The Colony That Kept Disappearing

The disappearance of Roanoke colony was long one of the great mysteries of early American history, one which challenged the ancient narratives of Anglo-American Manifest Destiny (since it suggested English colonization was reversible) and white supremacy. In the 1970s historian David Quinn offered a credible hypothesis to explain the event: he suggested that the colonists had probably moved to Chesapeake Bay, as they had been planning to do before England lost contact with them, and simply failed to leave a forwarding address. Later, they were probably wiped out by the Powhatan Indians, whose paramount chief told John Smith of how his warriors destroyed a white settlement. (See Quinn, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements [New York, 1977], 438.)  Researchers at the British Museum, however, have just turned up another intriguing bit of evidence that may provide a different explanation. Earlier this year they discovered, on a sixteenth-century watercolor map by colonist John White, the traces of a star symbol (possibly written in invisible ink) marking the site of a fort on Albemarle Sound, some miles away from Roanoke Island. The settlers may have relocated to this new site sometime before 1590, when an English relief expedition arrived to find the main settlement deserted. A future archaeological investigation will have to determine the validity of this new hypothesis; until then, historians will either content themselves with Quinn's idea, or with the possibility that the Roanoke colonists were devoured by Nordic wraiths.

P.S.: The title to this post refers to one of the more amusing student answers I received to an exam ID question ("Q: What was Roanoke?") back when I was a teaching assistant.

Dismal, but Free

Marronage, slaves' practice of running away from their masters and forming autonomous communities in remote areas, has received less attention from U.S. historians than it deserves. In part, this is because the largest and most famous runaway-slave communities in the hemisphere were in Caribbean and Latin American colonies, like Jamaica and Brazil, where planters lacked British North Americans' resources: a white majority population from whom officials could recruit slave patrols, and Native American neighbors willing to work as slave-catchers. Partly, this neglect is due to a lack of records; runaway slaves didn't leave many, and there were no large-scale military operations against maroon communities in the U.S., unless one includes the Seminole Wars.

Some of this neglect may now be ending. One of the largest harbors of maroons in North America, the Great Dismal Swamp, is the subject of an archaeological excavation by a team from American University. African slaves began running away to this immense wetland, situated in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, around 1700. By mid-century there were a number of small maroon communities on the region's few patches of high ground, whose inhabitants subsisted off of "corn, hogs, and fowls," and probably also the wild cattle that white travelers sometimes spotted in the region. Initially, the runaways received protection from white "borderers," squatters who were themselves taking advantage of the region's disputed political status to avoid eviction, and who received in-kind payment from maroons in exchange for looking the other way. Later, reinforced with African-American slaves who'd run away during the Revolutionary War, the maroons began to protect themselves by intimidating travelers who came too close. By the early nineteenth century, some were even working as wage laborers for local resource companies, including the contractors who built the Dismal Swamp Canal and thereby brought the region's isolation to an end. (See Isaac Weld, Travels through the States of North America, [2 vols., London, 1807], 1:180; Charles Royster, Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company [New York, 1999], 11-12, 250)

Archaeologist Dan Sayers and his assistants have located the remnants of several likely maroon dwellings in the Dismal Swamp, along with a small selection of material leavings and artifacts - "knife-cut bone," lead shot, and ceramics. Mainly these are very small remnants, suggesting that the locals threw very little away (and had little to throw away). Many of these artifacts show signs of re-use, and were probably originally Native American artifacts that runaways salvaged. Sayers and his team are therefore researching a group of people who lived lives of great privation, but were nonetheless free and able to hold off - or negotiate with - white Virginians and Carolinians who would otherwise have ended their "self-emancipation." (Marion Blackburn, "American Refugees," Archaeology, Sept./Oct. 2011, 49-58, quote p. 50.)

Now Silent, Upon a Peak in Darien

On May 1st I reported on the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union, whereby Scotland formally surrendered its independence to England and became part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. I implied that English anti-Catholicism and English bribes had much to do with the end of Scotland's sovereignty. However, in a new article in the Guardian, Rory Carroll attributes the end of Scottish independence to the kingdom's disastrous attempt to colonize Panama in the late 1690s. The now-obscure Scottish colony of New Caledonia cost Scotland hundreds of lives and one-fifth of its national wealth, and its collapse both bankrupted and demoralized the Scottish government. According to archaeologist Mark Horton, however, the failure of New Caledonia was not due to Scottish incompetence - the site was well-chosen and the death rate no higher than in 17th-century Virginia - but rather to Spanish military opposition and English indifference. The story reminds us, at any rate, that the margin of survival in Europe's 17th-century colonies was quite thin, and the consequences of failed colonies could be quite severe for the mother country.

Voyagers to the East, Part XI

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

The first Native Americans to visit England were brought over by English mariners for display as curiosities. There was no shortage of Englishmen interested in viewing see Brazilian "princes" or Inuit hunters, even if it meant paying for the privilege. Shakespeare observed that men who "will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar...will lay out ten to see a dead Indian" (The Tempest, Act II, Scene ii.)

A change occurred in the 1580s, after Queen Elizabeth I chartered the first English colonial venture to North America, the Virginia Company. In 1584 the company's chief proprietor, Sir Walter Raleigh, dispatched a vessel to survey the North American coast, look for settlement sites, and procure local Indians who could be trained as interpreters. The ship returned later that year with two Algonquian werowances (or petty chiefs), Manteo and Wanchese, from Croatan and Roanoke Islands off the coast of present-day North Carolina. The chiefs had come voluntarily, probably because they and their kinsmen had heard of other European incursions in the area (like the Spanish Jesuit mission in present-day Virginia) and wanted to gather intelligence on these new intruders.

The two chiefs resided for several months in London, more specifically at Durham House, the royal mansion that Elizabeth I had loaned to Walter Raleigh. There Raleigh's friend Thomas Hariot learned some of the visitors' language and prepared a rudimentary Algonquian syllabary for future colonists, along with a 36-letter alphabet for spelling Algonquian words. Hariot also taught the Indians a fair amount of English.

In the spring of 1585 Manteo and Wanchese returned home on one of the ships that the Virginia Company sent to Roanoke to establish its first settlement. Manteo subsequently became a close ally of the Roanoke colonists, probably because he regarded them as useful trading partners - and because his continued relationship with the English strangers provided him with political prestige. Wanchese, by contrast, turned his back on the English, probably because his people had to leave Roanoke Island after the colonists proved quarrelsome and warlike.

In 1586 Manteo returned to England with a Croatan companion, Towaye. The two men lived in London for nearly a year, and returned to Roanoke in 1587 with the second major party of Virginia Company colonists. Meanwhile, another Algonquian captured by Virginia Company officer Richard Grenville arrived in England in the fall of 1586. Grenville brought the captive to Devonshire, where he was baptized (March 1588) as "Rawly, a Wynganditoan." Perhaps Grenville intended to train Rawly as a translator, but he soon died and was buried in Bideford Parish, Devonshire, in April 1589.

Back in the Roanoke colony, Manteo remained a strong English ally and was baptized by colonial officials in August 1587. His subsequent fate is unknown, but Alden Vaughan speculates that his kinsmen, or other coastal Algonquians, may have killed him after one of many skirmishes between the trigger-happy English settlers and their Indian neighbors. As for the Roanoke colonists, it seems likely that they left their island early in 1588 and (as they had been planning to do) relocated to the shores of Chesapeake Bay. The Virginia Company lost contact with the colony during the Armada crisis of 1588 and the long Anglo-Spanish war that followed; relief expeditions in 1590 and 1603 found no trace of the colonists but were probably looking in the wrong place. There is documentary evidence that the relocated colonists were killed or captured by warriors of the Powhatan confederacy in 1607, just as another English expedition arrived in the Chesapeake to establish the colony of Jamestown. (Alden Vaughan, "Sir Walter Ralegh and His Indian Interpreters," William and Mary Quarterly 59 [April 2002]), 346-357.)

For the next entry in this series, click here.

Voyagers to the East, Part X

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

From the sixteenth-century Spanish viewpoint, North America was a backwater. Explorers like De Soto and Coronado had found no mines of gold and silver, and the indigenous population was too decentralized and too hostile (thanks to Soto and Coronado's tender mercies) for Spain to exploit. The southern Atlantic coast of the continent, however, was very familiar to home-bound Spanish mariners, who generally followed that coast after they left the Gulf of Mexico and picked up the Gulf Stream. In the 1550s King Phillip II of Spain supported the establishment of Spanish outposts in Florida to guard the treasure fleets and provide aid to shipwrecked sailors. In 1565, Spanish officer Pedro Menendez de Aviles finally accepted the king's commission and built a string of settlements on the Florida and South Carolina coast, anchored by the garrison town of Saint Augustine. Menendez didn't think small: he hoped one day to establish Spanish colonies in the Chesapeake Bay region, and so he encouraged Jesuit missionaries to open a mission for the Algonquian Indians living there.

Eight Jesuits did set out for the Chesapeake in 1570, accompanied by an Indian translator who was very familiar with the area and its native population. This man, the son of an Algonquian chief, had been captured by Spanish sailors in present-day Virginia in 1561. The mariners had brought him to Mexico City, where he learned Spanish, became a Christian, and adopted the name of his godfather, Viceroy Luis de Velasco. On at least two occasions during the next five years, Velasco traveled to Spain and was presented to Phillip II. By 1570 he was one of the most well-connected people in Spanish Florida, and not surprisingly the Jesuits named their new home on Virginia's York River after him: "Don Luis's Land." (David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America [Yale, 1992], 64-71.)

Unfortunately for the Jesuits, they established their mission during a time of prolonged famine, and the Algonquians declined to provide them with food. Moreover, "Don Luis" soon abandoned the missionaries and moved to a Native American village, where he proceeded to marry several women and live like the chief's son that he actually was. Facing mounting criticism and hostility from the Jesuits, Velasco soon decided to terminate their mission with extreme prejudice. In early 1571 he organized a war party which killed the eight missionaries and burned their chapel. (ibid, 71-72.)

Nor was that Luis de Velasco's last act of defiance toward Europeans. He later took the name Opechancanough, "He whose soul is white," and became an adviser to his brother, paramount chief Powhatan. When Powhatan died in 1617, Opechancanough became the military leader of Powhatan's confederacy, and in 1622 organized the military strike that killed over 300 English colonists and nearly destroyed the colony of Virginia. Opechancanough somehow survived the bloody ten-year war that followed, and was reportedly around 100 years old when, in 1646, an English settler finally shot him in the back near Jamestown. So ended the life of one of the first inhabitants of Virginia to have visited Europe.

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