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W ingina learned of the arrival of newcomers and sailing ships during the second week of July . The Englishmen went ashore, perhaps on the island the natives called Hatarask, perhaps at Wococon, or perhaps farther north, near the present-day town of Southern Shores. We cannot know for sure. The Englishmen fired their guns, frightening a large flock of white cranes, they said, that “arose under us” and took flight “with such a crye redoubled by many Ecchoes, as if an armie of men had showted all together.”1 Someone could have heard this. Roanokes who had been fishing or hunting or gathering shellfish on the Outer Banks carried the news of the arrival of the English to Wingina at Dasemunkepeuc. He had been wounded in battle, sometime before the English arrived, “shotte in two places through the bodye, and once cleane thorough the thigh,” a factor that certainly shaped his understanding of these newcomers. We can only imagine the reaction of Wingina’s people to this discovery, this strange and unexpected news. There must have been feelings of both excitement and fear. Wingina’s people had encountered Europeans before, and they would have worried that these newcomers would be like the others.2 We know how other Indians, in other places, perceived Europeans at the time of their “first contact” with them. Many native peoples remember the event in their oral traditions, those stories handed down from one generation to another that encapsulated a people’s history. Indians in New England and elsewhere, for instance, described their feelings of awe at the large“floating islands” they saw drifting toward them. The two ships commanded by          G Amadas and Barlowe, though larger than Algonquian dugout canoes, were not that big, and only the unsophisticated “savages” of European racial fantasy would have mistaken them for islands. Still, there can be no doubt that these ships were unfamiliar, and they were piloted by strange men. Perhaps the newcomers were enemies, who came with hostile intent. But, then again, they might be friends and allies useful to a native community engaged in a war with its neighbors.3 We do not know the source of the conflict between Wingina and the Pomeioocs and their allies. They could have been fighting over access to and control of certain ecological resources, or over insults and slights real or imagined. Wingina may have met resistance as he attempted to consolidate his power over other communities. Or he may have been attempting to resist a rival’s efforts to extend power over Wingina’s towns. Wahunsonacock , to the north, violently attacked his most intransigent rivals, and we know that this conflict could claim enough lives to depopulate a region. We cannot know the case in Ossomocomuck with certainty, but Wingina, as weroance, sought assistance and allies, so he asked one of his lesser weroances, his “brother” Granganimeo, to investigate the newcomers. Thomas Harriot later wrote that the inhabitants of Roanoke Island, when they first saw the English, “began to make a great and horrible crye, as people which never befoer had seene men apparelled like us,” and that they made “out crys like wild beasts or men out of their wyts.” Perhaps this is so. They may have feared them as Spanish raiders, killers who casually took Indian slaves. Other Indians, in other places, reacted in this manner when they encountered Europeans for the first time. But here, at Roanoke, the evidence suggests another possibility. Wingina and his people, reasonably and rationally, began to try to make sense, to comprehend, the newcomers who had intruded into their world.4 But whose rationality? We have only one account of the initial meeting between Englishmen and Indians along the Carolina Outer Banks, only one eyewitness who left us a record of what transpired. Without question, Arthur Barlowe wrote with an agenda. He described the Carolina coast as a New World Eden, a land of plenty where the English would find life easy and profitable. Armed with his account, Sir Walter Ralegh hoped to generate support for his American enterprise, to encourage the wealthy in England to put their money behind the risky prospect of settling an English outpost on American shores. Barlowe’s account must be read with this          objective in mind. His account was, in a sense, an advertisement, and Barlowe may have cast his experiences in the most positive light. Discerning the agenda of an author is a challenge with which all...

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