Whereas report has been made to this board that ye Hatteress Indyans have lately made their Escape from ye Enemy Indyans and are now at Coll Boyds house It is ordered By this Board that the afsd Coll Boyd Doe supply the Said Indyans wth Corne for their Subsistance untill they can returne to their owne habitations againe….8
The identity of the “Enemy Indyans” is not mentioned, but La Vere noted logically that they were probably Machapungas, which would place the Hatteras at Lake Mattamuskeet prior to their “escape.”9 As mentioned above, the Machapungas were provided with a reservation at Lake Mattamuskeet and Hatteras Indians are known to have been there in later years. In any case it is clear that these Hatteras were not at “their owne habitations” on the Outer Banks in 1714 and that they were not faring well. In March of the following year the Hatteras made another appeal to the Council, which reported, “Upon Petition of the Hatterass Indyans praying Some Small reliefe from ye Country for their services being reduced to great poverty.”10 Although they are still mentioned as a tribe by the Council in 1731, another source claimed that “by 1733 there were only six or eight Indians living at Hatteras and these lived among the English.”11 In May of 1761 the Hatteras are mentioned in a letter written by Alexander Stewart to Philip Bearcroft about his March trip to “Altamuskeet [Mattamuskeet] in Hyde County.”
… I likewise with pleasure inform the Society, that the few remains of the Altamuskeet, Hatteras & Roanoke Indians … appeared mostly at the chapel & seemed fond of hearing the Word of the true God & of being admitted into the church of our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 men & 3 women & 2 children were baptized by me.12
In another letter Stewart wrote, “the remains of the Attamuskeet, Roanoke and Hatteras Indians, live mostly along that coast, mixed with the white inhabitants.”13 The Hatteras had virtually disappeared by the 1780s, according to Torres, and the last record of them was in a 1788 deed from Mary Elks, “Indian of Hatteras Banks,” to Nathan Midgett, transferring a tract of land in the old Indian town.14 The Elks-Midgett transfer probably represented the final sale of the old Hatteras reservation tracts. As mentioned, the Hatteras had only acquired their reservation in 1759, but it was completely gone by 1788. The gradual disappearance of the Hatteras and other remaining eastern North Carolina tribes coincided with their selling off of tracts of reservation land, which had at least temporarily preserved tribal identities. The Poteskeet, Yeopin, Chowan, Meherrin, and Mattamuskeet had completely sold off the last tracts of their reservations by 1792.15
By the mid–18th century the remnants of the Hatteras Indians seem to have been located on the Outer Banks and at Lake Mattamuskeet, most likely limiting possible Lost Colony descendants to those locations. The historical record makes it clear that there were only a few Hatteras Indians on the Outer Banks, and that they were dwelling among the English who lived there. There is a possibility, then—but only a very slight one—that admixed Lost Colony descendants may have lived at Hatteras during this time, preserving the claim by some of today’s local residents that that was indeed the case. Of course, as the reservations were being sold off, the former Indian residents did not simply disappear. Many of them “mixed with the white inhabitants,” as Stewart noted in his 1761 letter. Others moved off to locations beyond the edges of white settlements and formed groups and small communities of their own.
Some of the Hatteras from Mattamuskeet may have been among these displaced people. As La Vere put it,
In other instances, survivors from shattered villages and towns took refuge in the swamps and forests of eastern North Carolina, on marginal lands that were then of little interest to white settlers. There these Indian people joined with other refugees and created thriving Indian communities, but out of sight of the North Carolina government and most settlers…. Time and time again over the next two centuries, North Carolinians would be surprised to discover communities of Indians across the eastern part of the state…. Increasingly, even among those lying low in the swamps, Indians began wearing cloth shirts, pants, and skirts; living in log cabins; plowing their fields; converting to Christianity; and speaking English.16
These were the people white settlers encountered as they pushed the borders of the frontier farther inland. It was a group such as this that Hamilton McMillan claimed was a tribe of Lost Colony descendants, found by the advancing white settlers “on the waters of Lumber River … speaking English, tilling the soil, owning slaves, and practicing many of the arts of civilized life.”17 Swanton wrote that at least part of the Indians who inhabited the Lumber River area were surviving remnants of the Siouan tribes that once dwelt along the lower Pee Dee and Waccamaw Rivers. According to Swanton, these Indians included some Cape Fears, Cheraws, Sissipahaws, Waccamaws, and Waxhaws,18 who moved farther inland particularly along the Pee Dee and Drowning Creek, which was what the Lumber River was called prior to 1809. Neither Mooney, writing in 1894, nor Swanton, writing in 1946, mentioned the Lumbee or Coharie as an identifiable “tribe.” In the North Carolina colonial records there was a description of the people at Drowning Creek, reported by the Bladen County militia in 1754: “Drowning Creek on the head of Little Pedee, 50 families a mixt Crew, a lawless People, possess the Lands without patent or paying quit rents; shot a Surveyor for coming to view vacant lands being inclosed in great swamps.”19
McMillan supported his Lumbee-Lost Colony theory by citing the occurrence of Lost Colonist surnames found among the Lumbee people in Robeson and in other counties in the latter part of the 19th century. There are several problems with this argument. Of the 117 Lost Colony surnames (a few were repeated) listed by Hakluyt, McMillan wrote, “The names in the foregoing list in italics [fifty-six of them], are those which are found at this time [1885] among the Indians residing in Robeson county and in other counties of North Carolina.”20 This is a meaningless statistic since McMillan’s fifty-six matches were not limited to Robeson County, but extended to “other counties” as well. Most of the Lost Colonists’ English surnames were fairly common and could be found in large numbers in all of North Carolina’s counties.
McMillan also declared that Henry Berry, who had received a land grant near the Lumber River in 1732, “was a lineal descendant of the English colonist, Henry Berry, who was left on Roanoke Island in 1587.”21 The fact that a land grant was issued to someone who had the same surname as a Lost Colonist is hardly evidence of a “lineal descendant.” Settlers from Virginia were already moving into the area north of Albemarle Sound during the second half of the 17th century. After 1704, when Parliament offered land bounties to encourage the naval stores trade—tar, pitch, and turpentine—immigrants started arriving in large numbers, particularly from Pennsylvania and Delaware, to what would become Duplin and Bladen Counties (Robeson County was carved out of Bladen in 1787). In the meantime, Scots-Irish immigrants began arriving in the Cape Fear area in the 1730s. Thousands of land grants were issued. It is far more reasonable to conclude from the historical record that the recipients of these grants came either from the northern colonies (where the Berry surname is known to have existed) or from Ulster than it is to assume that any of the recipients could be direct descendants of Lost Colonists.
The more significant problem with McMillan’s theory was his assumption that a large group of Lost Colony descendants—with their English surnames, language, and culture no less—survived for nearly two centuries and were discovered living at the Lumber River. As discussed in previous chapters, only a very small number of the original colonists could have lived past the events of 1588–89. Any possible survivors would have quickly integrated with one or more of the native tribes, most likely the Croatoans. If there were a few survivors, neither they nor their descendants could have had contact with whites in the Pamlico Sound area for another century. Their “Englishness” would have begun to disappear rather quickly, and after two or more generations their descendants would have been indistinguishable from the natives, except perhaps for the occasional manifestation of a recessive gene, such as the gra
y eyes Lawson noticed among the Hatteras in 1701. The English language and surnames of the original colonists had been shed long before then, or Lawson would certainly have mentioned it.
The single plausible argument in favor of a Lost Colony–Indian descendancy resides in the oral tradition of the tribes. As seen previously, the information related by the Powhatans to Smith and Strachey was quite accurate, but misinterpreted. If we accept the premise that Indian oral tradition contains an essential truth, then we must concede the possibility that some ancestors of some Indians were Lost Colonists. McMillan wrote that he first heard of the Lost Colony tradition during an inquest in 1864, when “an old Indian named George Lowrie” addressed the group and told of his tribe’s blood connection with the English at Roanoke. There can be no doubt that the tradition has existed for several generations among the Lumbee and Coharie people, and there are a number of sources who have confirmed that long-standing tradition. Cherokee Indian and anthropologist, Robert K. Thomas, was skeptical about McMillan’s Lost Colony hypothesis and suggested that his Lost Colony theory may have been adopted by some Lumbees in the 19th century to explain their origins, but that does not alter the fact that the same tradition existed on Hatteras as early as 1701, according to Lawson’s account.
Coharie tribal member C.D. Brewington acknowledged the long-standing Lost Colony tradition among his tribe in Sampson County, but was less certain of its source. He wrote that the ancient Iroquoian ancestors of the Cherokee and the Tuscarora were people he called “Ri-Choherrians” who later divided into various clans and tribal groups in what is now North Carolina. According to Brewington, two of these groups became the Cherokee and Cheraws, also called Saura. In a similar vein as Swanton regarding the assessment of the Lumber River inhabitants, Brewington wrote, “These Indians settled on the Cape Fear and on the Saxapahaw and its tributaries. They became the ancestors of the Indians who now live in the Cape Fear Region and on the Lumbee [Lumber] in Robeson County.”22 Brewington expressed his belief in a Lost Colony–Indian tradition, but wrote, “It is impossible to point out one particular tribe of Indians as their sole ancestors.” He went on to say, “These amalgamated Indians were first found on the banks of the Cape Fear and its tributaries, including Coharie, both big and little Coharie, South River, Mingo and the Neuse and Lumbee [Lumber] Rivers.”23
What can be said with confidence is that the existence of an oral tradition among elements of the Coharie and Lumbee tribes connecting Lost Colonist and native Indian bloodlines is undeniable. We can probably conclude, then, that the first generation of admixed descendants most likely originated from contact with the Croatoans after 1587. However, Brewington was also probably correct in saying that it is impossible to know where those bloodlines might be found after several centuries. It has been suggested above that almost certainly the Hatteras, but also the Pamlicos, Corees, and Cape Fears, may have had contact with the Lost Colonists. There could have been others. There is also the possibility that subsequent admixed descendants interacted with other unidentified tribes at a later time and at unknown locations.
Of course all of this is based on the assumption that at least a few admixed descendants survived beyond the first or second generation. Given the near-certain sharp reduction of Lost Colonist numbers in 1588 and 1589, coupled with the drastic decline of the Indian population in the 17th and 18th centuries, it is very possible that no direct Lost Colonist-Indian descendants survived. The absence of surviving descendants by the late 18th or 19th century, however, does not refute the oral tradition of a tribal Lost Colonist–Indian ancestry. Such a tradition only means, as the Hatteras Indians told Lawson, that several of their ancestors were white people. It does not mean that the tribe in general was descended from those white people or that any of their admixed descendants survived to the present.
A considerable effort has been undertaken in recent years in an attempt to identify Lost Colonist descendants through DNA analysis. Roberta Estes, co-founder of the Lost Colony Research Group and administrator of the Lost Colony Y DNA and Lost Colony Family Projects, is a leading figure in this endeavor. Progress has been slow, Estes reports, due in large part to the difficulty of locating verifiable relations of the 1587 colonists in England, without whom a comparative DNA baseline cannot be established. The primary sources for 16th century genealogical records are English parish registers, but many of these records no longer exist. In 1597 Queen Elizabeth decreed that church records, originally written in Latin on individual sheets of paper, be kept in more durable vellum or parchment registers, and the earlier records transcribed, but by that time many of the original paper records had either been lost or destroyed. Records of the Lost Colonists’ births, most of whom would have been born before 1567, probably disappeared during this time. In addition, many records were neglected or destroyed during the English Civil Wars in the mid–17th century.24
Another factor impeding the search for the 1587 colonists’ family relations in England is the fact that the colonists left little or nothing of value behind when they sailed for America in 1587. They expected to be the founders and landholders of the “Cittie of Ralegh” in the new land of Virginia, and they would have sold or disbursed whatever assets they had in England to take part in the venture. Consequently there were no estates to administer when, after seven years according to English law, the 1587 colonists were considered officially deceased. The single known exception was Ananias Dare, one of John White’s Assistants and son-in-law, who left a young son (illegitimate, according to Quinn25) named John and apparently some property in London. There is a court record indicating that John Dare, a minor and son of Ananias Dare of St. Bride’s in London, was placed under the guardianship of John Nokes of London in 1594, seven years after Ananias and the rest of the colony sailed for America. John Dare obviously carried the Y DNA of Ananias Dare, but there seems to be no confirmed documentary record of John Dare or his possible descendants after 1594.26 Efforts continue in both the U.S. and the U.K. to identify and test individuals who may have a claim to Lost Colony descendancy through old records or family histories, and the Lost Colony DNA Project maintains a database of Lost Colony surnames and DNA signatures.
The search for present-day descendants of Lost Colonists, though, brings us back once again to the question of survival probabilities. From a DNA perspective the odds are not very promising. As Estes wrote,
In order for a Y DNA match to occur, a male colonist would have to have survived and had male children who had male children down to the present generation—an unbroken line with no females. In order for a mitochondrial DNA match to occur, a female colonist would have to have survived and had female children who had female children down to the present generation—an unbroken line with no males.27
The search for even one Lost Colony descendant is akin to looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. If no unbroken male or female Lost Colonist line survived to the present, however, … there is no needle to look for.
Summation
In the final analysis, the history of the Lost Colony was remarkably short. It began on May 8, 1587, when the colonists sailed from England with the high hopes of establishing the “Cittie of Ralegh” in America, and it essentially ended just two years and four months later. In summary:
The colonists had their first disappointing setback before they even arrived at the Outer Banks. As soon as they reached the Caribbean, master pilot Simon Fernandez learned that the Spanish knew about Raleigh’s plan to establish a settlement at the Chesapeake Bay, and that they were in the process of searching for the English there. Consequently, their original Chesapeake destination had to be altered. After the flagship Lyon rendezvoused at Dominica with the flyboat, commanded by Edward Spicer, it was agreed that the Lyon and the pinnace would proceed to Roanoke Island, where Ralph Lane and Raleigh’s first colony had spent the year in 1585–86. Meanwhile, Spicer and the flyboat would acquire the usual supplies and requisite cargo in the Caribbean. The Lyon and pinnace arrived a
t Roanoke with most of the colonists on July 22, and the flyboat arrived three days later on July 25 with the cargo and the rest of the colonists.
The stay at Roanoke was intended to be temporary, while a permanent settlement location could be found and prepared on the mainland. The colonists rebuilt Lane’s old settlement at Roanoke, fortified and enclosed it with a strong palisade, and spent the winter there. At the same time the principal Assistants and other colonists, no doubt with the help of Manteo, explored the mainland for a good settlement site, which had to be readily accessible by way of a navigable inlet for White’s return as well as for future resupply and commerce with England. With the Chesapeake eliminated, the deepest and most stable inlet on the Outer Banks was Wokokon, and consequently the new mainland settlement would likely have been somewhere west of that inlet at present-day Carteret, Pamlico, or southern Beaufort County. That area had already been explored by Grenville in 1585, probably for a future settlement site, and it had the added requirements of being beyond the territory of the hostile Secotan tribes and also beyond the fifty mile restriction from Roanoke noted by White. The move from Roanoke to the new mainland settlement was accomplished by mid–March of 1588, in time for the first spring planting in early April. Prior to their departure from Roanoke, the colonists left carved messages directing White to Croatoan, where a few colonists would be waiting to escort the governor, the supplies, and the new colonists across Pamlico Sound to the settlement.
Everything changed when White failed to return by late summer or early fall of 1588. All the colonists’ hopes and expectations quickly evaporated with the realization that their continued existence as a viable English colony was now in serious jeopardy. Although the colony was intended to be agriculturally self-sufficient, it could not survive for long without regular contact with and resupply from England. The abandoned colonists were left with few options available to them in 1588. Their best chance for survival was to re-establish contact using their 30–35 tun pinnace, certainly capable of ocean travel, and their best route was northward to Newfoundland, an English possession frequented annually by English fishing fleets between May and October. The number of colonists who embarked on this voyage could have ranged from at least forty to perhaps eighty or ninety—nearly the entire colony—if a second vessel was built during the six or seven month wait for a preferred spring departure. In this likely scenario, all those who sailed for Newfoundland perished at sea in the attempt.
The Lost Colony of Roanoke Page 31
