set up new homes in an unfamiliar place. Some historians think some or all of the colonists might have wanted to separate from the Church of England and practice their own religion, like the Pilgrims who settled in Massachusetts thirty-three years later. Other historians think the financial incentives might have been more important: Each male colonist was supposed to receive five hundred acres of land.
One of the things I didn’t remember about the Roanoke Colony-or had never known-was that there were a few trials runs before John White, the Dares, and more than a hundred other men, women, and children showed up on Roanoke Island at the end of July 1587. Various all-male groups of English explorers and soldiers inhabited the island on and off beginning in 1584. In many ways, these trial runs were disasters and planted the seeds of more disaster. The Englishmen expected the local people to supply them with food-never mind that there was a drought and the natives had barely enough food for themselves. And never mind that the English acted almost schizophrenic, alternately befriending and killing their new neighbors. When the English thought an Indian might have stolen a silver communion cup, they burned an entire Indian village and destroyed the villagers’ corn. Later, they stole and ate dogs belonging to other Indians. They also kidnapped a prominent Indian leader’s young son. None of this could have endeared the English to the natives. When Virginia Dare’s parents and their fellow Roanoke colonists arrived in the summer of 1587, they expected to find fifteen soldiers who had been left to guard an English fort. Instead, they found a skeleton, presumably belonging to a soldier who’d been killed by Indians. Nobody knows what happened to the other fourteen soldiers.
That first discovery must have been disheartening, but there was plenty of bad news to come. Six days after they arrived, one of the colonists, George Howe, was killed by Indians while he was out alone looking for crabs. He left behind his young son, now an orphan. When the colonists decided to retaliate for Howe’s murder and attack a nearby Indian village, they discovered partway into the attack that they’d made a huge mistake: The village was occupied by Native Americans who were friendly toward the English, not the enemies they expected to find.
Amazingly, those Indians seem to have been willing to look past that error. But the Roanoke colonists still had plenty of other problems. For a variety of reasons, they’d failed to load up on necessary supplies-including food-on their way to America. And because the captains of the ships bringing them to America had wanted to spend as much of the sailing season as they could privateering (a common theme in the history of the English on Roanoke Island), the colonists didn’t arrive until late summer, when it was too late to plant any crops. Finally, one of the things the English had learned from their previous trial runs was that Roanoke Island was actually a lousy place for the English to try to settle. This time around, the colonists intended to settle farther north, in the Chesapeake Bay area. But Simon Fernandez, the pilot leading their fleet of ships, reportedly refused to take them anywhere else. Much of the speculation about the Roanoke Colony’s fate has been directed at Simon Fernandez. Was he intentionally sabotaging the colony? If so, who told him to do that? And why? Was he secretly working for Spain? Or was he taking bribes from some enemy of Raleigh’s within the English court?
Or have Fernandez’s intentions simply been misinterpreted because his side of the story is lost to history?
Regardless, Simon Fernandez did agree to let one person go back to England to plead for more supplies: John White. According to his own account, White was very reluctant to leave Roanoke, but the other colonists persuaded him that his word would carry the most clout-he would be the one most likely to be able to get help.
Once he got back to England, White faced obstacle after obstacle. The English were worried about a naval attack from Spain, so Queen Elizabeth ordered English ships to stay in port, to be ready to defend their country. At one point, White had permission to sail, but then the permission was revoked before he could actually leave. Another time, White managed to leave in a small ship with supplies and fifteen new colonists, but they never made it to America. Instead, the ship did a lot of privateering and then came under attack by French privateers. White himself was injured twice during the ensuing fight, and the ship was so badly damaged that it had to return to England. A few months later, the Spanish Armada attacked. But even after England defeated Spain in that epic battle, the Roanoke Colony investors were apparently too distracted to put together another rescue attempt right away.
White finally set sail for America on March 20, 1590, nearly three years after he’d left his colony behind. And he was able to sail then only because he agreed not to take any new colonists. He complained in his writings that he wasn’t even allowed to take a boy to act as his servant during the trip. The ship’s captain wanted as much room as possible to store the treasures he expected to gain through privateering. And he took a very leisurely path toward Roanoke, detouring to help capture a Spanish ship. As White himself described the situation, “both Governors, Masters, and sailers, regard(ed) very smally the good of their countreymen” in the Roanoke Colony.
The ship White was on, the Hopewell, finally neared Roanoke Island in mid-August 1590. The first evening, White was encouraged when he saw smoke rising from the area where he’d left the colony. The next morning, seeing smoke rising from another island nearby, White and others from the Hopewell decided to search there first. But this turned out to be a wild goose chase: No humans were in sight, and the fire evidently had natural causes. The second morning, two boats rowed toward Roanoke, but one capsized in the dangerous waters, and seven men drowned. By the time the survivors had dealt with this disaster, they decided it was too late and getting too dark to go to Roanoke. Anchored nearby, in sight of a fire on Roanoke Island, White and the others called out and played the trumpet and sang familiar English songs, in an effort to get the colonists’ attention. White heard no reply, and in the morning when he and the sailors were able to land on Roanoke, they discovered that the fire was only from dry grass and dead trees. On their way to the colony site, they saw footprints in the sand that White concluded belonged to Indians, but they met no one.
The rest of the story is as Andrea and Katherine told it: White and the men with him found the colony site deserted and mostly destroyed, but with CRO carved on an nearby tree and CROATOAN carved on a post of the wooden fort (which the kids in this book refer to as a fence, though White would have called it a palisade). White was upset to find that some of his own possessions-including a suit of armor-had been dug up from their hiding places in trunks and left to rot and rust and spoil. He blamed enemy natives for this. But he was overjoyed by the carved CROATOAN, especially since there was no cross carved along with the word. A cross was the sign he and the other colonists had agreed upon to mean that they had left the island in distress. White concluded that his colonists were safe with the friendly Croatoan tribe on nearby Croatoan Island (probably the island now known as Hatteras).
White intended to go to Croatoan Island the very next day. But a storm blew up in the night, and a series of disasters caused the Hopewell to lose three of its four anchors. At first, the plan was to go to Trinidad to make repairs and get supplies before coming back to search for the colonists on Croatoan. But continued violent weather blew the Hopewell far off course, and it ended up in the Azores, in the mid-Atlantic. From there, the ship’s captain decided to return to England.
And that was the end of the Hopewell’s efforts to find the Roanoke colonists.
In 1593, White wrote a letter to a man named Richard Hakluyt describing his 1590 voyage. By then-six years after he’d last seen his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter; three years after he’d made it back across the ocean to search for them-he seemed to have a philosophical attitude toward his losses. But he was still praying for the safety of those he had left behind at Roanoke.
After that 1593 letter, John White vanished from history almost as completely as the rest of his family. Some believe that, since he wrote that last letter from Ireland, he must have lived out his days there, on land belonging to Sir Walter Raleigh. Others point to records of a Brigit White appointed to administer the estate of her late brother, John White, in 1606. They say this means Governor John White must have died that year-even though it’s impossible to know if this is the right John White. Still others believe that White might have returned to America yet again to look for his family, just on a voyage that wasn’t very well documented. (This is the theory that I would want to believe, even if it didn’t help the plot of my book.)
Regardless of what happens to them in life, artists can hope to live on through their work after they die. Woodcuts of White’s drawings were published in 1590, but for many years his original work was lost. Some of his drawings showed up in 1788, and they were eventually purchased by the British Museum. Because of growing interest in his work, The American Drawings of John White was published in 1964, as a joint project between the museum and the University of North Carolina Press. As Andrea boasts, White’s work really is praised for his sensitivity and his depiction of Native Americans as human beings, not completely alien creatures.
For the past four hundred years, Virginia Dare and the other people John White left behind on Roanoke Island have been referred to as the Lost Colonists. What constantly amazed me, researching this book, was how poorly that term fits. It’s not exactly that the colonists were lost; it’s more that looking for them just wasn’t a very high priority for anyone besides John White. In more modern times, if we’d been forced to leave astronauts behind on
