Research The Lost Colony of Roanoke

This past week, my kids and I made the long journey south to the site of the last known location of the lost colony.

There isn’t much to see, and there isn’t even a decent interpretive center there. It seems failed colonies don’t get the same level of funding and interest as the more successful ventures. I suspect the archaeological sites of the failed Huguenot settlements in the Carolinas get a similar short shrift.

All that is left is a recreation of the earthworks on the site of the original fort, and a nature walk through the woods where the colonists likely lived for a few months before whatever fate was theirs befell them. Sad, really. No markers for digs, no sign of the trench found by White on his return and documented in Hakluyt, nothing of the post market with that enigmatic “CRO”.

Some things I learned, though, on this trip.

1) Thomas Hariot knew and documented all the colonists needed to know to be self-sufficient at that site.

2) The ratio of gentlemen to craftsmen and farmers was not correct; many people would have needed to work the fields to raise enough food for the 117 colonists.

3) The palisade, if the earthworks were made correctly, would not have been big enough to house the colonists.

4) It is very unlikely that the colonists would have stayed at that site and waited to be taken out by the hostile natives. Since Manteo, a Croatan Indian, was their translator and Native guide, this is especially true.

I suspect the colonists split up, with some staying at the palisade with the artillery and heavy gear, defending the fort and waiting for White’s imminent return from England with supplies, while the others went south with Manteo. Perhaps a third group went north in search of Copper mines or a new site on the Chesapeake, which was the original plan.

I’m inclined to believe Lee Miller’s version of events, that in the 20 years between 1587 and 1607, all the colonists were either assimilated into local tribes, or were killed or taken as slaves to work in the copper mines.

In any event, they are all lost to us now. Only archeology and excavation on the island will teach us any more, and given the deafening silence around this site, I doubt that will be done in any serious way any time soon. Farewell, Virginia Dare, and all you other lost colonists. May you rest in peace.

I’m almost done with Richard Hakluyt’s “voyages”, which ends with a fascinating account of Sir Walter Raleigh’s voyage to what is now Guyana, South America.

For those who have studied the period, this is old news, but for those of us who are amateurs…

In 1583 Raleigh began a campaign to create a colony in Virginia with the dual purpose of extracting gold from the New World, and serving as a friendly base of operations for the English pirates (I’m sorry, they preferred the term “privateers”) operating on the Spanish main. Raleigh himself never went to Virginia, but conducted operations remotely from London. In 1587, in a very controversial voyage, his pilot, Fernandez, dropped off the “lost colony” on the island of Roanoke, poorly provisioned, months late, and hundreds of miles south of the intended destination in Chesapeake Bay, in the midst of hostile Native Americans. This so he could go chase prizes on the Spanish main before heading home.

The following year, when the colony should be getting supplies two or three times a year, no ships sailed from England, having been sequestered for the defense of the homeland from the Spanish Armada in 1588. Two years later Governor White finally returned to find the island abandoned, and a cryptic note from the colonists indicating they moved to another island.

That’s all most of us have heard of the story. But here’s a new piece of news to me, anyway. Five years later, Raleigh outfitted his own expedition to the New World, with fifty soldiers and provisions for six months, and headed for…Guyana?

You may be wondering why he didn’t go to his established claim in North America, and pull together the survivors of his original colony. Why did he instead go to the enormous expanse of untamed jungle between the Amazon and the Orinoco rivers, in Spanish claimed territory? Well, I can’t answer the first question yet, but the answer to the second question is gold.

Raleigh had gotten reports of an entire city of gold in the highlands of Guyana that the Spanish had missed in their sacking of the Inca empire. The city was called Moreno by the natives, but the Spaniards called it “El Dorado”.

So rather than go and relieve his struggling colony, he spent all his money chasing gold in South America. He wasn’t alone; in a period of 20 or 30 years, the British, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish began colonization ventures on that coast, and sent expedition after expedition in search of the lost city of gold. The lost colony of Roanoke was left on the scrap-heap of history as a result.

I thought that was interesting.

I’m in the midst of reading a first-hand account of Cavendish’s “journey round the earth” (1586) in Hakluyt, and I’m struck by the fact that these Brittish “explorers” were truly pirates, raiding and pillaging honest and innocent people throughout the difficult landscape of Spanish occupied America. If they were caught, they were killed without trial. If they ran out of food or water, they either needed to steal more, or die.

After the escapades of Hawkins and Frobisher, the quiet and peaceful journey of Amadas and Barlowe in 1584 to look for a place to “settle” (actually, to create a pirate base) in what is now Virginia, is refreshing. They must have been shocked to find a beautiful landscape without ice, rampaging natives, or a Spanish colony, in so temperate a climate. These are the real heroes of the era, in my mind, and we’ve forgotten them under the litany of rape and pillage performed by the daring “Privateer Sea Dogs” of Cavendish, Hawkins, Frobisher, and the rest.

Ok, so I’ve finally gotten to the part of Hakluyt’s book “Voyages and Discoveries” that is about the trips to Virginia and the story of the lost colony.

Wow.

Wow, wow, wow!

Almost EVERYTHING we know about this event in history is a second or third-hand interpretation of these few pages of original accounts of the voyages. EVERYTHING. I feel like a coal miner with a handful of gold…