by Lee Miller
Explain the omission as one will, the fact remains that here is the record and there is very little of John White within it. Odd, at the very least. His intimate connection with Raleigh might have guaranteed him, as it did others of this circle, some degree of notoriety. Historical reference might have derived from his office as Governor; and of an ill-fated colony at that. One might reasonably expect him to have been mentioned by some biographer of the day. Yet all we have is his single farewell letter to Hakluyt; and that is all.
The Artist
What, then, is left? Pieces of a puzzle, a tantalizingly vague outline. We do know that John White was an artist — though even this occupation is revealed to us only imperfectly. Seventy-five paintings are attributed to him. How many more — if any — lie among the many anonymous works from the period is impossible to say.4 There is a John White entered into the musty guild registry of the Painter-Stainer’s Company in London in 1580.5 Certainly a match. But that tells us very little. What type of artist was he? Under whom did he study? To what Renaissance school does he belong? Hints to be teased from history. The first evidence presented to us is a portrait White drew of Calichoughe in the year 1577. In Bristol.
Martin Frobisher had just returned to England from his second Arctic expedition.6 A mining venture to exploit a black ore found the previous summer by his unlikely passenger, Dr. John Dee. Using, it might be added, the dubious technique of a divining rod.7 Assayers in London, and Dee himself, thought they had struck the mother lode.
But the 1577 voyage spelled disaster. On Baffin Island there was a misunderstanding, Frobisher’s error; resulting in the bloody massacre of an entire band of Nugumiut on a cliff overlooking the sea. Frobisher, his ship’s hold crammed full of ore, seized three Nugumiut and returned to England: a woman and child — Egnock and Nutioc — and an unrelated man named Calichoughe, who was injured in the capture.8
On Bristol’s wharves, Frobisher’s men unload the ore. Two hundred tons of black rock. Sparking an immediate gold mania. Metallurgists and assayers rush to the coast to test its worth. Investors tumble over themselves, calculating their returns. In the riot of excitement a comet streaks across the night sky, showering fireworks over the celebration.
In the harbor, beneath the angular trading houses, Calichoughe quietly plies his kayak. White seabirds circle overhead; over this lonely Nugumiut man, bleeding from internal injuries unsuspected by the crowds gathered onshore to watch.9 Calichoughe, paddling a kayak, creates a sensation. Celebrated Flemish artist Cornelis Ketel hastens to Bristol to paint all three Baffin Islanders. Two of the portraits are intended for Queen Elizabeth. To be displayed in her palace at Hampton Court, where they will be much admired by visitors.10 There are plans afoot to transport the Nugumiut to London for a royal audience.
But there is another painter here in Bristol. He, too, composes portraits of the Nugumiut. In watercolors. In a style reminiscent of Dürer or the Flemish artist Breughel, or Lucas de Heere who painted another Inuit taken by Frobisher the previous year.11 John White captures them with his brush. Sealskin parkas trimmed with fur; Calichoughe holding a bow; the kayak paddle. Egnock, with her little girl, Nutioc, tucked inside her coat, peering out from the hood. There is a certain sensitivity and realism in these paintings not found in others’ works.
And then it all goes wrong. The celebration smoke settles chokingly around Bristol as Calichoughe’s pain echoes out over the tidal wash. Frobisher’s expedition is crumbling. The biggest maritime fiasco to date. Yet even with everything unraveling — after the ore is determined fool’s gold and its financier cast into debtor’s prison; after Calichoughe dies within weeks from his injuries; after the attending Bristol physician, Dr. Edward Dodding, is bitterly grieved, not over his death, but over the Queen’s lost chance to view him; after Egnock and Nutioc succumb to fever days later — after all this tragedy and disaster, John White’s paintings alone come shining through.12 With a profound sense of humanity and compassion. They are the only redeeming feature of this whole episode. Who is this man, to paint like this?
A London Career
Watercolor was his speciality. His talent in this field was considerable. His known works, now in the British Museum, provide the only tangible evidence of John White. Yet what was his career? To what bent were his talents turned? Perhaps as a limner: a painter of portraits and miniatures like the famous Nicholas Hilliard?13 These gentlemen artists were in much demand, painting locket and token portraits of royalty and nobles. In an age before photography, princes and statesmen collect keepsake mementos of their foreign counterparts. To put a face to a name; to know their associates.
There are techniques in White’s work that suggest this: delicate brush strokes; opaque washes like those used in medieval illuminated manuscripts; gold and silver highlights. Yet White is also an innovator, a freethinker, a nonconformist. Anticipating watercolor methods not thought to have been developed until the eighteenth century — the use of light, rather than bold, outlines in lead; unconstrained strokes that imbue the drawings with a vivid sense of life; an awareness of the underlying texture and color of his medium, applying clear washes directly to the paper.14
Alternatively, White may have been a specialist in murals and decorative art, like Lucas de Heere, skills increasingly in demand to beautify the homes of wealthy patrons with startling depictions of ancient mythology, kingdoms, and exotic, cosmopolitan places. Currently all the rage. At Theobalds, Lord Burghley’s estate, the twelve signs of the zodiac march across the ceiling of the grand hall so that at night you can see distinctly the stars proper to each; on the same stage the sun performs its course, which is without doubt contrived by some concealed ingenious mechanism.15 White’s vivid portraits of travelers from Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Greece might imply familiarity with the merchants of Constantinople; or perhaps such colorful characters frequented the trading houses of London or Bristol. If, indeed, White drew them from life.16
But if one were to follow a hunch, one might suggest a different course, placing White squarely within a field then only in its infancy. That of scientific illustrator. England was just beginning to make forays into the distant world: to India, Asia, Africa, the Americas. Recent expeditions had resulted in myriad discoveries, having an impact on an exhaustive number of fields: astronomy, mathematics, navigation, geography, cartography, botany, zoology, entomology, ethnography, publishing, and engraving.
The rise of English naturalists and explorers prompted an explosive demand for scientific illustration. Books on foreign travel were popularized by their scenes of faraway lands. The new scientists, such as Dr. John Dee, Richard Hakluyt, and Thomas Hariot — all intimate acquaintances of Raleigh, the last, indeed, in his employ — were in the vanguard of these discoveries. For a young artist it was a thrilling, stimulating environment indeed. The question is, was White there?
Jacques LeMoyne
White’s connection with the skilled French artist Jacques LeMoyne de Morgues might indicate he was. LeMoyne had been a member of Rene de Laudonniére’s Huguenot colony, which had been established on the St. John’s River in Florida in 1564. After its destruction by the Spaniards, LeMoyne fled home to France, only to discover the attitude toward Protestants rapidly deteriorating. In 1572 the tension exploded in a bloodbath in Paris streets on St. Bartholomew’s Day. For three days and nights Protestant Huguenots were slaughtered. The killings raged across France. Thirty thousand dead. On the Rhone, corpses floated so thickly that they choked the water.17 LeMoyne must have hidden to preserve his life, as did a twenty-year-old English volunteer, hot for action in support of the Huguenots, who abandoned an education at Oxford University for this. Young Walter Raleigh, from Devon in the West Country.
After the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, LeMoyne moved permanently to London, one of many refugees pouring into the city. Later, Raleigh hired him to paint a visual record of Florida. This he did, creating an astonishing vignette of Timucuan Indian life: villages, harvests, celebrations, proces
sions, even family picnics with divers other things… lively drawn in colours at your no small charges, Raleigh is reminded by Hakluyt — himself busily translating Laudonniére’s narrative — by the skilfull painter James Morgues, yet living in the Black-friars in London.1
White must have been there, by the older man’s side. Somewhere. Two of White’s watercolors are based on LeMoyne’s drawings of Florida Timucua — a man and a woman. The woman in a blue sarong of Spanish moss, the man’s body laden with copper. Overall, in all of White’s paintings, there is a vague sense of LeMoyne. A similarity in background detail, in poses, in the angles of composition.19 Both artists made studies of ancient Britons and may have worked on some of them together. An effort, on White’s part, to show that the people of Roanoke were not so very different from his own ancestors.
Expedition Artist
It was at this juncture, thanks to Raleigh, that a remarkable opportunity opened up for John White … Roanoke Island. He joined the first Roanoke expedition in 1584 as commissioned artist. In 1585 he was again sent thither specially and for the same purpose, to draw.20 To bring home remote, strange lands to those who would never go there. To be England’s eyes in the new world: faithfully recording the plants, animals, faces, and village life of the people he sees. It will change White forever. Hakluyt’s cousin, a lawyer, urged that American voyages include a skilful painter similar to that which the Spaniards used commonly in all their discoveries, to bring the descriptions of all beasts, birds, fishes, trees, towns, &c.21 And so John White was commanded to faraway Roanoke, a skillful painter, hauling paper and lead and pigments and brushes and grinding stones into an unknown world.
White’s depictions of botanical and zoological specimens made on the voyage attest to experience with scientific illustration. The surviving examples are marked by a considerable attention to detail. They are fresh, vivid, carefully labeled: the spidery veins in a plantain; the fins of a flying fish, splayed like an accordion; spinelike hairs on the leg of a land crab; the creamy underbelly of a baby alligator: This being but one month old was 3 foot 4 inches in length and live in water.22
Dr. Thomas Penny’s work on insects entitled Insectorum… Theatrum included four of White’s illustrations: a butterfly, two fireflies, and a gadfly from Virginia. White also presented him with a Virginia cicada. He was, said Penny, a painter not uncelebrated. A most skilful painter. A diligent observer of natural life both in the Caribbean and on the North American mainland. A yellow swallowtail, its wing tips singed a sooty black, bears the inscription: From Virginia, America, given me by White, the painter, 1587.23 A poignant gesture. The fragile gift of a butterfly thoughtfully offered by White to Penny at a time when his own family was in such danger. Or perhaps he gave it earlier, before the colony’s departure from England.
Botanist John Gerard also utilized White’s work. His famous Herball, published in 1597, included a woodcut of a milkweed based on one drawn by Master White, an excellent painter. Indeed, the two men held avid discussions about a plant from the American Southeast. The Spaniards positively raved about it. White contributed to Gerard’s knowledge of the root — and possibly supplied samples — of this salsa parilla, mangled into English as sarsaparilla and, finally, “sasparilla.”24
Thomas Hariot’s book about Roanoke, the Briefe and True Report of the New Founde Land of Virginia, was published in 1590 by Theodore De Bry. An expert engraver, De Bry illustrated the volume by cutting copper plates from originals diligently collected and drawn by White.25 Wildly popular, the work raced through seventeen editions between 1590 and 1620, published in Latin, French, German, and English. It would be fully three centuries before anyone created a visual record as spectacular as John White and LeMoyne did of the Americas.26
The Family Man
In 1587 White is prepared to take a much more decisive step with regard to America. One that will be irreversible. On January 7 he is appointed Governor of the City of Raleigh in Virginia and agrees to lead a company of planters across the Atlantic to establish it. White will emigrate permanently to the New World. His family will go with him.
But who are they? In all this time, we have heard nothing of them. White had been married, though his wife’s name is unknown. She was probably deceased, for she is not mentioned among the passengers. Together, she and White had at least one child: a daughter, Eleanor.
Eleanor was grown and married at the time of the expedition, though we do not know how old she was. When she left for Roanoke, she was more than five months pregnant.27 The age of consent for marriage in England was twelve years for girls and fourteen for boys, although most unions were contracted much later: half of all marriages took place with both parties well into their twenties.28 Adding their ages together, John White was perhaps in his early forties in 1587.
What other family did White have? Some may have been present on the expedition. A Cutbert White is listed among the Lost Colonists. A brother, perhaps? A grown son? It would be surprising if a number of the colonists were not bound by blood to John White, since many had agreed to go, as he said, through his persuasions. Implying a closeness. Thomas Butler, a Lost Colonist, may have been related, since White counted Butlers in his family tree. It is just possible that Henry Payne was also. An original collection of White’s watercolors appeared, in 1788, in the hands of a London bookseller named Thomas Payne, with their provenance far from clear.29
Governor of a Colony
If we are uncertain of White’s family connections, we are equally in the dark as to how he was selected to govern the City of Raleigh. Perhaps the projected colony was his idea. He was certainly instrumental in gathering the personnel and arranging the logistics of the voyage. Raleigh wholeheartedly approved of him, claiming that he himself had nominated, elected, chosen, constituted, made & appointed John White of London, Gentleman, to be the chief Governor there.30
Eleanor’s husband, Ananias Dare, was a London tiler and bricklayer, an occupation which has led to the assumption that White’s own status was not above that of a common laborer.31 But other causes might have brought two young people together: a shared religious conviction perhaps. And then there is White’s fine italic hand, which speaks of education and class; his skill as a limner; his known contacts with men of substance such as Raleigh, LeMoyne, and Hakluyt; the fact of his being made Governor at all; his title of address as master and gentleman.32
A Distorted Image
By July 1587 White’s colony had reached Roanoke Island and begun to settle in. Yet despite its hopeful beginning, something had gone quite wrong. One colonist had been murdered, and the horror of death hung like a pall over the rest. Panicked, they forced White back to England for help. He sailed away … and never saw them again. The 1590 rescue expedition failed. The Roanoke dream was dead.
After this, we know nothing of White’s whereabouts. The trail ends abruptly…until 1593. In England Richard Hakluyt receives a letter dated February 4 from Newtown in Kilmore, Ireland, signed by White. The contents detail the sad events of the 1590 voyage, penned in response to a request Hakluyt had made when they were last together in London. The wording of the letter bears the stamp of finality. In other hands, it might have made a convincing suicide note. What was happening here? Could White merely have been going away? Had he indeed resigned himself to the colony’s fate, as implied? Perhaps he wished to end further discussion. Or is it possible he no longer felt safe? Did John White know too much? The answers, in time, will become clearer, though they will never be brought fully into focus. Strangely, after the farewell letter was delivered, White was never heard from again.
John White of London, gentleman. Celebrated artist. Governor of Roanoke. Missing person.
The Search Broadens
In the absence of concrete information about White, the investigation logically should turn to the colonists. It is they who are missing. We might expect them, in fact, to hold the key to the puzzle or, at the very least, to furnish a clue. Instead, what they furnish is anot
her dead end. What do we know of them? Who were they? And why did they emigrate thousands of miles to an unknown land? Did they hold certain political or religious convictions that might have a bearing on this case? What of their internal organization? Or their relationship to Raleigh? The answers to these questions may only be inferred. Because, curiously, there is scarcely any information on these people. Like John White, much about them is veiled in mystery. Their story, from start to finish, is an enigma. It would seem that we have both a Governor and his colony who simply can’t be found.
Yet what if we make a wider sweep? What can we learn about the colonists by looking at the world in which they lived? A world which they left behind and which may provide a motive for their departure. England. What is it like at this moment in history? For the Lost Colonists do not owe their genesis to Roanoke. Everything in London bears on their story.
4 OF LONDON
London is a large, excellent, and mighty city of business, and the most important in the whole kingdom; most of the inhabitants are employed in buying and selling merchandize, and trading in almost every corner of the world, since the river is most useful…
