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I n the summer of  Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, soldiers and sailors both in the service of Sir Walter Ralegh, first reached the Outer Banks of what is today the state of North Carolina. The new land, the home of Wingina and his people, impressed Barlowe.“The soile,” he wrote, “is the most plentifull, sweete, fruitfull, and wholesome of all the world.” The Indians welcomed the English, Barlowe noted. They entertained the explorers “with all love, and kindnes, and with as much bountie , after their manner, as they could possibly devise.” Barlowe “found the people most gentle, loving, and faithfull, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age.”1 And so it is here, in this New World Eden, where most stories of English colonization begin. History, in this sense, is all too often depicted as commencing with the arrival of the newcomers on American shores. But we are interested in a different story. In order to understand the murder of Wingina and its consequences, we must recognize that the peoples Barlowe and the sailors who accompanied him encountered had long histories of their own on this continent. Wingina’s story begins well before Ralegh’s ocean-weary settlers clambered out of their ships’ boats onto the sands of the Carolina Sounds. It is time for us to establish the setting, and the scene of the crime. In order to understand why a young colonist beheaded Wingina and why this act of violence mattered, we must understand something of the beliefs and values Wingina and his people carried into their encounter with the English newcomers. The Indians of the Carolina Outer Banks, these peoples of rivers, sounds, and sea, did not          O 0 0 25 50 Kilometers 25 50 Miles A T L A N T I C O C E A N P a m l i c o S o u n d A l b e m a r l e S o u n d Pamlico River Neuse River C u r r i t u c k S o u n d Chowan Rive r Roanoke River Wococon Inlet Mattamuskeet Lake A l l i g a t o r R i v e r P a s q u o t a n k R i v e r Roanoke Dasemunkepeuc Croatoan Pomeiooc Tramaskcooc Aquascogoc Secotan Neuusiooc Mascominge Chepanoc Tandaquomuc Waratan Mequopen Choanoac Metackwem Moratuc Pasquenoke Catokinge ROANOKE Croatan Sound CHOANOAC WEAPEMEOC S E C O T A N  . Map of Ossomocomuck. consider the place they lived a new world, and the English explorers intruded into an environment where Indian rules prevailed. At first, the English thought that the Indians called this new land Wingandacoa . The newcomers placed that name proudly in patents and documents and proclamations once they returned home, until they learned that it did not refer to a place at all. As Sir Walter Ralegh remembered later, “when some of my people asked the name of that Countrie, one of the Salvages answered Wingandacon which is to say, as you weare good clothes, or gay clothes.” The natives’ own name for the region into which these oddly-attired Englishmen had intruded was Ossomocomuck, a term that cannot be translated with certainty, but may mean something as appropriate and simple as the land that we inhabit, the dwelling house, or the house site.2 Ossomocomuck consisted of the coastal region of the North Carolina mainland, from the Virginia boundary south to today’s Bogue Inlet. Its limits to the east included the thin barrier islands of the Outer Banks and a number of larger islands located on the sounds between the two. Roanoke was one of these sheltered islands. It extended westward along a line that ran with the Chowan River south through the present-day locations of Plymouth, Washington, and New Bern.3 The geography of this region shifts constantly. Grasses cover the islands. In places there is soil suitable for agriculture, as well as stands of timber for housing and fuel. Still, wave and wind continually reshape the Carolina Sounds; they always will. Rain in the Carolina interior can swell rivers, and as these waters flow out to sea they deposit sand and sediment that close old inlets between the barrier islands and open new ones. Severe storms, the famous Atlantic hurricanes, only intensify the mutability of the Outer Banks. According to one study, Roanoke Island has seen its...

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