that the next serious attempts were undertaken by the English to find out what happened to the 1587 colony. The Jamestown leaders had been instructed to acquire information about the Lost Colonists, and these efforts resulted in some tantalizing—but misunderstood—reports about the colonists’ location and fate. The most definitive revelations were reported by two sources: Captain John Smith, one of the principals among the 104 original colonists who established the Jamestown settlement on May 16, 1607, and William Strachey, who would become Secretary of the Jamestown colony in 1610. Unfortunately, both Smith and Strachey thoroughly misinterpreted the information they obtained, and their errors would obstruct any real progress in the search for the truth about the Lost Colony for more than four centuries.
Smith had been a controversial figure during the voyage to the Chesapeake, where he arrived in shackles and accused of mutiny. However, the London-based Virginia Company, which sponsored the colonization expedition through a charter obtained from King James I, had enough faith in Smith’s abilities to name him in a sealed letter as one of the seven council members to govern the Jamestown colony. There is little doubt that Smith proved to be an effective leader without whom the colony might not have survived. On September 10, 1607, Smith and other council members voted Edward Maria Wingfield out of office as president of the colony, and installed John Ratcliff in his place. Smith was made cape merchant, responsible for obtaining food from the Indians through trade, negotiations, or coercion if necessary.
It was during an early encounter with these Powhatan Indians that Smith heard what he believed to be the first news about the Lost Colonists. In December of 1607 Smith and two others were attacked by natives led by Opechancanough, younger brother of Wahunsunacock, as they traveled up the Chickahominy River, a northern tributary of the James River. Smith was spared, possibly because the Indians believed he was an important weroance or chief, but the other Englishmen were slain. The Indians conducted Smith to the village of Rasawrack, where he was fed and treated quite well by Opechancanough, who told Smith “what he knew of the dominions” and “of certaine men cloathed at a place called Ocanahonan, cloathed like me.”1 These, Smith concluded, could be none other than the lost 1587 colonists.
Smith was then taken to the village of Werowocomoco, the political center of the Powhatan chiefdom, where Wahunsunacock, whom the English would thereafter call “Powhatan,” resided. Wahunsunacock also related some remarkable information to Smith about distant places where “there were people with short Coates, and Sleeves to the Elbowes, that passed that way in Shippes like ours…. The people cloathed at Ocamahowan, he also confirmed…. He described a countrie called Anone, where they have abundance of Brasse, and houses walled as ours.”2 Shortly after Smith’s return to Jamestown in early January 1608, he and Captain Newport “agreed with the king of Paspahegh, to conduct two of our men to a place called Panawicke beyond Roonok, where he reported many men to be apparelled.”3 Smith recorded all these experiences, as well as the information he had obtained, in a lengthy letter which would later be published without his authorization under the title of A True Relation.
In July of 1608 a packet containing Smith’s letter arrived from Jamestown “to a worshipfull friend” in England. The letter contained Smith’s account of the first year of the Jamestown colony, including his month-long captivity in December and January, and the supposed references to the 1587 colonists. The narrative was accompanied by a roughly drawn and geographically confusing map of the regions surrounding Jamestown. Three notations on this map—which has come to be called the “Zúñiga Map” after the Spanish ambassador who managed to obtain it—contained references to the information Smith had learned a
bout the lost 1587 colonists, and these have given rise to considerable speculation about the colonists’ whereabouts ever since the map was rediscovered and finally published in 1890.
Although John Smith probably did not actually draw the map, he clearly had a role in its production, since it illustrated his movements during his captivity in 1607–08 and identified many of the Indian villages he mentioned in his account. The map, along with Smith’s manuscript, came to England aboard the Phoenix with Captains Francis Nelson and John Martin in June 1608. The map and manuscript generated considerable excitement in London, but not, it seems, because of the potential Lost Colony references. About a month earlier Christopher Newport had arrived in England with the first delivery of letters and reports from the fledgling settlement of Jamestown. These first reports were not particularly encouraging. The lukewarm attitude in London about the new colony is illustrated by a letter from Sir Dudley Carleton, to John Chamberlain, in which he summarized the content of the letters from Jamestown:
They write much commendations of the air and the soil and the commodities of it; but silver and gold have they none, and they cannot yet be at peace with the inhabitants of the countrie. They have fortified themselfs and built a small towne which they call Jamestowne, and so they date theyr letters, but the towne me thincks hath no gracefull name….4
That perception changed quickly after the arrival of the Phoenix. Martin, who most likely drew the map, brought news about a gold mine he had heard about from the Powhatan Indians. The mine was to be found far up the James River,5 which is drawn in detail and highlighted on the Zúñiga Map, and is perhaps a good indication that Martin was its author. The primary importance of the map, at least in the eyes of Newport and Martin, was apparently not the possible references to the Lost Colony, but rather the gold which was four or five days up the James into the territory of the Monacans. Adding to the allure of the upper James River was the possibility that the elusive passage to the South Sea could also be found there. Smith had written in his letter “that within 4 or 5 daies journey of the falles was a great turning of salt water.” These developments hastened Newport’s return to Jamestown, loaded with gifts for Powhatan, who hopefully would be persuaded to provide guides in the exploration up the James River.
The Lost Colony of Roanoke Page 18
