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P emisapan was shot, took flight, was hunted down, and was then beheaded, killed by colonists who feared that he was conspiring against them. It is a story few people know about. Most Americans, after all, are far more interested in the English struggle to conquer a wilderness than in the collateral damage inflicted upon a small Indian village and its people. Yet Pemisapan’s story mattered in deep and important ways to the Algonquian peoples who lived in Ossomocomuck late in the sixteenth century, and when the English resumed their efforts to colonize the region, his surviving followers forced them to live with the consequences of their treacherous attack. Governor Lane tells us that he would have remained on the island had not the hurricane arisen, but he needed to justify to Ralegh the decision to abandon his post. The simple fact is that he knew he could not safely remain on Roanoke. The slaying of Pemisapan and the savagery of the English attack made this impossible. When Drake lost the few ships he could spare in the storm in the summer of , Lane seized the opportunity to evacuate. He and the English colonists abandoned Ossomocomuck in a hurry. Much was lost. The sailors, pulling themselves together in the hurricane’s aftermath, cast the colonists’ excess baggage overboard. They had been at sea with Drake for over a year, and badly wanted to return home. As a result, Harriot’s notes and research material and much of John White’s artwork ended up on the ocean floor. Three of Lane’s men, if they did not die in the skirmish at Roanoke or in the assault on Dasemunkepeuc , were left behind in the rush to depart. We already have mentioned          V the several hundred African slaves and Central American Indians whom Drake may have deposited somewhere on the Outer Banks. These would have been a first and almost entirely forgotten “Lost Colony,” ignored by generations of American mythmakers who chose to believe, as one antiquarian put it, that only men of “the purest Anglo-Saxon Blood” colonized America.1 But something more may have been lost in  at Roanoke Island. The English, at least in part, had launched their invasion of America on waves of benevolent intent. Sir Walter Ralegh had premised his plans for America on a “dream of liberation,” in which Englishmen would carry civility and English Christianity to America, bringing benefits to natives and newcomers alike. Ralegh’s empire, if it had lived up to expectations, would have been an Anglo-American empire.2 It did not live up to those expectations, of course. Algonquians had little interest in playing along, once they recognized what the English expected of them. For Wingina’s people to follow the path of progress and civility that Harriot, Hakluyt, and others believed them capable of would have required that they abandon their religion and the cultural assumptions on which it was based. Ralegh’s empire failed to live up to his expectations, as well, because of the violence of Lane’s soldiers and the diseases his men carried. The disappointment of English metropolitans with this result is readily apparent in the writings of Harriot and the younger Richard Hakluyt . Pemisapan, the weroance who with his advisers had initially welcomed the English into Ossomocomuck and invited them to settle on Roanoke, was dead, killed by Edward Nugent in an act of horrific personal violence. Murder replaced philanthropy. Harriot, indeed, noted that “some of our companie towards the ende of the yeare, shewed themselves too fierce, in slaying some of the people, in some towns, upon causes that on our part, might easily have bene borne withall.” Most historians leave it at that and move on to the next colonizing effort. Lane and his men attacked Dasemunkepeuc . They killed Pemisapan and his followers. The English then left, and with their departure the story of the first colony comes to a close. Instead of asking about the consequences of the English attack and the wreckage it caused in destroyed human lives, historians have focused on the English: Was Lane justified in acting as he did? Could he claim selfdefense , or the good of the colony, as grounds for his duplicitous attack on Pemisapan’s people? Because Europeans wrote the few surviving documents, historians have followed the English colonists, and their paper trail, as they          moved across the Atlantic. But the events that occurred in the villages of...

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