Moreover, from the very first voyage to Jamestown in 1607, ships from England had avoided the old route of the earlier Roanoke expeditions which took them along the coast near Cape Fear, Croatoan, and Roanoke. George Percy, one of the original Jamestown settlers and future president of the colony, provided the most detailed account of the 1607 voyage: The ships did make the traditional stop at Dominica in the Caribbean, and replenished supplies at several islands, but upon reaching Puerto Rico they veered directly north instead of following the old north-westerly heading which continued to the Bahama island chain and then north along the coast to Cape Fear.
Once they left Puerto Rico, the 1607 Jamestown voyagers remained far out to sea and did not make landfall again until they “descried the Land of Virginia [and] the same day wee entred into the Bay of Chesupioc directly.”13 After Jamestown was established, ships from England started following an even more direct course across the Atlantic, avoiding the Caribbean altogether by sailing west from the Azores to Bermuda and then west again from there directly to the mouth of the Chesapeake.
It is very possible, then, that the Indians at Croatoan and Roanoke had not seen an English ship draw near those locations for two decades, not until what appeared to be an English vessel approached Croatoan on July 20, 1609. A twenty-two year wait would explain their enthusiastic attempt to make contact with Écija’s disguised ship. One is reminded of John Lawson’s comment about images of “Sir Walter Raleigh’s Ship” that these Croatoan/Hatteras Indians still imagined a century later.14
It is significant, too, that when the Indians called out to the ship on both July 20 and 23 and the replies came back in Spanish, they immediately retreated in fear. It is logical to conclude that if the Indians thought Écija’s ship was English, then they would have expected the replies to be in English, and it follows, then, that they had some familiarity with the English language in 1609. Although Manteo in particular had interacted with all the Roanoke voyages, the Indians’ determined effort more than two decades later to contact what they thought was an English ship, as well as their apparent ability to distinguish between English and Spanish, suggests perhaps a more recent affiliation with Englishmen. It also raises the possibility that these Indians may have had some important information to impart about the 1587 English colonists.
That possibility is further supported by what immediately followed the Indians’ initial retreat on both occasions. They began playing musical tunes upon—what to Écija sounded like—pipes or flutes. This highly unusual activity, somewhat confusing to the Spanish, could have been an attempt to mimic English tunes and intended to identify themselves as friends and companions of the English. The ability to imitate English tunes in 1609 is additional evidence of a past association with English colonists. Interestingly, John White had used a similar musical tactic in 1590 when he tried to announce his arrival to his colony, thought to be at Roanoke: As they rowed towards the island the men “sounded with a trumpet a Call, and afterwardes many familiar English tunes and Songs.”15
Since the second attempt to contact Écija’s ship was made on the beach opposite Roanoke, it is possible that by 1609 the Croatoan tribe had also occupied Roanoke and perhaps Dasamonguepeuk as well. John Lawson wrote in his 1709 A New Voyage to Carolina that the Croatoans, by his time called Hatteras Indians, “either then lived on Ronoak-Island, or much frequented it.”16 Manteo, it will be recalled, “by the commandement of Sir Walter Ralegh, was christened in Roanoak, and called Lord thereof, and of Dasamonguepeuk, in reward of his faithfull seruices.”17 A few 17th century maps also had the Dasamonguepeuk location labeled “Croatoan.”
It is tempting to theorize from this that some of the original colonists may have been alive and in the vicinity of Croatoan or Roanoke on July 20 and 23, 1609, but that is improbable. An equally enticing but still unlikely scenario is that one or two of the eleven English children from Roanoke—the original nine plus Virginia Dare and the Harvie child—now grown to adulthood, may have dwelt among the Croatoans. It is more likely that mixed descendants of the colonists and Indians could have been among those attempting to contact Écija’s ship. What is certain is that the Spanish regarded these peculiar contacts at Croatoan and Roanoke as curiosities, not vital to their mission, and whatever first-hand information these Indians may have possessed about the 1587 colony was lost forever.
At the same time Écija was searching for the English in July of 1609, John Smith and the Jamestown colonists were awaiting the arrival of the flagship of the “third supply,” which carried the instructions for the punishment of Chief Powhatan and his priests for his supposed slaughter of the 1587 colony. The Sea Venture was wrecked off Bermuda and the planned retribution was not carried out. Up to this time three searches for the Lost Colonists had been conducted from Jamestown, but, as noted, the most promising one to Pananiock “returned within three or foure dayes after, without going further.” It is ironic that, based on the Indian reaction to Écija’s ship at Croatoan and Roanoke, credible information about the plight of the Lost Colonists may have been readily available not very far to the south of Jamestown.
18
William Strachey and the “Slaughter at Roanoke”
1609–1611
The Fourth Institutionalized Assumption
On July 29, 1609, having been separated from the rest of the “third supply” and about to be sunk in a hurricane, the Sea Venture—with William Strachey aboard—was intentionally grounded on a reef off what would later be called St. George’s on the Bermuda archipelago. All passengers managed to make it ashore, and in the next few days they were able to salvage most everything of importance and usefulness from the wrecked ship. As it turned out Bermuda provided an abundance of natural food sources—fresh water, wild hogs, fish, fowl, sea turtles—and perhaps most important, the archipelago was uninhabited, eliminating the ever-present threat of hostile Indians that plagued Jamestown.
Lookouts were stationed on the higher dunes and signal fires prepared, but no ships were sighted. Fortunately there were at least two shipwrights among the stranded colonists, and on August 28 Richard Frobisher began work on the construction of a pinnace. As mentioned previously in reference to the 1587 colony’s likely attempt to sail to Newfoundland, some objections were raised in 1609, particularly by a number of the more disgruntled colonists who feared they would be left behind. Consequently it was agreed that a second pinnace would be built so that all the colonists could make the 600-mile voyage to Jamestown. On May 2 the Deliverance and Patience sailed from Bermuda and arrived in just nineteen days at Point Comfort, a peninsula in the Chesapeake about thirty-five miles downriver from the colony at Jamestown. Upon their arrival at Jamestown they found a disheartening sight:
Viewing the fort, we found the palisadoes torn down, the ports open, the gates from off the hinges, and empty houses, which (the) owners’ death had taken from them, rent up and burnt, rather than the dwellers would step into the woods a stone’s cast off from them to fetch other firewood. And it is true the Indian killed as fast without, if our men stirred but beyond the bounds of their block¬house, as famine and pestilence did within, with many more particu¬larities of their sufferances brought upon them by their own disor¬ders the last year than I have heart to express…. In this desolation and misery our governor found the condition and state of the colony.1
It was soon decided that the situation at Jamestown was hopeless and that there was no other option left but to abandon the settlement and sail for the Newfoundland fisheries. On June 7 all the colonists headed down the James River aboard the four ships, the Discovery, the Virginia, the Deliverance, and the Patience, and it looked briefly like Jamestown would take its place among the failed English settlements. Before they reached Point Comfort, however, new governor Lord De La Warr arrived with 150 new colonists and much-needed supplies and everyone returned to Jamestown. De La Warr immediately instituted a reconstruction program, repairing and rebuilding Jamestown and erecting two more forts at the mo
uth of the James River. On June 13, 1610, he organized a governing council and made several key appointments, including “William Strachei, esquire, secretary and recorder.” More than a year after William Strachey had left London, he finally became Secretary of the Jamestown Colony.
Strachey’s early endeavors as Secretary, in addition to recording official business, were devoted to writing and revising the final draft of his True Reportory, an account of the hurricane and the subsequent events at Bermuda. Eventually his attention turned to what would be his major work, The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia. Two of Strachey’s Indian sources were Kemps and the aforementioned Machumps, and it was particularly from the latter that Strachey obtained a few perplexing bits and pieces of information about Powhatan’s alleged slaughter of the Lost Colony and possible English survivors. Strachey remained at Jamestown for a little more than a year, returning to England in September of 1611 and completing his Historie in 1612. Strachey’s Historie did not have an immediate impact on the established Powhatan–Lost Colony slaughter scenario which had been reported by John Smith to the Council in 1609, however, because Strachey’s manuscript remained unpublished for 237 years. In addition to Strachey’s own, there were only two copies of the manuscripts known to exist by 1849, one dedicated to Sir Francis Bacon and the other to Sir Allen Apsley.2
The Virginia Company may have declined to publish both Strachey’s True Reportory and his Historie because of his descriptions of discontent and mutinous activity at Bermuda and his occasionally unflattering portrayals of the leadership at Jamestown. He was also highly critical of the selection of the site for the settlement which he believed was
seated in somewhat an unwholesome and sickly air, by reason it is in a marish ground, low, flat to the river, and hath no fresh water springs serving the town but what we drew from a well six or seven fathom deep, fed by the brackish river oozing into it; from whence I verily believe the chief causes have proceeded of many diseases and sicknesses which have happened to our people, who are indeed strangely afflicted with fluxes and agues; and every particular season, by the relation of the old inhabitants, hath his particular infirmity too; all which, if it had been our fortunes to have seated upon some hill accommodated with fresh springs and clear air, as do the natives of the country, we might have, I believe, well escaped.3
Strachey’s Historie also competed with John Smith’s The Proceedings and Accidents of the English Colony in Virginia, which was published in 1612. It is interesting to note that Smith’s Proceedings made no mention of Powhatan’s slaughter, whereas Strachey’s account did contain the troubling slaughter references. The Virginia Company may have rejected Strachey’s Historie precisely because of those references, which would hardly encourage new settlers and investors had the dreadful news been made public. The Virginia Company did, in fact, publish a propaganda pamphlet later that year praising the wondrous benefits that could be had by those who would venture to Jamestown, but neglecting to mention, of course, the reported slaughter of an English colony. Strachey’s Historie was eventually published by the Hakluyt Society in 1849, by which time the fate of White’s Lost Colonists had been firmly rooted in the flawed Powhatan slaughter scenario for nearly two and a half centuries. The task of reconciling Strachey’s seemingly confusing statements with the established, but mistaken, Lost Colony doctrine was left to later authors and historians, who have struggled with it ever since.
As proposed earlier, the Powhatan–Lost Colony slaughter story was a myth based entirely on John Smith’s misinterpretation of a statement apparently made by Chief Powhatan concerning a slaughter that had nothing to do with the 1587 colony. The publication of Strachey’s Historie provided more details supposedly connected with the fate of the 1587 colony, but those details only further confused the long-standing and already misguided Powhatan–Lost Colony slaughter story. The failure to explain Strachey’s references satisfactorily has resulted in attempts by 19th and 20th century authors and historians either to sidestep or slant those references in order to have them comply with preconceived, long-standing theories about the colony’s fate. While these efforts resulted in many of the most widely accepted Lost Colony theories, virtually all have been based on a key distortion of Strachey’s assertion that the slaughter of the 1587 colony happened “at Roanoke.” That distortion, now generally glossed over, represents the fourth and final institutionalized assumption cited in the Preface.
Since all serious theories regarding the fate of the Lost Colony must ultimately confront the troublesome references in Strachey’s Historie, they are cited here:
Excerpt #1: …the men, women, and childrene of the first plantation at Roanoak were by practize and commandement of Powhatan (he himself perswaded thereunto by his priests) miserably slaughtered, without any offence given him either by the first planted (who twenty and od yeares had peaceably lyved intermixt with those salvages, and were out of his territory)….4
Excerpt #2: …Powhatan hath slaughtered so many of our nation without offence given, and such as were seated far from him, and in the territory of those weroances which did in no sort depend on him or acknowledge him….5
Excerpt #3: It is not long since that his priests told him how that from the Chesapeack Bay a nation should arise which should dissolve and give end to his empire, for which, not many yeares since … he destroyed and put to the sword all such who might lye under any doubtful construccion of the said prophesie, as all the inhabitants, the weroance and his subjects of that provinve, and so remaine all the Chessiopeians at this daye, and for this cause, extinct.6
Excerpt #4: …at Peccarecamek and Ochanahoen, by relation of Machumps, the people have howses built with stone walles, and one story above another, so taught them by those Englishe whoe escaped the slaughter at Roanoak, at what tyme this our colony under the conduct of Captain Newport, landed within Chesapeake Bay, where the people breed up tame turkeis about their howses, and take apes [metal] in the mountains, and where, at Ritanoe, the weroance Eyanoco preserved seven of the English alive—fower men, two boyes, and one yonge mayde (who escaped and fled up the river of Chanoke), to beat his copper of which he hath certaine mynes at the said Ritanoc, as also at Pamawauk are said to be store of salt stones.7
Excerpt #5: …southwest to Anoeg … whose howses are built as ours, ten daies distant from us….8
Excerpt #6: …he [Powhatan] doth often send unto us to temporize with us, awaiting perhaps a fit opportunity (inflamed by his furious and bloudy priests) to offer us a tast of the same cuppe which he made our poore countrymen drink of at Roanoak….9
Excerpt #7: …and thus we will commune and entreate with them [the Powhatans], truck, and barter, our commodityes for theirs, and theirs for ours … in all love and friendship, untill, for our good purposes toward them, we shall find them practize violence or treason against us (as they have done to our other colony at Roanoak).10
All of the serious past and present narratives about fate of the Lost Colony have been based on Smith’s earlier references and these passages from Strachey, and they all are variations of the following scenario: The 1587 Roanoke colonists had been living peacefully for more than twenty years among a group of Indians, presumably the Chesapeake tribe beyond Powhatan’s domain, when they were massacred. Powhatan himself directed the slaughter because of prophesies by his priests about a danger that would arise from the Chesapeake Bay, and the slaughter took place about the same time that Christopher Newport arrived at the Chesapeake Bay with the Jamestown colony on April 26, 1607. Powhatan exterminated the Chesapeake Indians and the 1587 colonists. Finally, and most perplexing, Strachey claimed that the slaughter of the colonists occurred “at Roanoke” and that several colonists survived “the slaughter at Roanoke” and escaped to various places he called Peccarecamek (Pakrakanick) and Ochanahoen (Ocanahonan), and perhaps Anoeg, where they taught the Indians how to build English-style houses.
One of the most notable historians to tackle Strachey’s Lost Colony reference
s was the previously cited David Beers Quinn (1909–2002). His overall efforts, particularly on the Roanoke voyages, provided an unparalleled body of work which set the standard for late–20th century Lost Colony research. Quinn was not without his critics however. Among those was his contemporary, North Carolina historian Thomas C. Parramore (1932–2004). Both Quinn and Parramore grappled with William Strachey’s difficult references, and their conclusions represent divergent schools of thought in Lost Colony theory. Their work has influenced virtually every author and historian in this field over many decades, and it is fair to say that effectively all serious Lost Colony theories today have been inspired in one way or another by the analyses of Quinn and Parramore. Since mainstream Lost Colony theory owes so much to the earlier work by these two historians, it will be helpful to see just how they explained Strachey’s references.
Quinn approached Strachey’s Historie as an essentially credible source and believed Strachey to be “thoroughly reliable and conscientious in what he wrote.”11 Quinn acknowledged that it would have been impossible for Strachey to verify everything he wrote, but that Strachey’s statements “were based on the best information he could obtain.”12 As mentioned previously, Quinn was a proponent of the now-refuted theory that most of the 1587 colonists must have traveled north to the Chesapeake, their original destination, where they apparently settled among, and intermixed with, the Chesapeake Indians.
This scenario was compatible with excerpts 2 and 3 above, since the Chesapeake tribe inhabited the area to the east, just beyond Powhatan’s domain, and did not pay homage to him.13 Quinn speculated that the colonists may have settled among the Chesapeake Indians about fifteen miles along the Elizabeth River at Skicoac, where Englishmen—possibly including John White—had received a cordial reception during the previous 1585–86 Grenville-Lane expedition. There, Quinn proposed, the colonists lived and intermixed with the Indians for “twenty and od yeares,” as Strachey wrote, until April of 1607, when Powhatan ordered their slaughter. Quinn was incorrect, however, when he wrote, “Strachey alone indicates when the Lost Colonists were killed….”14 The Council’s 1609 instructions to Gates, written more than two years before Strachey started his Historie, noted that the slaughter happened “upon the first arrival of our [Jamestown] Colonie.” In any case, to support his theory Quinn used the previously cited notation from Samuel Purchas regarding the so-called “confession” Chief Powhatan made to Smith about his slaughter of the Lost Colony. For Quinn this piece of evidence was not only corroborated by Strachey’s assertions, but it also seemed to validate his own Lost Colony “Chesapeake” theory.
The Lost Colony of Roanoke Page 24
