by Lisa Alther
On the second afternoon, a Turkish professor from George Washington University named Turker Ozdagan takes the podium to discuss the similarities between kilim carpets and Native American blankets. He points out that both Turks and Native Americans came from the Altai Mountains of Central Asia. Some went northeast across the Bering Strait to America, while their cousins headed southwest to eastern Europe and the Aegean. He maintains that if Turks did come to America in the sixteenth century, as Brent Kennedy proposes, they’d have assimilated into Native American tribes with ease because of the cultural similarities that already existed.
“It would have been a natural marriage,” he says, “one in fact that would have gone largely unnoticed by most Europeans arriving in the New World over the ensuing centuries.”
Every shade of skin, eye, and hair is represented beneath this tent, but as I listen to Dr. Ozdagan, I start to become aware of a certain distinctive combination: Many attendees have, like my cousin Brent, wavy dark hair, faces that appear tawnily tanned, and deep blue eyes. Once I zero in on this look, I see it everywhere. It’s like a reunion of failed Elvis impersonators.
But I’m baffled. If Melungeon heritage is Hispanic or Turkish or African, plus Native American, where do the blue eyes come from? I’d thought blue eyes represented a recessive trait that genes for darker eye color overwhelm. Who are these bizarre-looking people?
I study Bill. I realize that he and I look equally bizarre. I’ve met my childhood bogeyman, and he is me.
One speaker discusses physical traits associated with non-Caucasian heritage. Afterward, audience members tug at the corners of one another’s inner eyes and stick their fingers into each other’s mouths, checking for East Asian eyefolds and Native American shovel teeth. They also stroke the backs of one another’s heads like primates grooming for lice, trying to determine who has the Anatolian lumps indicative of East Asian or Native American ancestry.
Bill observes, but I join in. I’m downcast to discover that the backs of my teeth are smooth and my eyelids are single-folded, albeit drooping with age. There’s a lump on my head, but it’s probably an old football injury. Once again I’m an Episcopalian watching the Baptist Youth depart on their hayride without me. I’m beginning to suspect that I’m wasting my time. If Melungeons actually exist, it’s unlikely that their ranks include my family, or surely we’d have heard about it before now.
Ina and Nellie have volunteered to accompany me to my next station along the Melungeon Via Dolorosa — Roanoke Island at the northern end of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Ina believes her family to be Melungeon. Her paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Freeman, a common Melungeon surname, and these Freemans lived near the base of Newman’s Ridge. Her maternal grandmother always claimed to be half Cherokee.
Nellie is just along for the ride. She grew up on eleven thousand acres in Alabama that she calls the “planation” (for reasons that escape me). She’s an English teacher at Dobyns-Bennett and a columnist for the Kingsport Times News. Her columns alternate among community service stories, tales of life on the planation, and pieces that support abortion and gay marriage and attack fundamentalist preachers and right-wing politicians. Yet sometimes she drives her Mercedes to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church to attend services in her ankle-length mink coat. She’s such a moving target that her enemies can’t figure out how to attack her. The most they can do is write outraged letters to the editor offering to take up donations to send her to Cuba. But this doesn’t bother her because she never reads the paper, any more than she reads the hate mail that arrives at her house, which she tosses unopened into the trash.
In any case, she’d love to go to Cuba. Nellie has cruised into the fjords of Norway, around Cape Horn, and along the ice shelves of Antarctica. I’ve never met anyone as interested in everything as she. She’s even interested in the Melungeons.
As we drive across North Carolina from the Blue Ridge through the piney Piedmont to the swampy coastal plains, Ina and Nellie regale me with tales of Dobyns-Bennett. Some of my old teachers are still there, including my nemesis, Mrs. Hawke, who turns out to be Ina’s cousin. Ina has thirty-eight aunts and uncles, forty-five first cousins, nine double first cousins, and God knows how many second and third cousins. This is one of the many challenges of Appalachian genealogy. The families are huge and interconnected, and many people share the same names generation after generation. One of my ancestors had eighteen children, and many of them had at least a dozen.
Nellie tells about Ina’s sleuthing skills at school. Students are no longer allowed to leave campus for lunch, but one day Ina saw some entering the building who, instinct told her, were returning from McDonald’s. When she confronted them, they denied it. So she invited them out to the parking lot. Once there, she asked the most nervous-seeming to take her to his vehicle, a white truck. She requested that he unlock the door. He did so. She reached in and pulled out a McDonald’s cup.
“That’s left over from breakfast,” he said quickly.
“Then why is it full of unmelted ice?” she asked.
He remained silent, so she asked him to pop his hood.
When he’d done so, she said, “Well, Clint, you’ve failed the Ice Test. And now we’ll do the Engine Test. If you didn’t go out to lunch, it will be cool.”
As she reached out her hand to touch the block, he pushed it aside and said, “You don’t want to do that, ma’am. You’ll burn yourself.”
As we approach Roanoke Island, they request my lecture on Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony. I obligingly explain that in the sixteenth century England, Holland, France, Spain, and Portugal were locked in a struggle to rule the world. It was like a giant video game, each country trying to establish a foothold in the New World, while simultaneously destroying everyone else’s. The Spaniards appeared on the verge of victory because the pope had granted them most of North and South America. (I confess to not knowing why the pope thought it was his to give.) Spain was now looting those continents of their gold and silver in order to finance its conquest of Protestant northern Europe and its defense of Christendom against the Muslim Ottoman Empire, which was encroaching from the east via the Balkans and the Mediterranean and from the south via North Africa.
These New World colonies were a double blessing: they allowed the various nations to stake their territorial claims, and they were also a dumping ground for troublemakers — criminals, debtors, prostitutes, and religious and political heretics. No one in his right mind would have chosen to join a colony bound for the Americas, but most weren’t in their right minds. They were the madmen, the dreamers, the paupers, the fugitives, and the fanatics. Many believed right up until they were slaughtered or starved to death that their god would keep them safe.
We check out the reconstruction of the Lost Colonists’ fort, trying to imagine cowering behind those flimsy palisaded posts as enraged Indians tried to scalp us.
“It definitely isn’t how I’d have chosen to spend my time,” I confess.
“Not unless the alternative were the gallows,” Nellie says.
In the harbor bobs a replica of their ship. It’s scarcely larger than Dolly Parton’s tour bus.
“I’m amazed they didn’t murder each other on the voyage over,” says Ina.
“Once they got here, they probably wished the ship had sunk. At least sharks kill you quickly,” I reply.
I tell them about Sir Walter Raleigh’s three attempts to people this small green island. The first, commanded by Sir Richard Grenville in 1585, involved around a hundred settlers. While Grenville returned to England for supplies, the colonists antagonized some Indian neighbors by burning down their village because they claimed an Indian had stolen one of their silver cups.
Being mostly city dwellers, the colonists were unable to hunt, fish, or farm. Like everyone’s worst nightmare relatives, they constantly demanded corn from the Indians and stole fish from their traps. But there’d been several years of drought, and the Indians were barely able to feed th
emselves. When they moved inland to their winter camp, as they did every year, the colonists became convinced that the Indians were trying to avoid feeding them (likely) and were plotting an attack against them (also likely).
As the situation deteriorated, the English privateer Sir Francis Drake arrived off the coast, en route to England from the Caribbean, where he’d sacked the Spanish town of Cartagena in what is now Colombia. Cartegena was the main port at which gold and silver looted from Incan mines were loaded onto Spanish ships, which sailed back to Spain in large fleets, in an effort to avoid being plundered by privateers from other countries. The loading on the docks was done by slaves — South American Indians, Africans, Protestants, Turks, and Moors. The Turks and Moors were routinely captured during Spanish sea battles with the Ottoman fleets on the Mediterranean, the most notable being the battle of Lepanto in 1571.
After raiding Cartagena, Drake had spare room on his ships because yellow fever had killed some of his soldiers and sailors. So he rounded up several hundred slaves who’d assisted his attack against their Spanish captors. Originally he intended to take them to Cuba to set up a colony from which to harass the Spanish treasure fleets. But a storm drove Drake off course toward eastern Florida, so he decided to sack St. Augustine instead and then head back to England, stopping off at Roanoke Island to see how Sir Richard Grenville’s colony was faring.
In fact, the colonists were now cold and hungry, sick and scared. Drake offered to leave them some supplies and slaves or to take them back to England. After a dreadful storm demoralized them even further, they decided to go home, even though it meant abandoning three absent colonists who were delivering a message to a neighboring Indian village.
At this point, what happened becomes speculation. Some historians believe that Drake, having lost some ships from his fleet in the storm and not having enough room for the colonists, dumped some of the freed slaves from Cartagena on Roanoke Island. (This is the basis for Brent Kennedy’s belief in a Turkish component for the early Melungeons, in addition to some Turkish and Armenian textile workers later brought to Jamestown as indentured servants.) In any case, Drake left Cartagena with several hundred slaves of various ethnicities, but he arrived in England with only one hundred Turks. Either the others were dumped on some coast while still alive, or they died on the voyage and were heaved overboard. It wasn’t unusual for ship captains to unload sick, unruly, or otherwise unwanted passengers on some desolate shore.
Meanwhile, Sir Richard Grenville returned from England to Roanoke Island with new recruits, only to find neither his colonists nor freed slaves of any nationality. He left a dozen soldiers, some German miners, and a Jewish mineral expert from Prague named Joachim Ganz to guard the island until a new expedition could be launched.
When this new expedition arrived in 1587, they found no soldiers, slaves, miners, or colonists — only one skeleton. Soon, a new settler who’d gone crabbing alone was found dead. The colonists under their watercolor-painting governor, John White, accused their long-suffering Indian neighbors of having murdered him (probably true). As punishment, they killed the chief of the Roanoke Indians whom they held responsible. Then they burned down a Roanoke town. Unfortunately, the hostile Roanoke who’d lived there had left, and some of the few Indians who still liked the English had moved in.
As usual, the colonists ran out of food, and by now all the Indians were hiding when they saw them coming with their empty baskets. These Indians must have felt a mix of exasperation, pity, and contempt for the colonists with their greed, incompetence, and capricious violence. At least the Pilgrims took Squanto’s fish and learned to plant them so as to fertilize their corn crops, proving the wisdom of the old saw that if you give a man a fish, it feeds him for a day — but if you teach him how to plant a fish, he won’t raid your traps.
By now the Indians were dying left and right from European diseases, as well as from war with the English and starvation caused by feeding the invaders winter stores already depleted by an ongoing drought.
John White sailed to England for more supplies. The arrival of the Spanish Armada off the English coast delayed his return. When White finally made it back to Roanoke Island three years later (on the third birthday of his granddaughter, Virginia Dare, supposedly the first English child born in America), the island was once again empty. The word CROATOAN was carved on a tree, minus the Maltese cross the colonists had been instructed to carve if they were in danger. Though how they thought they’d have time to carve anything at all while being attacked by Indians remains a mystery.
A tribe called the Croatan lived about halfway down Cape Hatteras and were probably the colonists’ last remaining Indian fans. Some historians believe the Croatan may have already absorbed Grenville’s soldiers and/or the three original missing colonists, and perhaps some of the dumped slaves as well.
“Why would the Croatan have wanted such a sorry bunch?” Ina interjects.
I explain that one named Manteo, the son of the Croatan weroansqua (“female ruler,” and perhaps the origin of the word squaw), had traveled to England in 1584 with Captain Edward Barlowe, who scouted Roanoke Island in preparation for the first colony there. Manteo learned English and adopted English dress. With him went an adviser to the chief of the Roanoke named Wanchese. When both returned to Virginia, Wanchese immediately defected and warned his tribe about the threat posed by the English. But Manteo remained loyal to the English and persuaded his mother’s tribe to assist them.
One North Carolinian historian maintains that the Croatan were originally named the Hatteras and that the members of the Lost Colony started calling them Croatan because they had evidence of Croatian ancestry for them. Although this may sound like one of Diane’s theories, it’s not as far-fetched as it first sounds. In the sixteenth century, the Croatian republic of Dubrovnik (earlier known as Ragusa) produced ships that were the largest and sturdiest in the world. Spain chartered some of them and their Croatian crews for its treasure fleets. Croatian sailors also sailed with Columbus, the Cabots, and Verrazano. Various place names along their routes are thought to be of Croatian origin.
In addition to the possibility of Croatian sailors being shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, one Croatian historian has found evidence in the Ragusan archives of Croatian emigrants to America in 1510-20. Another claims that ringleaders of a failed peasant revolt in Croatia in 1573 established a settlement in America.
A researcher named Charles Prazak has listed a number of ostensibly Croatian words found among the Algonquin tribes of coastal Virginia and North Carolina. For example, the head of the Powhatan Nation was himself called Powhatan, and the Croatian pohotan means “cruel leader.” Pocahontas’s real name was Matoaka, and the Croatian matorka means “big little girl.”
Captain Barlowe said of some local Indians he encountered on his scouting mission in 1584, “They were of color Yellowish and their hair black for the most part, and yet we saw children that had very fine auburn and chestnut-colored hair.” He himself assumed they were descended from stranded Europeans. He also reported that some coastal Indians spoke of “at least two Spanish ships wrecked within living memory,” from which they had salvaged some iron spikes.
In 1709, an explorer named John Lawson (killed by the Tuscarora two years later) visited a tribe on the Outer Banks whom he called the Hatteras, who claimed descent from the Croatan. Lawson believed them to be descendants of the Lost Colonists and said they reported that “several of their ancestors were white people and could talk in a book as we do, the truth of which is confirmed by gray eyes being frequently found among these Indians and no others. They value themselves extremely for their affinity to the English and are ready to do them all friendly offices.”
Lawson also reported that “the ship which brought the first colonists does often appear amongst them, under sail, in a gallant posture, which they call Sir Walter Raleigh’s ship.”
Other historians believe that at least some of the Lost Colonists headed north to live w
ith the Chesapeake tribe on the southern shore of Chesapeake Bay. This tribe was slaughtered twenty years later by the Powhatan from the northern side of the bay. Chief Powhatan showed Captain John Smith of Jamestown a musket barrel, a brass mortar, and some chunks of iron he claimed were seized during this raid.
Reports later reached Jamestown that four Englishmen, two boys, and a young girl had survived this attack and were “living to the south with Indians who had stone houses of more than one story.” Several search parties were launched from Jamestown, but these survivors were never located. However, a Jamestown colonist named George Percy reported seeing an Indian boy of about ten with “a reasonable white skinne” whose hair was “a perfect yellow.”
“But the oddest part of this whole thing,” I tell Ina and Nellie, “is that John White, the governor who went back to England for supplies and was delayed in returning by the Spanish Armada, had a daughter and granddaughter among the Lost Colonists. When he finally arrived at Roanoke Island and found them missing, he had good reason to suspect that they were living nearby with the Croatan. Yet he never dropped by to check on them. He had various excuses — a storm that drove his ship southward, a need to pick up fresh water, a leak in his ship, etc. But he went back to England and never returned.”
“No one could accuse him of being an overprotective parent,” Nellie agrees.
After a lunch of taco salads at Wendy’s, we head down the Outer Banks, passing through the beach town of Nags Head. I mention having once vacationed nearby with my family. Nellie knows my parents and knew my grandmother from socializing with them for years. Ina knows them, too, from playing tennis with my sister and watching the town tennis tournaments with my parents. She never met my grandmother, but she reports seeing her almost daily while driving into town. She says my grandmother would nose her silver Cadillac into the road from her driveway without looking in either direction. She assumed the other cars would stop to make way for her, which they did.
