-
6. Lost Colonists, Lost Indians
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
I t is here that the story of the Roanoke ventures, and of the killing of an Indian and its consequences, moves slowly but certainly into the realm of myth, where what we wish we knew far exceeds that of which we can be certain. On August , , Governor White’s daughter Eleanor gave birth to Virginia Dare, “the first Christian borne in Virginia.” Meanwhile , Simon Ferdinando had finished unloading the colonists’ supplies and refitting and repairing his ships for the return to England. On August , the colonists, who had become increasingly edgy and frightened in the wake of the Dasemunkepeuc attack, demanded “with one voice” that White “returne himselfe to England, for the better and sooner obtaining of supplies , and other necessaries for them.” White resisted. He had a grandchild now, and must have found the prospect of leaving his daughter behind heart-wrenching and extremely difficult. He feared that people at home would think ill of him for leading colonists to a country where he did not intend to stay himself. Furthermore, White knew that the colonists intended to leave Roanoke Island “to remove . miles further up into the maine presently.” If he were absent, White said, his “stuffe and goods, might be both spoiled, and most of it pilfered away in the carriage, so that at his returne, hee should be either forced to provide himselfe of all such things againe, or els at his coming againe to Virginia, finde himselfe utterly unfurnished .” White was now grasping at straws, and those who followed him to “Virginia” knew it. Only when the exasperated colonists promised “to make him bonde under all their handes, and seales, for the safe preserving of all his goods for him at his returne to Virginia, so that if any part L C, L I thereof were spoiled, or lost, they would see it restored to him,” did he finally relent and board the ship.1 By any standard it was a horrific journey home. White sailed on the smaller of the two ships returning to England. At the outset, one of the bars that ran through the capstan broke, causing the other two bars to spin around rapidly, injuring most of the fifteen sailors “so sore, that some of them never recovered from it.” The ship drifted. Soon the men ran out of fresh water, and with most of the crew incapacitated, White limped into Ireland in mid-October. He was not able to deliver to Ralegh “his letters and other advertisements concerning his last voyage and state of the planters” until late in November.2 As White struggled home, the queen, in October, ordered that no ships leave English ports. She feared the Spanish Armada, and the prospect of a Spanish invasion. White lobbied persistently, however, and in , before the Battle of the Armada, was allowed “two small pinnesses” with which to relieve the colonists. The expedition was a disaster. The pilots of the two ships pursued a number of prizes, but were attacked themselves by a much larger French ship. In the ensuing battle, White “was wounded twise in the head, once with a sword, and another time with a pike, and hurt also in the side of the buttock with a shot.” He was lucky to make it back to port.3 Not until was White able to sail, at long last, for Roanoke. Three ships, the Hopewell, the John Evangelist, and the Little John, left Plymouth that March, sailing at a leisurely pace across the Atlantic. The expedition traded with Indians on Dominica.At Cape Tiburon,White wrote,“we found the bones and carkases of divers men, who had perished (as wee thought) by famine in those woods, being either straglers from their company, or landed by some men of warre,” a bleak symbol of the many lost colonists and doomed sailors whose stories have never been recorded.4 Finally, in August, nearly five months after leaving England, the expedition anchored off Hatorask. White saw “a great smoake rise in the Ile of Roanoak neere the place where I left our Colony in the yeere , which smoake put us in good hope that some of the Colony were there expecting my returne out of England.” The next morning, August , White and some of the company climbed into the ship’s boats to cross to Roanoke. White instructed the gunner on board the Admiral to “make readie minions and a Falkon well loden, and to shoot them...
