The Lost Colony of Roanoke

by Fullam, Brandon

  The possible presence of colonists at Pananiock, coupled with the fact that the Powhatans had no contact with the 1587 colony, narrows down the earlier proposal that the colonists relocated to the mainland somewhere south of Roanoke in 1588. Parts of Beaufort, Craven, and Pamlico Counties would all overlap into the territory of Pananiock. A settlement location in that area might also help explain the legends and traditions about the Lost Colony which predominate in the southeastern part of North Carolina.

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  PART III: LOST COLONY SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS

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  21

  Survival Possibilities

  1612–1711

  A question not yet adequately addressed is the possibility of Lost Colony survivors into the early 17th century, and the likelihood of admixed descendants in the centuries beyond. It is difficult to make mortality estimates for the original 1587 colony, which presumably numbered 119 originally, excluding murdered George Howe, Sr., and including Virginia Dare and the Harvie child born on August 18 and 19 respectively, shortly after the arrival at Roanoke. What can be said with a fair amount of assurance is that under normal circumstances in England infants had about a 14 percent chance of not surviving a year and about a 30 percent chance of dying before age fifteen.1 William Strachey wrote that he was godfather to the appropriately named Bermuda Rolfe, the daughter of John and “Goody” (Sarah Hacker) Rolfe, born while the Sea Venture’s passengers were stranded at Bermuda. Although food was plentiful and the climate accommodating, the child lived only a few weeks and Goody died shortly after they reached Jamestown. The average life expectancy in Elizabethan England was said to be about forty-two years, but that number is somewhat skewed by the higher infant mortality rate. If we can guess that the adult colonists averaged thirty to thirty-five years of age in 1587 and allow them an extended fifty to fifty-five year lifespan, then they could be expected to live to between 1602 and 1612 under normal circumstances.

  These were not normal circumstances, however. A good number of the colonists were likely lost at sea in the failed attempt to reach Newfoundland in either 1588 or 1589. If they decided to build a second pinnace, a plausible scenario, they could not have sailed until 1589, in which case many more of the colonists would have perished, perhaps in the same hurricane that struck the Outer Banks in September and swept away the mainland settlement. That hurricane and surge would have inundated Croatoan and eradicated the coastal mainland settlement, possibly reducing the number of remaining colonists by at least fifty percent. By October 1589, there may have been only a handful or so of the colonists left alive.

  By 1612 John White’s colony had been missing for a quarter century, and, using the aforementioned estimate, it is questionable that any of the original adult colonists could still be alive. Virginia Dare and the Harvie child would have been twenty-five years old if they survived, but that is an unlikely proposition. If they were among a group that sailed for Newfoundland, they certainly had died, and if they remained behind, they would not likely have survived the hurricane surge as two-year-olds in 1589, assuming they overcame the fourteen percent infant mortality rate in the first place. There were eleven children among the original colonists, possibly between the ages of ten and fifteen. If any of these children survived, they would have been between thirty-five and forty years old in 1612. One of these was said to be the previously mentioned George Howe, Jr., son of George Howe who was killed by Wingina’s/Pemisapan’s followers shortly after the colony arrived at Roanoke.

  According to Ernest Bullard’s previously mentioned “Legend of the Coharie,” a mixed group of Indians, and one named colonist, George Howe, Jr., began a slow migration southward along the coast, beginning perhaps a year or two after the 1589 hurricane. It is difficult to evaluate much of the post–1589 legend, when the surviving group was said to have changed from its previously fixed agricultural make-up at Croatoan and the mainland settlement to one of a migratory nature. Mooney noted that migratory tribal groups “have short histories and as they seldom stopped long enough in one place to become identified with it, little importance was attached to their wanderings and little was recorded concerning them.”2

  Nevertheless, the legend claims that they eventually settled east of the Cape Fear River, where they lived for a long period, until white settlers began to arrive at the lower Cape Fear. Ernest Bullard suggested that these white settlers may have been the so-called Clarendon Colony, otherwise known as the “Yeamans Colony,” established by English settlers from Barbados in 1664. The legend goes on to claim that the admixed descendants of what Bullard refers to as “Manteo’s tribe” migrated farther inland “very much desiring peace and tranquility.” This passage, however, would appear to contradict the long-standing tradition of the Croatoan/Hatteras Indians regarding their affinity for the English. One would wonder why this group, supposedly including admixed descendants, would withdraw from Englishmen with whom they shared a traditional kinship.

  The Clarendon Colony was the last of three groups to arrive at the Cape Fear River between 1663 and 1664. In September 1663, Captain William Hilton had sailed from Barbados to examine the suitability of the Cape Fear River for settlement, and it was Hilton’s report that led to the establishment of the Clarendon Colony the following year. Earlier in 1663, however, a group of settlers from Massachusetts had entered the Cape Fear River and established themselves on the south bank about twenty miles from the river’s mouth. Relations with the local Indians quickly turned hostile. It is believed that these New Englanders took a number of Indian children and, under the pretense of teaching them the ways of civilization, sent them north to be sold into slavery. When the local Indians learned of this treachery, they attacked the settlement with such resolve that the New Englanders abandoned the area after only three months and sailed back to Massachusetts.

  If the Bullard legend is to be believed, this event could explain the fearful reaction of “Manteo’s tribe” to the English and their reason for migrating farther inland at that time. In that case the legend’s “colony of white people” may actually have been the Massachusetts settlers, and the migration inland would probably have begun prior to the arrival of both Hilton in October of 1663 and the Clarendon Colony in May of 1664. It is also noteworthy that none of the Indians Hilton encountered at the Cape Fear could speak English, and communication had to be accomplished through sign language. Hilton recorded only one word—“bonny”—which a few Indians repeated over and over as an indication of their good intentions, and Mooney regards this as a “reminiscence of previous contact with Spaniards.”3 After more than three generations of migration and assimilation, any surviving descendants of Lost Colonists would by this time have been fundamentally “Indian” in appearance, practice, and language.

  At some time after the arrival of white settlers the group is said to have migrated farther and farther inland, apparently following the Cape Fear River, until it reached the confluence of the Deep and Haw Rivers, tributaries of the Cape Fear. An unknown—but apparently considerable—number of years passed during this extended, gradual migration. What follows the arrival at the Deep and Haw Rivers in the Bullard legend is the first reference to a specific genealogical connection between this group and the Lost Colonists, and here the legend is at its weakest. The present-day “Haw” River, we are told, is actually a corruption of “Howe,” which the river was originally named in honor of George Howe III, grandson of Manteo. Four Howe generations are identified in the legend. George Howe, Jr. (referred to with the generational suffix “II” in the text) is said to have married one of Manteo’s daughters. The “Legend of the Coharie” ends in Sampson County, where in 1779 Enoch Hall, said to be a lineal descendant of George Howe, resided in a small log cabin overlooking the lowland of Big Swamp in what was then called the Territory of Duplin County.

  If George Howe, Jr., was about twelve years of age in 1587 when his father was killed, a marriage to Manteo’s daughter could perhaps have taken place about 1595
, and George Howe III may have been born about 1615, putting him close to fifty years of age at the time the Massachusetts settlement was established in 1663 at the Cape Fear. If, as the legend contends, the “Howe” river was named in his honor, it would mean that at least one admixed descendant of the original 1587 colony still survived with this group after nearly a century, and that he still retained his English surname, a rather implausible consideration.

  Furthermore, the legend’s account of the naming of the “Howe” River is contradicted by John Lawson, who made the first documented reference to that river in his A New Voyage to Carolina, published in 1709. (Lawson’s actual 600 mile exploration was undertaken in 1700–1701.) Lawson wrote,

  … with great Difficulty, (by God’s Assistance) [we] got safe to the North-side of the famous Hau-River, by some called Reatkin; the Indians differing in the Names of Places, according to their several Nations. It is call’d Hau-River, from the Sissipahau Indians, who dwell upon this Stream, which is one of the main Branches of Cape-Fair.4

  Little is known about the “Sissipahau” tribe, sometimes called Saxapahaw, other than the possibility that they may have been related to the Shakori, and probably belonged to the Siouan linguistic family. The name “Saxapahaw” is believed to be an anglicized version of the Siouan/Catawban word “sak’yápha” meaning “foothill.”5 Their principal settlement appears to have been along the Haw River, perhaps ten miles west of present-day Chapel Hill. The tribe apparently faded from the historical record after 1717, but their name is retained in the small mill town of Saxapahaw and the newly restored Saxapahaw Rivermill area. The Saxapahaw may have been the same tribe spelled “Sauxpa” or “Sauapa” whom the Spanish encountered in 1569 near the Santee River in South Carolina.6 This tribe may well have migrated to the Haw River long before “Manteo’s tribe” could have arrived. Therefore, it is more likely that the “Haw” name was appropriated to suit the “Haw-Howe” tradition, in which case the legend’s claim regarding the naming of “Howe River” is simply an embellishment.

  There is one recorded incident demonstrating that the Saxapahaw may have had an affinity for the English, at least for a time. In early 1712, as Col. John Barnwell marched his army from South Carolina into North Carolina to assist that colony in the Tuscarora War, he met a sizable group of Saxapahaws who were fleeing from the Tuscaroras. They told Barnwell that sixteen of their people had been killed when they were attacked by the Tuscaroras because they refused to join them in the attack on the English settlers. Barnwell referred to these Saxapahaws as “brave men and good” and persuaded them to join his army.7 However, the affinity for the English had apparently changed shortly thereafter, since, as John Reed Swanton noted, “They were one of those tribes which joined the confederation against the English in 1715 [the Yamasee War in South Carolina].”8

  Any attempt to hypothesize about the possible existence and location of Lost Colony descendants in the 17th century must follow, as closely as possible, the movement of the tribes. For nearly a century after Jamestown was established, English expansion extended southward only as far as Albemarle Sound, and little is known about the movements and activities of the tribes farther south with whom any admixed descendants of the Lost Colonists would have most likely dwelt. A number of exploratory expeditions were sent out from Jamestown during the 17th century, but they tended to venture west to the Appalachians or southwest as far as the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers. John Pory led an expedition to the Chowan in 1622, and in 1650 Edward Bland explored the Chowan, Roanoke, and Meherrin Rivers, an area he called “New Brittan.” During Pory’s trek he reportedly heard from a Tuscarora Indian about an Englishman who dwelt among them, but the “Englishman” would turn out to be the Spaniard that Francis Yeardley would hear about four years later. Finally, John Lederer led three expeditions westward to the Appalachians in 1669 and 1670.

  As previously suggested, the yellow-haired “savage boy” observed by George Percy at the James River in 1607 could have been a descendant of one of Grenville’s 1586 contingent, but not of a 1587 Lost Colonist. Percy estimated the boy’s age to be about ten, so he would have been born about 1597. The 1587 Lost Colony had virtually disappeared eight years earlier and 150 miles to the south or at sea in the pinnace, but the eleven or so surviving members of Grenville’s contingent may well have been living among the Chesapeake tribe for about ten years by 1597. Powhatan’s “slaughter” of the Chesapeakes apparently occurred just prior to the arrival of the Jamestown settlers, and the boy’s presence in Powhatan territory at the James River can be explained by the customary native Indian practice of sparing younger children from other tribes and adopting them as their own.

  References in Francis Yeardley’s 1654 Narrative of Excursions into Carolina are occasionally cited as possible Lost Colony clues, but they are usually taken out of context and actually are not relevant. The first reference is to “Sir Walter Ralegh’s fort, from whence I [Yeardley] received a sure token of their being there.” The second reference is that the great chief at Roanoke wanted Yeardley to teach his son “to speak out of the book, and to make a writing.”9 It would be incorrect to suspect from these that Yeardley may have obtained something from the old fort at Roanoke that related to the 1587 colony, or that the chief’s knowledge of reading and writing might be an echo of previous contact with the Lost Colony. Quinn wrote, “There were Indians on Roanoke Island when Francis Yeardley went there in quest of land in 1653 … but they had nothing to say of how the earlier colonists met their end, except to point out to him the remains of the old fort.”10

  However, Yeardley only funded the “excursions to Carolina,” and he did not personally participate, as Quinn wrote. The expedition came about quite by accident. A trader in beaver pelts, the previously mentioned Nathaniel Batts, came to Yeardley to request provisions so that he could search for the sloop which had accidentally left him and “had been gone to Rhoanoke.” And so,

  he set forth with three more in company, one being of my family, the others were my neighbours. They entered in at Caratoke, [Currituck] ten leagues to the southward of Cape Henry, and so went to Rhoanoke island; where, or near thereabouts, they found the great commander of those parts with his Indians a hunting, who received them civilly, and shewed them the ruins of Sir Walter Ralegh’s fort, from whence I received a sure token of their being there.11

  In the sometimes misconstrued latter part of that quote, “their” refers to the Indians and the Englishmen looking for the sloop, and has nothing to do with the Lost Colonists. From what we can infer of Yeardley’s account, the Indians at Roanoke seemed to know nothing about the history of the fort or its inhabitants.

  At some time afterwards the Roanoke chief and a few of his tribesmen were escorted to Yeardley’s house at “Linne-Haven,” today’s Lynnhaven in Virginia Beach…

  where they abode a week, and shewed much civility of behaviour. In the interim of which time, hearing and seeing the children read and write, of his own free voluntary motion he asked me, (after a most solid pause, we two being alone), whether I would take his only son, having but one, and teach him to do as our children, namely is his terms, to speak out of the book, and to make a writing; which motion I most heartily embraced.12

  The Roanoke chief’s interest in having his son taught “to speak out of the book, and to make a writing” was initiated by his observations of English children reading and writing in 1653 at Linne-Haven, and not from a past tribal connection to the Lost Colony. After returning south, Yeardley’s men purchased “three great rivers” from the Roanoke king “in the name, and on the behalf, of the commonwealth of England.” Later, the Roanoke chief and some of his tribesmen guided Yeardley’s men to the west, where they met the “Tuskarorawes emperor” at a hunting camp. It was there that the Tuscarora chief told the Englishmen about a Spaniard who had lived at their main village for seven years. This Spaniard was almost certainly the misidentified “Englishman” who was living among the Tuscarora in 1650 and reported to Edwar
d Bland during his exploration of “New Brittan.”

  By the time Yeardley was writing in 1654, any surviving admixed descendants of the Lost Colonists—after two or three generations—would have been thoroughly assimilated with the native tribespeople with whom they dwelt. As suggested, therefore, what happened to those descendants and where they might be found depends entirely on the location of the tribes and the events that could have impacted them. From Yeardley’s narrative it seems that the Roanoke Indians abandoned the coastal area in 1653 and moved to what must have been a considerable distance inland, since it was near there that the Englishmen met the Tuscarora. Yeardley promised to build the Roanoke king an English styled house at his “new habitation” after the land purchase was completed…

  … and actual possession was solemnly given them by the great commander, and all the great men of the rest of the provinces, in delivering them a turf of the earth with an arrow shot into it; and so the Indians totally left the lands and rivers to us, retiring to a new habitation, where our people built the great commander a fair house, the which I am to furnish with English utensils and chattels.13

  It is unfortunate that Yeardley did not provide more information about the “great commander” at Roanoke or about “all the great men of the rest of the provinces.” The Hatteras Indians were known to frequent Roanoke, and perhaps “the rest of the provinces” could have included the Outer Banks to the south.

  By this time the old tribes encountered by the Roanoke voyagers north of Albemarle Sound were slowly but surely succumbing to the wave of English expansion from Jamestown. The tribe known in the 16th century as the Weapemeoc now consisted of a number of smaller interrelated tribes such as the Yeopim—probably a shortened form of the original “Weapemeoc”—the Pasquatank, Poteskeet, and Perquiman.14 In 1660 and 1662 the Yeopim king sold some of the land to Nathaniel Batts and George Durant respectively, making these the first “recorded” land deeds in North Carolina. The Yeardley purchase in 1653 was confirmed by the delivery of “a turf of the earth with an arrow shot into it,” but apparently never officially recorded. According to Lawson, by about 1700 the Pasquatank were down to just ten fighting men, the Poteskeet thirty, and the Yeopim only “6 people.”15