The Head in Edward Nugent's Hand: Roanoke's Forgotten Indians

Prologue

D rive onto Roanoke Island. Whether you take the bridge from Nag’s Head or come from the mainland by way of Mann’s Harbor, you will be greeted with a road sign bearing the same message. Roanoke Island, the sign reads, was the “birthplace of America’s First English Child, .” And so one story has been privileged and remembered above all others. It has been that way for a long time. North Carolina’s Edward Graham Daves, the first president of the Roanoke Island Memorial Association, resented what he considered the unwarranted historical attention lavished on the English settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth Plantation to his north, the respective stomping grounds of flamboyant Cavaliers and stern Calvinists. So what if those colonization efforts produced permanent settlements ? Daves argued in  that the attempts at Roanoke and the birth of Virginia Dare were events “of supreme importance in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race in America.” On this island, Daves asserted, “the seed was sown which was eventually to yield the richest harvest: the direct fruit of these efforts was the colony of Jamestown, and Raleigh is the real pioneer of American civilization.” Another North Carolinian, O. R. Mangum, wrote in  that to Roanoke Island “belongs a unique honor for all ages to come.” It was “the birthplace of the first girl of English parents in America , for shortly after the arrival of the colonists Virginia Dare was born.” ix  In the end an Irish man serving me, one Nugent . . . undertooke him, and following him in the woods overtooke him, and I in some doubt least we had lost both the king, and my man by our own negligence to have been intercepted by the savages, we met him returning out of the woods with Pemisapan’s head in his hand. —   With this, “North Carolina won the distinction of being the mother of the first white child born of Anglo-Saxon blood on the continent of America .” The nation was thus founded on the Carolina Sounds, and not in Virginia or Massachusetts. And so it went. Roanoke, wrote one historian, was “the first stone laid in the great structure of English colonization and expansion.” It was, another argued, the first home for “the first fore runners of the English-speaking millions now in America,” where “was turned the first spade of earth to receive English seed.” At Roanoke, as well, began “the life of the English church in the new world.”1 But what of the Indians who greeted these colonists and ultimately decided their fate? They were here first, but their stories were considered irrelevant by Daves, Mangum, and scores of other early historians. History and memory, it is clear, often walk hand in hand. Certain stories become part of the record. They are meaningful, significant, and resonant. They provide important answers to what we consider the important questions. They help us make sense of ourselves, or they educate or entertain us. Other stories we cast aside. They are uninteresting and trivial, it seems, so we forget them. We must be honest about this. We make choices about the stories we want to tell. We can continue to cast the story of Roanoke in mythic terms, if we choose, and view it as the opening act in the great drama of English colonization in America. This is what the Roanoke Island Memorial Association did when, in , it erected a monument at the site of “Fort Raleigh,” on the northern tip of the island, commemorating the birth of Virginia Dare and the baptism of England’s first Christian Indian convert, Manteo. Or we can follow in the footsteps of the Memorial Association ’s successor, the Roanoke Island Historical Association, whose efforts to retrieve the island’s past from historical oblivion culminated in the commissioning of the “Lost Colony” pageant and efforts to reconstruct a fort at what is now the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.2 Efforts such as these can shape how we remember historical events and help define the record and the significance of the past. Many who know anything at all about Sir Walter Ralegh’s colonizing ventures, for instance, learn it from Paul Green’s “symphonic drama,” The Lost Colony, staged at the Waterside Theater on the Fort Raleigh site for the first time in  and, with a few exceptions, every summer since then. Green made his choices about the stories he wanted to tell. In the opening...