Parramore 2001

North Carolina Office of Archives and History
The "Lost Colony" Found: A Documentary Perspective

Author(s): Thomas C. Parramore
Source: The North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 1 (JANUARY 2001), pp. 67-83
Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and History
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23522231
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The "Lost Colony" Found: A Documentary Perspective
Thomas C. Parramore
AfterWalter
RalphRaleigh
Lane's sent
abortive attempt
another to colonize
expedition there in Roanoke Island
1587 under in 1585-1586,
the leadership Sir
of John
White. The second colony, comprising 115 men, women, and children, arrived on
September 27, 1587. Finding themselves ill equipped to reside on Roanoke, perhaps
because of a drought, they persuaded White to return to England for supplies. When
he finally got back to the island in 1590, his colony had disappeared.
Fifteen years ago, the research and writings of English historian David Beers Quinn
brought effective closure to the daunting mystery of the Lost Colony. His thesis was a
deft blending of logical deductions and subtle inferences drawn from early documents,
some of them his own discoveries. There seems to have been no scholarly work on the
subject since the last of Quinn's books appeared.
Quinn's thesis posits that John White's colony, after his departure in August 1587,
probably moved north to live near or among the Chesapeake Indians on the south shore
of Chesapeake Bay, the colony's original destination when it sailed for America. There,
he argues, Chief Powhatan, warned by his priests of danger from unnamed people east
of his confederacy, had both the Chesapeakes and Roanoke colonists massacred in
April 1607.1
In his small volume of 1985, The Lost Colonists: Their Fortune and Probable Fate,
Quinn chides his North Carolina colleagues for their skepticism toward Virginia
chroniclers John Smith, first head of the Jamestown colony, and William Strachey,
from 1609 to 1612 the colony's secretary. This has resulted, he believes, in an
"inadequate knowledge of their work and, especially, of how far they could be relied
upon." This, in turn, he believes, explains why North Carolina's own historians failed
to solve the Lost Colony mystery.2
These charges are inaccurate and unfair. Strachey promises, early in his 1612 history
of Jamestown, to reveal the colonists' "miserable and untymely destiny." But he then
fails to say that they settled among the Chesapeakes or even left "South Virginia," as
the region below the Dismal Swamp was known. Smith supposed that some of the
colonists were still alive when his three search parties set off in 1608 into what became
northeastern North Carolina. But, finding "little hope and lesse certaintie" about the
colony, he assumed that they "were all dead" and, owing to the vagueness of the reports,
1. David Beers Quinn, The Lost Colonists : Their Fortune and Probable Fate (Raleigh: Division of Archives
and History, Department of Cultural Resources, 1984), 15-42.
2. Quinn, Lost Colonists, 51.
VOLUME LXXVIII • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2001
68 Thomas C. Parramore
had presumably been so for some time. He does not speculate on when, where, or how
they died.3 Far from supporting Quinn's thesis, both sources effectively refute it.
Yet if, as Quinn states, Strachey's "basic authenticity" is established, one must pay
close attention to Strachey's book and especially to his claim that the colonists were
slaughtered "at Roanoak." Indeed, Strachey makes this assertion in three different
places.4 Strachey's assertion is dismissed by most scholars on the compelling ground that
White, returning to Roanoke Island in 1590, saw no sign of a hostile encounter, still
less a massacre, and had no cause to suspect one.5 Furthermore, archaeologists have
produced no evidence of a struggle there.
Quinn is among those historians who misconstrue the term "at Roanoak," where,
Strachey insists, the colonists were killed. But seventeenth-century Virginians used the
name "Roanoak" to signify the region bordering what some early maps call the "Sea of
Roanoke," modern Albemarle and Currituck Sounds. When, for example, Virginia fur
trader and explorer Nathaniel Batts met Quaker founder George Fox on the lower
Chowan River in 1672, Batts boasted of having formerly served as "governor of
Roanoak," the thinly settled area on the northern sounds that in 1663 became Carolina.
It was this region, not Roanoke Island specifically, that Strachey almost certainly was
referring to in his remarks on the Lost Colony's fate.6
Ethnohistorian Helen Rountree, in her 1990 volume Pocahontas's People, observes
that the Roanoke Island refugees "may have been killed at the time Quinn suggests,"
days before Jamestown's colonists reached Chesapeake Bay in 1607. But, she adds,
without giving her reasons, "if any such attack occurred, it was on the Carolina
mainland." Strachey, she notes, mentions the Roanoke slaughter, on one hand, and
Powhatan's destruction of the Chesapeakes, on the other, in different places. "[A]t no
point," she continues, ". . . does [Strachey] indicate any connection between the
Roanoke colonists and the obliterated Chesapeakes." Strachey, she observes, believed
that "most, if not all, Roanoke survivors [took] refuge among the Carolina tribes," where
Jamestown leaders sent searchers to look for them.7
Strachey's placement of the colony's massacre "at Roanoke" (northeastern North
Carolina) receives support from another early source. As John White was leaving
Roanoke Island for England in 1587, his colonists told him that "they were prepared
to remove from Roanoak 50 miles into the maine." Their haste to leave was almost
3. John Smith, The generall historie of Virginia (1624; reprint, Murfreesboro, N.C.: Johnson Publishing Co.,
n.d.), 74,88. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund, eds., The historie of Travel! into Virginia Britania, by William
Strachey, gent. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), 15.
4. Wright and Freund, historie ofTravell into Virginia Britania, 26, 34, 58.
5. David Beers Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, eds., The First Colonists: Documents on the Planting of the First
English Settlements in North America 1584-1590 (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, Department of
Cultural Resources, 1982), 123-127.
6. Quinn assumes that "at Roanoak" refers to "the settlers of the Roanoke colony who had moved to the
Chesapeake area." Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 367. On the use of the term "Roanoke" by seventeenth
century Virginians, see, for example, reference by Thos. Ward to an expedition against Yeopim Indians
"abt. Roanoake," October 20, 1645, Norfolk County Minute Book B, Folio 36, p. 294, Norfolk County
Courthouse, Great Bridge, Virginia; on Nathaniel Batts, see William L. Saunders, ed., The Colonial
Records of North Carolina, 10 vols. (Raleigh: State of North Carolina, 1886-1890), 1:217.
7. Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 21-22.
THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW
The "Lost Colony" Found: A Documentary Perspective 69
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Prior to the settlement of the Roanoke colony in 1587, John White, with the assistance of surveyor Thomas Harriot,
surveyed and charted the territory of Virginia from Cape Charles to Cape Lookout, pictured in this 1585 map.
Roanoke Island (Roanoac) appears for the first time on any map. Original in the British Museum, London,
reproduced from William P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1958), plate 12.
70 Thomas C. Parramorh
certainly because the neighboring mainland Indians, notably the Secotans, were
irreconcilably anti-English and the island itself, according to modern findings, was in
the early stages of a withering drought. It was probably for the latter reason that White
had to return for supplies to England. Apparently, Roanoke Island was not considered
a permanent dwelling place.8
It seems clear that the colonists did not intend to go to the south shore of Chesapeake
Bay, reckoned by Ralph Lane a year earlier as being 130 miles from Roanoke Island.
(The actual distance is about seventy miles by land, a bit more by sea.) Moreover, Lane
believed that the Chesapeake Indians in 1586 may have conspired with Secotan chief
Wingina to destroy Lane's colony, and in fact, English visitors to the Chesapeakes in
the spring of 1607 met a decidedly hostile reception.9
Where, then, did White's colonists intend to go from inhospitable Roanoke Island?
Certainly not southwest or west, as only actively hostile Indians, especially the Secotans,
and impenetrable swamps lay in those directions. But fifty miles northwest lay the lands,
and only these, of the certifiably friendly Weapemeoc tribe. In 1586, Chief Okisko had
sent two dozen Weapemeoc emissaries to Roanoke Island to pledge his fealty to Sir
Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth.10 His was the only sixteenth-century New World
tribe to submit formally to English sovereignty and, more to the point, the only friendly
mainland Indians within fifty miles of Roanoke Island.
In short, there are strong reasons, supported by the best extant documentation, why
the colonists should have gone, and almost certainly did go, to live among or near the
Weapemeocs and equally impressive and documented reasons why they should not, and
did not, leave to reside in the Chesapeake country. Other primary documents underscore
these conclusions.
When Philip Amadas and Ralph Lane first visited Weapemeoc in August 1585, they
learned of its alluring abundance. Within days after his return to Roanoke Island from
Weapemeoc, Lane wrote historian and geographer Richard Hakluyt that they had
"discovered the maine[land] to bee the goodliest soile under the cope of heaven, so
abounding with sweete trees, that bring such sundry rich and most pleasant gummes,
grapes of such greatnes, yet wild, as France, Spaine nor Italy hath no greater." In another
letter to Sir Francis Walsingham, secretary to Queen Elizabeth, Lane seems to have
enclosed a crude map, its legends revealing a "great store of fishe" and "great red grapis
very pleasant" there. The fish weirs of Weapemeoc appear in his narrative of 1585 as
the most productive known to the colonists.11 All of these were reasons why the
8. Quinn and Quinn, First Colonists, 126; David W. Stahle et al., "The Lost Colony and Jamestown
Droughts," Science 280 (1998): 564-567.
9. Quinn and Quinn, First Colonists, 25; David B. Quinn, ed., "Observations Gathered out of 'a Discourse of
the Plantation of the Southern Colony in Virginia by the English, 1606,' Written by that honorable gentleman,
Master George Percy" (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967), 8. In April 1586, Ralph Lane,
leader of Raleigh's first colony, informed of a plot by Wingina to slaughter the English, staged a preemptive
attack on Wingina's mainland town, killing the chief himself.
10. Quinn and Quinn, First Colonists, 36-37.
11. Quinn and Quinn, First Colonists, 22 (first quotation), 33, 36-37; anonymous cartographer, "A
discription of the land of Virginia" (map) in William P. Cumming, Mapping the North Carolina Coast:
Sixteenth-Century Cartography and the Roanoke Voyages (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History,
Department of Cultural Resources, 1988), 131, plate 22 (second and third quotations).
Roanoke colonists would have been wise not just to sojourn in Weapemeoc territory
while White was away but, if possible, to establish long-term residence there.
The Weapemeocs occupied the west side of southern Currituck Sound and north
side of Albemarle Sound (the "Sea of Roanoke") including both sides of the lower
Chowan River, according to Lane. It would have been quick and easy for the colonists
to reach the place in the pinnace, a light sailing vessel that White left at Roanoke Island
when he departed. Both Indians and colonists could have subsisted in this domain, even
in times of drought—whereas resources would have been strained in Croatoan leader
Manteo's small and struggling tribe. The colonists in July 1587 had found the Croatoans,
who resided south of Roanoke Island, near modern-day Cape Hatteras, to be miserably
deficient in grain.12
Hence, the very sources in which Quinn urges readers to place their faith make clear
that the colonists in 1587 were already prepared, when John White left them, to move
from Roanoke Island across Albemarle Sound to Weapemeoc. The documents further
suggest that they apparently did so, presumably within days or, at most, scant weeks after
White left and that they were subsequently massacred in that vicinity. But these sources,
although they show where the Lost Colony went, why, approximately when, and with
what result, do not disclose the cause of its destruction—and here uncertainty remains.
Exactly who killed the colonists and under what circumstances?
In 1625, English historian Samuel Purchas related in his book Virginia's Verger a tale
Smith had told him, evidently more than a decade after the fact. It was Powhatan's claim
to Smith that he had been present at the colonists' massacre, and he showed Smith some
European hardware to confirm it. But it is doubtful that Smith took the tale seriously,
especially as he never mentioned it in his own writings. In any event, Purchas wrote
that Powhatan confessed to Smith that he had killed "those at Roanoke."13
Powhatan's hardware might have come in trade or otherwise from any number of
sources—English, Spanish (including the 1570-1572 Jesuit mission on the York River),
Indian, or derelict ships—and he had ample reason to try to intimidate Smith with it.
Helen Rountree notes that Purchas's revelation on this point appears in the context of
"an anti-Indian polemic" and should be regarded with skepticism.14
Rountree's wariness seems warranted. Strachey claims that Powhatan attacked the
Chesapeakes after his priests warned that unnamed people from the direction of
Chesapeake Bay sought to harm him. Quinn infers that the Roanoke colonists, residing,
12. See "Raleigh's Virginia," endpiece map in Quinn and Quinn, First Colonists. The Quinns, relying on
John White's 1585 map, place the village of Metackwem on the north bank of Salmon Creek, though some
other early maps (see also the John White-Thomas Harriot map of 1590 reproduced in David B. Quinn, Set
Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonists, 1584-1606 [Chapel Hill: Published for America's Four Hundredth
Anniversary Committee by University of North Carolina Press, 1985], 118-119) place the village on the
creek's south side. Lane states that Metackwem was "under the jurisdiction of the king of Weopemiok, called
Okisko." On the pinnace, see Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 299; on Lane's estimate of the distance to
Chesapeake, see Quinn and Quinn, First Colonists, 25. On the Croatoans' scant food supplies, see Quinn
and Quinn, First Colonists, 99.
13. Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 365, 374-375; Samuel Purchas, comp. and ed., Hakluytus Posthumus or
Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (1625; reprint, Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904-1906), 19:228.
14. Rountree, Pocahontas's People, 22. On the York River mission, see Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J.
Loomie, The Spanish Mission in Virginia, 1570-1572 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the
Virginia Historical Society, 1953.)
VOLUME LXXVII1 • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2001
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as he supposes, with the Chesapeakes, may thus have shared the same fate. But Strachey's
comments, possibly based on Powhatan's alleged boast to Smith, seem muddled. His
claim, for example, that Powhatan immediately replaced the murdered Chesapeakes
with another tribe, also called Chesapeakes, seems, on its face, far-fetched.15
A massacre of Chesapeakes and colonists, near the mouth of the James River in the
spring of 1607, it seems, would have stirred some excitement in the Jamestown area,
but it appears to have generated not a ripple. Word of the episode, along with stolen
English goods and other relics, would have circulated detectably among James River
Indians. Details of so recent, near, and thorough a massacre would have been common
property, not confined to one or two Jamestown leaders and ambivalently disclosed by
them only years later. Parties would almost certainly have been sent to search for the
colonists on Chesapeake lands.
It is hard to accept Powhatan's alleged boast that he had anything to do with the
slaughter of either colonists or Chesapeakes. The latter, in fact, were not massacred at
all, as Smith was well aware; in 1608, a year after their supposed extinction, he estimated
their fighting strength at one hundred men. Virginia records show that the Chesapeake
tribe continued to occupy the south shore of Chesapeake Bay until routed by Jamestown
militia in 1627.16 Powhatan could hardly have faced any danger from the weaker
Weapemeocs, well to the south, and there is no evidence that he ventured south of the
Dismal Swamp for any purpose.
If not Powhatan, by whom and why did the Roanoke colonists meet death in
Weapemeoc lands? There are entirely plausible, though inferential, answers to these
questions but as yet no direct documented one. According to Ralph Lane, Chief
Wingina, seeking in 1586 to form an Indian coalition against Lane's colony, sought
alliance with, among other tribes, the Weapemeocs. Some Weapemeocs joined him,
but those loyal to Chief Okisko declined and even retreated farther into the mainland
to avoid any association with Wingina's alleged plot.17 This split among the Weapemeocs
is likely to have been seriously exacerbated by the arrival among them of the Roanoke
colonists in 1587.
If the Weapemeocs were goaded by this or, possibly, armed white intervention, to
factional or defensive warfare, perhaps only the latest development in a larger internal
struggle, the conflict was evidently one of unusual ferocity. Jamestown maps and records,
while recognizing Indian tribes well south of the Weapemeocs, omit reference to this
nearby tribe altogether.18 This is a strong indication that the Weapemeocs, who occupied
impressive territory in 1587, had disintegrated by 1607, leaving only remnant
communities, such as the Yeopim, a name evidently derived from the Weapemeocs. The
Weapemeoc tribe, as such, probably no longer existed at the time Jamestown was
founded.
15. Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 365.

16. Alice Granberry Walker, comp., Captain Thomas Willoughby of England, Barbados and Lower Norfolk
County, Virginia. Some of His Descendants 1601-1800 (Richmond: n.p., 1939), 222-223.
17. Quinn, First Colonists, 40.
18. Gerhardus Mercator and Jodocus Hondius's map of 1606 shows the Weapemeocs, but the rendering relies
heavily on the John White-Theodor De Bry map of 1590. It should not be taken as evidence that the
Weapemeocs still existed in 1606. See Cumming, Mapping the North Carolina Coast, 141, plate 27, which
places Metackwem on the south side of Salmon Creek.
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Although this detail from the Gerhardus Mercator-Jodocus Hondius map (1606) shows the Weapemeoc territory,
the map relies heavily on the John White'Theodor De Bry map of 1590 and does not necessarily indicate that
the tribe still existed at that time. Maps and records of Jamestown, founded in 1607, omit references to the
Weapemeocs. Original copy in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; reproduced from Cumming, The
Southeast in Early Maps, plate 20.
Given the division between pro- and anti-English Weapemeoc factions, it would have
been unthinkable for the colonists, before leaving Roanoke Island, to post signs
summoning John White, on his return from England, directly to Weapemeoc.
Presumably, they would direct him to those who could intelligently inform him of the
situation in Weapemeoc and specify precautions to take when he went there. To proceed
to Weapemeoc without such information might well have been a mission of self
destruction.
The only reliable source for intelligence as to Weapemeoc dispositions in 1590
would have been Manteo's friendly Croatoans, south of Roanoke Island. So the signs
"CRO" and "CROATOAN" on Roanoke Island directed White there rather than to
Weapemeoc. Quinn reasons that the colonists may have posted men with the
Croatoans to guide White to their new settlement,19 and although this is certainly
possible, no documentary evidence supports that theory. The Croatoans, in any case,
were too far from Chesapeake Bay to provide useful information on that region.
In short, the Lost Colony did precisely what it informed John White it would do—
"remove from Roanoak 50 miles into the maine." Alternative possible destinations can
be plausibly ruled out. There is sound evidence that White's colony was wiped out, or
virtually so, on Weapemeoc soil during internal or external fighting that broke up the
tribe. This probably occurred closer to 1587 than 1607, for conflict would likely have
flared as soon as the colonists reached Weapemeoc. Smith, Strachey, and Powhatan
probably heard only faint rumors of it, because most of the victims and perpetrators were
dead, and survivors, if any, were not located.20 That the colonists did not return to
Roanoke Island for buried chests found there in 1590 argues for an early massacre of
most or all of the colony.
Where did the Lost Colony meet its end? Extant documents are of little or no help
in answering that question. But a discussion of the ongoing conflict between Iroquois
and Algonquian alliances may help shed light on the mystery.
Rumors in early seventeenth-century Jamestown, as Smith, Strachey, and various
Indians reported, tell of survivors of the Lost Colony still living at that time among the
Indians of what is now eastern North Carolina.21 The historical context in which the
region's Indians existed can help one to understand why that may have been the case.
Arthur Barlowe, in his reconnoitering narrative of 1584, mentions the Secotan tribe
west of the Pamlico and Roanoke Sounds. As to other nearby tribes, he adds this:
"Adjoyning unto ... Sequotan, beginneth a Countrey called Ponouike belonging to
another King, [called] Piemacum, and this King is in league with the next King,
adjoyning towardes the setting of the Sunne, and the Countrey Neiosioke, situate uppon
the side of a goodly River, called Neus: these Kings have mortall warre with Wingina
... but about two yeeres past, there was a peace made betweene ... Piemacum, and
the Lorde of Sequotan... ,"22
19. Quinn and Quinn, First Colonists, 125-126; Quinn, Lost Colonists, 20-21.
20. Quinn and Quinn, First Colonists, 126.
21. Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 371-376.
22. Quinn and Quinn, First Colonists, 5, 10.
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Barlowe's passage describes a native league reaching from the Pamlico River south
to the lower Neuse River and probably into the western reaches of the Coastal Plain.
It comprised three tribes, the Ponouikes, south of the Pamlico River; the Neusiocs, on
the Neuse; and the powerful Mangoaks, or Tuscaroras, the unnamed tribe immediately
west of the Ponouikes. All three of these were Iroquois-speaking or, since ethnologists
disagree on the issue, at least arguably so.23
Barlowe and Lane reported a rival league that included the Secotans of lower Pamlico
River, the Chowanokes west of Chowan River, and the Weapemeocs, all of them
Algonquian-speaking tribes. The weak Croatoans, among whom Chowanoke chief
Menatonon had a wife and child, and the Moratocs of lower Roanoke River, may also
have been allied with this group, or perhaps, remained neutral.24
Besides the apparent war of the Secotans with the Iroquois League, there is evidence
in Lane's 1586 narrative of recent conflict between the Chowanokes and Tuscaroras
(i.e., between other members of the Algonquian and Iroquois Leagues, an episode
probably related to the former conflict.) In any event, there was a recent history of severe
hostilities between tribes of these leagues, which may have played a role in the
destruction of White's colonists.25
By 1608, Indian reports that some of the English had survived the colony's
disappearance surfaced. At that time Jamestown citizens had heard that several Lost
Colony survivors (evidently held against their will) and possibly other Europeans were
residing at four villages in what is now eastern North Carolina. These were Ponouike
(or Panauioc, etc.), south of the Pamlico River; Pakerakinik, on the lower Neuse;
Ritanoe, near Pakerikinik; and the Tuscarora town of Ocanahowan on the Roanoke
River, at or near the present town of Weldon.26 Thus, all four sites appear to have been
within the bounds of the Iroquois League.
But why, if the Lost Colony was massacred in Algonquian country, were survivors
said to be held by Iroquois tribes farther south and west, rather than by the nearby
Chowanokes or other Algonquians, known for cooperation with the English? An
obvious possibility is that some of them fled west, into Iroquois hands, away from
Weapemeoc bloodshed. This seems, however, unlikely since the only prior contact that
the Roanoke colonists had with Tuscaroras or Mangoaks was their ambush of Lane's
men on the Roanoke River in the spring of 1586.27
Also, such an escape may have necessitated crossing rather a wide body of water, the
lower Chowan River. Once launched into that stream in rafts, canoes, or a pinnace,
Roanoke Island, Croatoan, and relative safety from Indian conflict beckoned from the
east. But it is also possible that the colonists and Indians loyal to Weapemeoc chief
Okisko had retreated earlier from the tribe's anti-English element to the west side of
the Chowan.
23. David B. Quinn, The Roanoke Voyages, 1584-90: Documents to Illustrate the English Voyage to North
America ... 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), 2:857, 871-872.
24- Quinn, First Colonists, 10, 36, 100-102.
25. Quinn, First Colonists, 4, 5, 9-10, 31.
26. For the approximate locations of Pakerakinik, Ponouik (or Panawick and other spellings), and
Ocanahowan, see the Zuñiga map, ca. June 1608, reproduced in Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 372. For
Ritanoe, see Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 1:388, where it is said to have been west of the Roanoke River.
27. Quinn and Quinn, First Colonists, 32.
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The relocation of tribes within the next forty years later is revealing. By 1644, the
once formidable Chowanokes had deserted their territory west of the Chowan River
and, much reduced in number, were inhabiting modern Gates and Chowan Counties,
formerly Weapemeoc lands. The Secotans had vanished or withered into what later were
called the Bay River or other Pamlico-area tribes. And the still-powerful Tuscaroras had
claimed both the former Chowanoke and Weapemeoc lands west of the Chowan River.28
These alterations show that the Tuscaroras, possibly at some point before 1608, seized
both the Chowanoke and Weapemeoc territories west of the Chowan, either by force
or forfeit. Tuscarora warriors, descending on Weapemeoc land west of the Chowan,
during or soon after the implied chaos within that tribe, would have been able to seize,
or give refuge to, any whites found alive there.
This scenario makes it possible to specify where the colonists may have been settled
at the time. Only that part of Weapemeoc at the mouth of the Chowan River lay as
near Roanoke Island as fifty miles, yet readily accessible from the island by water. The
most eligible site in that vicinity for the Roanoke colonists to have settled would have
been on the west side of the Chowan River estuary, at or near the village of Metackwem,
evidently the only known Weapemeoc settlement west of the Chowan. It lay apparently
on the south side of lower Salmon Creek, which perhaps formed the Weapemeoc
boundary with the Chowanokes. Of the rumors heard in Jamestown as to the fate of
the Lost Colonists, the only one with directional specificity was that they had "fled up
the river of Choanoke... ."29
Historian Samuel A. Ashe, early in this century, proposed that the colonists probably
"seated themselves" on the right bank of the Chowan River, close to the Chowanoke
village of Ohanoak. This was presumably near the present town of Colerain, in
northeastern Bertie County. Here, he writes, lay a "highland... where there were goodly
cornfields and pleasant surroundings." But, like Chesapeake, Ohanoak lay at least
seventy miles from Roanoke Island and was not well known to the colonists. Lane sailed
past it in 1586 but saw fit to comment only on its cornfields.30
Lane, owing to his reconnoitering jaunt with Amadas in 1585 may have been better
acquainted with and more impressed by Metackwem. John Smith's map of 1624
designates Salmon Creek as "Layn flu" (Lane's River). This is the only feature on
discovery-era maps bearing Lane's name and implies that he may have had a special
28. In 1644, the Tuscaroras granted the Weanock Indians "all ye land from ... ye mouth of Moratuck
[Roanoke] and up Chowan to Meherrin River." The Weanocks soon afterward returned to Virginia, from
whence they came, the Tuscaroras apparently reclaiming the land as hunting territory. Evidently, the
Chowanokes had already moved to their last home east of the Chowan River. See Saunders, Colonial Records,
1:676; Examination of Thorn Green et al., May 23,1711, in William G. Stanard, "The Indians of Southern
Virginia, 1650-1711," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 8 (July 1900): 6-10. In a war with the
Carolina colony (1665-1667), the Tuscaroras cleared Salmon Creek of its white settlers. See depositions by
George Bullock and Richard Sanderson in Stanard, "The Indians of Southern Virginia, 1650-1711," Virginia
Magazine of History and Biography 7 (April 1900): 345-348.
29. Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 373-374. On the location of Metackwem, see, for example, the White
Harriot map reproduced in Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 118-119, and endpiece in Quinn, The Roanoke
Voyages, vol. 2.
30. Samuel A'Court Ashe, History of North Carolina, 2 vols. (Greensboro: Charles L. Van Noppen, 1925),
1:43, 47; Quinn and Quinn, First Colonists, 26.
VOLUME LXXVII1 • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2001
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association with that stream. Thus, it was perhaps Salmon Creek in particular that
occasioned his glowing description to Hakluyt of the virtues of Weapemeoc.31
If the colonists, or some of them, settled at or near Metackwem, or fled there during
Weapemeoc internal tumult, they would, if still alive, almost certainly have fallen into
the hands of invading Tuscaroras and their Iroquois allies. This would account for why
a few colonists, in 1608 or before, may have resided as captives or refugees among the
Tuscaroras and their allies, the Ponioukes and Neusiocs.
Why might the colony have chosen or been compelled to settle on the Weapemeoc
land spur west of the Chowan River rather than the larger and more populous eastern
side? It may have been because, having fewer native residents, it seemed safer, possibly
indicating that the colonists may have imposed themselves on Salmon Creek. Whether
they arrived by invitation or force, this tract of Weapemeoc (later Tuscarora) land was
known to English explorers and settlers as perhaps the most desirable mainland site
accessible to them, for which reason it is now decidedly the most history-laden site in
North Carolina.
Besides the Indian village, the first English house on the Carolina mainland was built
there for Nathaniel Batts in 1657, a site perhaps already cleared and improved by earlier
white inhabitants. Religious dissidents from Isle of Wight County, Virginia, in 1661
established there the first English settlement west of the Chowan (the Tuscaroras drove
them off in 1665). The Lords Proprietors proposed building a town at the site in 1676.
Seth Sothell in the 1680s was the first of several proprietary governors to reside there
or in the immediate vicinity. While Gov. Edward Hyde lived in this area, it was the
site of the decisive battle in Cary's Rebellion. It had the colony's earliest known shipyard,
was the foremost early proprietary station for the Indian fur trade, and later had one of
the most profitable inland fisheries in America.32
31. John Smith, "Oufd Virginia. 1624" (map) in William P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958), plate 23.
32. On Batts's house, see Nicholas Comberford's 1657 map, "The South Part of Virginia," in Cumming,
Southeast in Early Maps, plate 32. "A rude outline Chart of the coast of North Carolina and Albemarle
river, in North Carolina" (1660) shows land near Salmon Creek designated "Gove plant," presumably
the governor's plantation, possibly land restricted to Batts's use. For the 1660 map, see copy in files of the
State Archives, Division of Archives and History, Raleigh. For Batts's claim to Fox, see Saunders, Colonial
Records, 1:217. Isle of Wight County dissidents, possibly with Batts's connivance, settled in 1661 three
or four miles northeast of the Roanoke River's mouth, a site consistent with the south side of lower
Salmon Creek. See Lindley S. Butler, "The Early Settlement of Carolina, Virginia's Southern Frontier,"
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 79 (January 1971): 27. For 1676 town proposal, "where the
Shipps will be lade and unlaid," see Saunders, Colonial Records, 1:229-231. Gov. Samuel Stephens (1667
1669) patented 16,000 acres there, leaving it to his widow, who married Gov. George Berkeley of Virginia.
On Stephens's patent and Sothel's acquisition, see Margaret M. Hofman, ed., Province of North Carolina,
1663-1729, Abstracts of Land Patents (Weldon, N.C.: Roanoke News Co., 1979), 12. Governor Sothel
(1678, 1682-1689) conducted a fur trade here at a log cabin, possibly Batts's old house, "such as the
Swedes in America often make, and are very strong," it "being the Indian Store-House, where the Trading
Goods were kept." Batts's house was twenty feet square with a lodging chamber, buttery, and chimney.
On Sothel's trade, see Hugh T. Lefler, éd., A New Voyage to Carolina by John Lawson (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 223-224; in 1683, Sothel paid a laborer for "a month's work
upon the Logg house," evidently repairs and enlargement. For a description of Batts's house, see Elizabeth
Gregory McPherson, "Nathaniel Batts, Landholder of Pasquotank River, 1660," North Carolina Historical
Review 43 (winter 1966): 73. A log house is mentioned in Sothel's estate in 1694. William Duckinfield,
then owner of the site, allowed his friend Gov. Edward Hyde to reside in his manor house there in 1711,
WilamChurton's176mapofSlnCrekfatushi ndwrteos(ntelarypdonthemapdnotsiemnodiG.HThrop's 185novel,Brti).Popearygvno(1683-9)Sethol's"g-houecrk,"sitofhradingpost, dicaebynrowitheuprlft quadrnt.NhielBats'houewapsiblyouthfSel'sacity.Muhofisarewondi176bySrNathnielDukfd.Seplatof SalmonCrekp tyin"Dukfeld,SirNathnel,"AuditOfcePaprs,13/8BritshRecod,StaArchives,D onfArchivesandHtory, Raleigh.
Hence, the high value placed by generations of pre-proprietary and proprietary

colonists on lower Salmon Creek land—at first under Weapemeoc rule, within fifty miles
of Roanoke Island, and quickly accessible from there—eminently qualifies it as a
sanctuary for the 1587 colonists. But a residence there would place them directly in
the path of Tuscarora invaders, who gained control of this area by the early seventeenth
century. In any event, no study of White's Lost Colonists that disregards the nature and
dynamics of the Indian societies among which they dwelt is likely to reveal much that
is useful.
The evident decline of scholarly interest in the Lost Colony is misguided. The Lost
Colonists, according to primary documents, were probably destroyed in the course of
Indian conflict on the North Carolina mainland on the western shore of the Albemarle
Sound. Further research may help to determine more precisely why, when, and at what
place the colony may have been slaughtered; it may also help delineate the behavior
and concerns of the earliest colonists. Archaeologists and historians should renew their
pursuit of the Lost Colony mystery and try to provide, perhaps to the chagrin of
romanticists, a full, documented, consensus solution.
Dr. Parramore is professor emeritus of history at Meredith College. He is the author of a number
of books and articles on North Carolina history.
and Hyde soon won there the decisive battle of Cary's Rebellion. Residents on-site or close by included
Batts, Sothel, and Sir Nathaniel Duckinfield, on the south side of the creek; Governors Charles Eden and
Gabriel Johnston (at Eden House) and Thomas Pollock (at Bal-Gra) on the north side; and other
notables. For the Duckinfields, see plat of their Salmon Creek property in 1767 by William Churton,
manuscript in Audit Office Papers, 1765-1790, Loyalist Claims (Downies-Hamilton), Public Record
Office, London, British Records, State Archives; for Eden and Pollock, see Dictionary of North Carolina
Biography, s.v. "Eden, Charles," "Pollock, Thomas." A North Carolina Historical Highway Marker (A-10)
on U.S. 17, fifteen miles east of Windsor, cites Eden House, home to both Eden and Johnston, as having
stood "a few yards north." In 1773, Duckinfield's Salmon Creek lands were advertised in the Williamsburg
Virginia Gazette as "so well known, for their remarkable fertility and fine situation, that it is needless to
give any farther Description of them." Virginia Gazette, May 27, 1773. The colony's earliest-known
shipyard, the nation's finest herring fishery (Capehart's Avoca), and, it appears, the most-frequented early
colonial ferry between Virginia and South Carolina have occupied the site. On the shipyard, see John
Pearson to Messrs. Willson and Carr, October 1774, Chowan County, Ferriage Docket 1781-1783,
manuscript in the State Archives, which mentions the launch at "Duckinfield" of the 200-ton Penelope,
"esteemed one of the finest ever Built in this part of the World." Churton's 1767 plat places it about a
mile up the creek, on the south side. For Capehart's fishery, see, for example, News and Observer (Raleigh),
August 4, 1907.

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North Carolina Office of Archives and History

The "Lost Colony" Found: A Documentary Perspective

VOLUME LXXVIII • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2001

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

VOLUME LXXVIII • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2001

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

VOLUME LXXVII1 • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2001

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

15. Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 365.

VOLUME LXXVIII • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2001

^Coffore U eft, tf? ^

Melius 'Mcridianus cfh 300,rciv.

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

VOLUME LXXVIII • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2001

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

VOLUME LXXVIII • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2001

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THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

VOLUME LXXVII1 • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2001

£*i':'Aadr" - .■v**" «.li-.l^--i"

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

VOLUME LXXVIII • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2001

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

Hence, the high value placed by generations of pre-proprietary and proprietary

VOLUME LXXVIII • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2001

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