by Lisa Klein
In doing research I relied primarily on David Beers Quinn’s comprehensive Set Fair for Roanoke. An excellent, and shorter, narrative is the one by David Stick. Lee Miller’s Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony is nonfiction but reads like fiction, with first-person narration and (unattributed) quotations woven in. In it I found the suggestion that Sir Francis Walsingham tried to sabotage Ralegh’s colony.
The Library of America edition of the writings of John Smith, soldier and Jamestown founder, is a valuable resource. It contains Barlowe’s Discourse of the First Voyage (1584) and all the existing writings of Ralph Lane, John White, and Thomas Harriot regarding the Roanoke voyages, reproductions of John White’s drawings, and William Strachey’s account of the Virginia Indians (1612). These were my main sources for the customs of Virginia’s native inhabitants. Accurate or not, the writings do represent how the English saw the Indians. The terms “Indian” and “savage” (though they might offend modern readers) were the ones used at the time. “Savage” meant wild and uncivilized. The English saw the natives as human and capable of being civilized (as they understood civilization, of course). Manteo, as he learned English and became a lord, was proof of that. Harriot and White were surprisingly without prejudice in their observations of the natives and their customs. Most of those who came to the New World were not so objective.
Nothing is known about the particular customs of Manteo’s people, the inhabitants of Croatoan (known as Hatteras Island today). They did have a female chief who was Manteo’s mother. They probably spoke an Algonkian language like the Powhatan and other tribes of tidewater Virginia and northern New England, and possessed similar religious beliefs. Knowing no other way to craft a character so remote from my own experience, I have adapted Algonkian legends in order to convey how Manteo might have understood himself and his world before and after the English came into it. An immense help in this regard was Michael Leroy Oberg’s book. He analyzes the colonization effort from the Native American perspective, showing how the English failed to understand the native’s society and upset its balance. His title, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, refers to the killing of Wingina and its consequences.
Now, about my treatment of Sir Walter Ralegh. I have opted to spell his name “Ralegh” rather than the more familiar “Raleigh,” because the first was more common in his time. (Spoiler alert! Skip the rest of this paragraph if you haven’t read the book yet.) Despite his association with the Virginia colony and its most famous export, tobacco, Ralegh never went there. At least not officially. No biographers are specific about what Ralegh was up to from March to October of 1590 (the time of John White’s final voyage). They assume he was in London serving the queen. There is only one extant letter from this period with Ralegh’s signature: a recommendation for an unemployed vicar, written in a clerk’s hand. I am pretending it was signed by a deputy to conceal that Ralegh had secretly left the country. It is not impossible that Ralegh sailed to Roanoke Island with John White, but there is no historical evidence to support my fiction. This is the one occasion where I stretched the truth for the sake of a good story.
I do take considerable license with Ralegh’s poetry, selecting verses that seem to illuminate his fortunes in love and politics, then editing and rewriting them for a modern reader. (His poetry is known for its obscurity.) His poetic works were not published until years later, but like most poets of his time, he shared his poems among friends. So consider the poetic fragments here to be his works in progress, or early drafts. The letters and papers of Ralegh are fictitious but based on historical sources.
What happened to Ralegh after the failure of his Roanoke colony? In 1592 he seduced and married one of Queen Elizabeth’s ladies, Elizabeth Throckmorton. The queen threw them both in the Tower for a time, and he was banished for five years. During that time he sailed to South America, pursuing a dream of gold, and published The Discoverie of Guiana. In 1602 he made another effort to locate the colonists; some said that this was an effort to keep his Virginia patent from expiring by claiming English planters still lived there. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and under King James Ralegh was imprisoned on suspicion of treason, where he wrote The History of the World, only getting as far as 168 BC. He made a voyage to Guiana in hopes of finding gold, but it was unsuccessful, and in 1618 he was finally executed on the old treason charges.
The 1590 voyage was not the end of attempts to locate the Roanoke colonists. The Jamestown settlers tried to find them. On an expedition inland in 1607, one of their leaders, George Percy, reported: “We saw a Savage Boy about the age of ten yeeres, which had a head of haire of a perfect yellow and a reasonable white skinne.” John Smith spoke to two Indian chiefs who described men clothed like Smith who lived in English-style houses. There was also a report the colonists were slain by Powhatan, but a few survived. Powhatan, the chief of an alliance of tribes in the Chesapeake region, also claimed that he killed them. The explorations by Smith’s men turned up no one, and they concluded by 1612 that all of Ralegh’s colonists were dead. There was no proof either way. In 1660 a Welshman reported preaching to light-colored Indians along the Neuse River. In 1709 John Lawson surveyed the Carolinas and encountered Hatteras Indians who told him that “several of their Ancestors were white People, and could talk in a Book, as we do; the Truth of which is confirm’d by gray Eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians.” After this point legends take over, including an elaborate hoax involving stones with Eleanor Dare’s initials, reflecting an intense desire to know the fate of America’s first-born English child, Virginia Dare. Today the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, the descendants of the Hatteras Indians who migrated from Croatoan Island, also claim to be descendants of the “lost” colonists. This is likely, but impossible to prove. There were other lost Englishmen—the three left behind by Lane and Drake in 1586 and the fifteen left by Grenville—who may have survived and intermingled with the natives also.
John White, by the way, gave up his search for the colonists after the voyage of 1590, declaring himself contented. From Ireland he wrote to his friend Richard Hakluyt that he was “committing the relief of my discomfortable company the planters in Virginia to the merciful help of the Almighty, whom I most humbly beseech to help and comfort them, according to his most holy will and their good desire.” He certainly sounds as if he believed the colonists were still alive.
In the 1605 comedy Eastward Ho, which predates the sightings by the Jamestown settlers, Captain Seagull says of Virginia: “A whole country of English is there, man, bred of those that were left there in ’87; they have married with the Indians, and make ’em bring forth as beautiful faces as any we have in England.”
Seagull is joking with another character, but he has hit upon a truth that lies at the heart of the Roanoke mystery. No one can migrate to a new land without being changed by it and leaving a mark on it. Sometimes this happens by violence, and sometimes it happens quietly and no one writes about it. Probably there were colonists still alive in 1590, and in 1605, and even forty years after that. They had children with beautiful faces who gave birth to more children with beautiful faces, and on and on. In that way, they are still among us.
For Further Reading and Research
Algonquians of the East Coast. By the editors of Time-Life Books. Alexandria, Virginia, 1995.
Harriot, Thomas. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Originally published in 1588. New York: Dover Publications, 1972.
Lacey, Robert. Sir Walter Ralegh. New York: Atheneum, 1974.
Leland, Charles G. Algonquin Legends. New York: Dover Books, 1992. Rpt. Of Algonquin Legends of New England. Boston, 1884.
Miller, Lee. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000.
Milton, Giles. Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2000.
Oberg, Michael Leroy. The Head in Edward Nugent’s H
and: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Quinn, David Beers. Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1606. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
Ralegh, Sir Walter. The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh. Agnes M. C. Latham, ed. London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1929.
Searching for the Roanoke Colonists: An Interdisciplinary Collection. E. Thomson Shields and Charles R. Ewen, eds. Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2003.
Smith, John, Capt. Writings, with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America. New York: The Library of America, 2007.
Stick, David. Roanoke Island: The Beginnings of English America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.
Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, Manteo, NC
www.nps.gov/fora/index.htm
Roanoke Island Festival Park
www.roanokeisland.com
Jamestown Settlement Web site
www.historyisfun.org
Acknowledgments
For helping to bring this lovely book to readers, I thank my wonderful editor, Melanie Cecka, copy editors Alexei Esikoff and Jill Amack, and designer Nicole Gastonguay. Thanks also to my publicist Deb Shapiro, library marketing director Beth Eller, and the entire staff at Bloomsbury Children’s Books for their support.
ALSO BY LISA KLEIN
Ophelia
Two Girls of Gettysburg
Lady Macbeth’s Daughter
For Carolyn French
Copyright © 2010 by Lisa Klein
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First published in the United States of America in October 2010
by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers
E-book edition published in October 2010
www.bloomsburyteens.com
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Bloomsbury BFYR, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Klein, Lisa M.
Cate of Lost Colony / by Lisa Klein.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When her dalliance with Sir Walter Ralegh is discovered by Queen Elizabeth in 1587, lady-in-waiting Catherine Archer is banished to the struggling colony of Roanoke, where she and the other English settlers must rely on a Croatoan Indian for their survival. Includes author's note on the mystery surrounding the Lost Colony.
Includes bibliograpical references.
ISBN 978-1-59990-507-5 (hardcover)
1. Roanoke Colony—Juvenile fiction. 2. Roanoke Island (N.C.)—History—16th century—Juvenile fiction. [1. Roanoke Colony—Fiction. 2. Roanoke Island (N.C.)—History—16th century—Fiction. 3. Raleigh, Walter, Sir, 1552?–1618—Fiction. 4. Elizabeth, I, Queen of England 1533–1603—Fiction. 5. Great Britain—History—Elizabeth, 1558–1603—Fiction. 6. Lumbee Indians—Fiction. 7. Indians of North America—North Carolina—Fiction. 8. Orphans—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.K678342Cat 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2010008299
ISBN 978-1-59990-651-5 (e-book)
Table of Contents
Cover
Add Card
Title Page
Copyright
Cast of Characters
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part II
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part III
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Epilogue
Author's Note
For Further Reading and Research
Acknowledgments
