Yet Manteo is traditionally seen as merely a dutiful and loyal adviser, while some indigenous people label him a traitor or lackey. As with Fernandes, the complex and interesting non-Anglo character has been reduced to a one-dimensional portrait. Though he dressed as an Englishman and spent a total of fifteen months in London, his people greeted him with joy on his 1587 return. He might have calculated that throwing in his lot with the English would give both himself and his tribe a far more powerful position than under Wingina’s reign.
By 1588, if they were still alive and living with the Croatoan, the colonists would have learned the rhythm of the seasons, breaking into smaller groups in the winter and spring to hunt and forage. They may well have moved back and forth across Pamlico Sound. “The Indians from the back country came regularly in the early springtime to the coast of the Cape Fear for the seawater fish and oysters which were abundant,” early-twentieth-century author James Sprunt wrote of a tribe that lived on the southern end of the Outer Banks. First they would imbibe yaupon tea and purge. Then they would “gorge themselves to repletion with the fish and oysters.” Turkeys and squirrels supplemented the spring diet. By May and June, there were acorns and walnuts, as well as blue crab and land tortoise, easy to catch and highly nutritious. After planting corn, beans, and squash, the settlers would have learned to find berries and dig up tuckahoe roots. Sunflowers provided oil as well as bread. The harvest began in late summer, and fall was devoted to gathering fruits and nuts and drying and smoking deer and other game for the coming winter. Throughout the year, there were always more fish and oysters.
As time passed and White failed to return, the Europeans would have changed more than their diet. They would have traded out their culture. Without resupply from England, woolen dresses and leather shoes would have rapidly worn out, to be replaced by soft deerskin. Corn bread quickly substituted for biscuits, and Indian coil-made ceramics replaced broken English pots made on a wheel. Once gunpowder stores were used up or a gun jammed, bows and arrows and nets would have been the only way to hunt game. A reed-poled hut covered with adjustable grass mats might have felt better suited to the climate than a stuffy thatched cottage. Local herbs flavored their stews and healed their illnesses. With a working knowledge of Carolina Algonquian so necessary for survival, spoken English would have fallen away.
As David Phelps noted, the class structure of royal family and commoners, though practiced on a smaller scale, would have felt familiar to Elizabethans. They would have found some common religious ground; both groups, after all, believed in a version of heaven and hell and an overarching deity. Eventually, rather than lay the heads of their dead facing east, toward Christian resurrection, they would have adopted the Algonquian practice of folding their deceased loved ones’ arms and legs to mimic the body’s position before birth. Some English songs and dances as well as technological know-how might have entered the Croatoan repertoire, but the Lost Colonists would have found not just a New World home but a new way to live.
It was not an easy life, even before the advent of European diseases; arthritis often set in while Carolina Algonquians were barely out of their twenties, and life expectancy hovered around age thirty-five. Women could expect to lose every fourth child before it reached the age of five. But these grim statistics were not so different from those in Elizabethan England.
Archaeological finds in the past few decades demonstrate the Native Americans and early European settlers already lived virtually cheek by jowl. A 1560s Spanish fort in western North Carolina was built adjacent to a Native American town—the locals even helped the soldiers build their encampment—and Jamestown’s streets were often filled with Virginia Algonquians trading deerskins for tools and Venetian beads. Indians routinely visited settlements like Plymouth and New Amsterdam to trade and share a meal and even spend the night. The Roanoke settlement, wherever it was located, was almost certainly close to Granganimeo’s village.
Most historians now accept that the Lost Colonists, if they survived, merged with indigenous society. “It is probable that some of the Roanoke colonists did live on and melt into the native population,” writes NYU’s Kupperman. “This could have been true of the several hundred enslaved Africans and Indians from the Caribbean left by Drake, the three men abandoned by Lane’s colony in their haste to leave, or the fifteen men left by Grenville.” The colonists might even have encountered the Africans and South Americans left behind by Drake who would have blended in as well with the locals.
Michael Oberg, a historian at the State University of New York at Geneseo, adds, “Ralegh’s colonists were lost only to those Europeans who searched and failed to find them. Indian people knew what happened to them.” He concludes that “they became Algonquians and were no longer English men and women.”
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Why, then, the mystery? If assimilation is the simplest and most logical answer that fits the few facts we have, then why do we invoke aliens and zombies to explain what happened to the Lost Colonists? What is the nature of the “horror within” that still lurks on Roanoke Island?
I went back over the centuries of theorizing and discovered a single thread that runs unbroken from today back to the very beginning. In his 1605 play, Ben Jonson and his co-author celebrated the settlers mixing with the Indians to make beautiful babies, but that bawdy Elizabethan tolerance (tempered by the assertion that the beauty came only from the English genes) soon gave way to strictly corseted Puritan morality.
The one famous exception proves the rule. When John Rolfe wed Pocahontas in 1614 after she was taken captive, the bond proved not the start of a merging of two peoples but a one-of-a-kind diplomatic marriage. Unlike the Spanish and French, the English firmly rejected mixing with Native Americans. By the end of the seventeenth century, Virginia enacted the first laws prohibiting marriage between Europeans and either Africans or Native Americans. “Intermarriage had been indeed the method proposed very often by the Indians in the beginning” to secure a peaceful coexistence, noted Virginia-born Robert Beverley almost wistfully in 1705. “And I can’t but think it would have been happy for that country, had they embraced this proposal.”
Instead, the inevitable ties were illicit and harshly punished. Spanish spies at early Jamestown reported that forty or fifty English abandoned their countrymen to live with Indian wives. In 1612, the Virginia governor had those settlers living among Powhatan’s Virginia Algonquian people captured and then “hanged, sunburned, some broken up on wheels, others to be staked and some shot to death” to discourage others from following suit. “All this extreme and cruel torture [the governor] used and inflicted upon them to terrify the rest for attempting the like,” one eyewitness reported. Despite these extreme measures, men continued to desert, whether for food or female companionship or to escape the severe discipline at the fort.
Englishwomen also became part of Virginia Algonquian society. A decade later, Indians captured Anne Jackson during the bloody Native American uprising. Her brother thought she was dead, and when he learned three years later that she survived, he set off with another colonist to retrieve her. He found her among the Pamunkey Indians, but she refused to go back with him. So did his traveling partner. When Anne returned in 1629, apparently against her will, she was locked up in a house until a ship could take her back to England.
During his 1701 travels through Carolina, John Lawson met English traders who “find these Indian girls very serviceable to them” because they could learn more quickly the Indian tongue while enjoying “the satisfaction of a she-bed-fellow” who cooks and instructs them on the “customs of the country.” The explorer even proffered racial mixing as the most likely outcome of Raleigh’s vanished settlers. “In process of time, they conformed themselves to the manners of their Indian relations,” he writes. Yet Lawson instinctively recoiled from the very idea, perhaps because this suggested white women found Indian husbands. “And thus we see how
apt human nature is to degenerate,” he concluded with disgust.
Contemporary commentators played down the fact that most whites, even those taken captive, preferred their new families to their old homes. Though we don’t have any reliable numbers, the decision by many Europeans to join and stay in Indian society was colonial America’s dirty secret. In 1747 New York’s surveyor general reported to the king’s council that “no arguments, entreaties, no tears of their friends and relations, could persuade many of them to leave their new Indian friends.” The few who did “in a little time grew tired of our manner of living, and run away again to the Indians and ended their days with them.” Benjamin Franklin, with only some exaggeration, remarked that “no European who has tasted savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”
Whites and blacks could expect a high degree of acceptance in Native American society, although warrior-age men might be deemed too unreliable and be killed. Newcomers might be enslaved for a time, but they often took up life with a family of a recently deceased person, sometimes literally filling the shoes of the lost one. They could even rise in the ranks and become political leaders. This is, in part, why Lumbee and other Native Americans are reluctant to accept DNA as a true marker of tribal identity; it is cultural affiliation more than blood that determined if a person belonged.
If this desire to remain Native American was the result of Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages develop a close bond with their captors, it didn’t work both ways. Even an Indian child reared among the colonists would slip away, Franklin noted, and “there is no persuading him ever to return.” The taint of a darker skin color and a Native background kept them apart. “We have no examples of even one of these Aborigines having from choice become Europeans,” one New Yorker wrote in 1782.
For white Americans—and particularly women—“going native” became a disturbing yet thrilling popular genre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that highlighted Indian subjugation and rape. As the frontier vanished in the east, however, the very notion of the two peoples mixing became taboo. That is why, in nearly all the Virginia Dare romances of the mid- and late nineteenth century, the young maid keeps herself apart from the lusty Indian braves. Every other colonist, at least those of childbearing years, has to die. She has to be rescued by a European or be turned into a white doe to avoid her partnering with an Indian warrior.
No one expressed the taboo against racial mixing more clearly than Bishop Cheshire in 1910. “Never let anyone persuade you to believe for one moment” that the colonists were “swallowed up and amalgamated with half-naked heathen Indian savages, so that no remnant was left which could be recognized by their white brethren of Virginia,” he warned his listeners at the annual Virginia Dare birthday celebration. “The descendants of those first Christian inhabitants of our land are not to be sought in the mongrel remnants, part Indian, part white, and part negro, of a decaying tribe of American savages.” His blatant warning to not even consider the possibility of “mongrel remnants” struck me as a clear case of a man locking the barn door after the horse has bolted.
Even the respected historian Quinn—an Irishman!—was not wholly comfortable with the idea of English settlers casting off their Anglo heritage. He argued that most of the colonists created a proper English village near the Chesapeake, and fretted about those left behind to the south. “We are forced to accept as a fact that they became Indians themselves, and their children and grandchildren wholly so,” he writes with a tone of obvious reluctance. He only grudgingly admitted “a handful of them may have contributed some genes to the Hatteras Indians.”
This abiding unwillingness to embrace the idea that the colonists assimilated with the Croatoan, like the stories around the virginal Virginia Dare, reflects centuries of deep anxiety about sex between the races—particularly between European women and non-European men. Unlike the Spanish, Portuguese, and French, who tolerated interracial mixing to varying degrees, the English in the New World moved quickly to punish those who strayed. (Virginia had a loophole called the “Pocahontas exception” that allowed members of the white upper classes to retain their status while claiming the Powhatan princess as their ancestor.) Those laws remained in effect as late as 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Virginia’s statute banning interracial marriages. The woman in that famous case, Loving v. Virginia, was of mixed African-Algonquian ancestry.
This old unease, running so quiet and deep through our history, is reason enough to fill Roanoke Island with scary supernatural beings and turn Croatoan into a blood-borne virus, “a demon of plague and pestilence” that incites a murderous rage. The fascination that the Lost Colony inspires is, in the end, not about settlers getting lost in the woods; it is about our primal fear of losing our identity in a land constantly reshaped by new arrivals. I remembered the Secotan prophecy recorded by Harriot, that “there were more of our generations yet to come, to kill theirs and take their places.” Having done just that, later Americans, it seems, inherited the fear that the same fate would befall them.
The Lost Colonists, after all, weren’t described as lost until the 1830s, when Nat Turner’s rebellion and the forced removal of indigenous tribes hardened racial boundaries. That was the decade when a song-and-dance routine called the “Jim Crow,” involving white performers wearing black face and ragged clothes, first became popular. The Roanoke settlers didn’t vanish; they were lost in order to veil the likely but inconvenient truth that the survivors simply ceased to be white.
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When Governor White returned in August 1590, it was the prime season for harvesting corn, fishing, and gathering shellfish from the warm Pamlico Sound. While he visited Croatoan before moving on to Roanoke, he reports seeing no one on either island. The three fires and footprints he subsequently mentions show that there were people there, just none who wanted to make contact.
The Indians might have feared his ship was Spanish, intent on killing the settlers and their allies. Alternatively, Wanchese and his tribe might have been back in control and worried the English would seek revenge if the colonists were dead or enslaved. They had reason to worry: two decades before, a Spanish captain in Chesapeake Bay hanged Virginia Algonquians to avenge the deaths of several Jesuits, though only after baptizing the victims as Christians.
Recent tree-ring data from bald cypress in the Great Dismal Swamp between Roanoke and Jamestown shows that the Southeast underwent an extended drought that was particularly severe in northeastern North Carolina between 1587 and 1589. This doesn’t mean they starved; the crisis might have pushed the Croatoan and colonists to the mainland, where bodies of freshwater and carbohydrate-rich roots might have allowed them to survive the lean years.
The surviving colonists also might have seen White’s ships with fear rather than joy. Three years is a long time; by then they might have chosen Carolina Algonquian spouses and had children. A homecoming with family back in England would be awkward. In later cases, many Europeans living among Native Americans for far less time refused to return or hid from their former friends and family. The Lost Colonists, in other words, may have wanted to remain lost.
Curiously, the name Croatoan itself appears to have migrated by the time English explorers returned in the following century. While it clearly denotes the tribe as well as the island between Hatteras and Ocracoke in the Elizabethan era, several seventeenth-century English maps place the word instead on the mainland opposite Roanoke Island, at the former site of Wingina’s town; this is also when the waterway separating Roanoke from the mainland began to be called Croatan Sound, its current name. Other maps place the word “Croatoan” to the south, on the mainland opposite Hatteras. This is where White drew most of his images of Algonquians and their way of life, and also where Smith’s 1608 map referred to the home of four mysterious clothed men.
When the second wave of English began to move south o
f the Albemarle Sound around 1700, they made no reference to the Secotan, Roanoke, or Croatoan people. Instead, they mention a small Algonquian tribe called the Mattamuskeet or Machapunga, who numbered about one hundred members and could field thirty warriors. The newcomers, along with seizing lands, captured Indians and sold them as slaves to the West Indies and even Pennsylvania. In the resulting Tuscarora War, one of the first victims was John Lawson, who was tortured and killed in 1711 as a spy. The Machapunga, allied with the Tuscarora, launched raids and captured English settlers as far away as Roanoke and Hatteras. Acting governor Thomas Pollock calls them “expert watermen” with the advantage “of such dismal swamps to fly into…where it is almost impossible for white men to follow them.” Like the Lumbee’s ancestors to the southwest, they retreated into an area that provided them with a measure of protection. If there were Croatoan—and Lost Colony—descendants among the Machapunga, they made their home in the very area visited by the Lane and Grenville expedition in 1585.
The Tuscarora eventually surrendered, but “a handful of Indians who would not come into the treaty with the rest have spilt more innocent blood than all the rest,” complained the Reverend John Urmstone in Bath, referring to the nearby Machapunga. “They are like deer, there’s no finding them.” Later, he added, “we are forced to sue for peace.”
The bloody uprising prompted North Carolina’s legislators in 1715 to impose a fifty-pound penalty for whites who married anyone black, mulatto, or Indian. The same year, the colony created its first Indian reservation along Lake Mattamuskeet’s shores for the tribe. Though short-lived, it drew some of the remaining indigenous people from the Outer Banks. A visiting pastor half a century later described “the few remains of the Altamuskeet [Mattamuskeet], Hatteras, and Roanoke tribes” living “mostly along that [Pamlico Sound] coast, mixed with the white inhabitants.” According to David La Vere, they kept a low profile: “Eastern North Carolina Indians learned to lay low, become invisible, being seen by the surrounding white population only when they wanted to be seen.”
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