France and Spain on the North American Coast
The Beginning of the Virginia Venture
The Beginning of the Virginia Venture
At the opening of the seventeenth century, England cast a speculative eye on North American possibilities. The business objective of the Virginia Company of London was profit for its investors, but colonization of Virginia was also a national enterprise and a godly mission to convert the heathen to Christianity. The Englishmen who landed in Virginia processed what they saw through their own previous experience. Some, like John Smith, had already traveled widely and their acquaintance with peoples of other cultures shaped their responses to the Americans they encountered in Virginia; others had spent their lives until then at home in England. But all the colonists puzzled their way through Native American culture, trying to understand it in relation to their own, not realizing that many of the Americans they met had had previous contact with European castaways, deserters, fishermen, and explorers throughout the course of the previous century and, in some cases, probably knew more about European ways than the newcomers could ever have imagined.
These early accounts are lively, written by men with strong opinions and an equally strong desire to persuade the reader to their point of view. Some of the writers had first-hand experience of conditions in Virginia, while others were armchair critics or supporters, but the language of all of them is colorful with a sense of immediacy. Navigating this minefield of impassioned accounts––constructed in almost equal measure from on-the-spot observation and hearsay––has presented problems of interpretation for generations of historians and will, no doubt, continue to do so into the future.
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[11] The Roanoke Outpost larger view
"Americae pars, nunc Virginia dicta." Theodor de Bry. Grand voyages. Part I. (Frankfurt, 1590). Queen Elizabeth had granted Sir Humphrey Gilbert a patent to plant a colony in North America but he had died at sea on his second attempt. In 1584 Gilbert's half-brother, Walter Raleigh, took over the charter and sent out a reconnaissance expedition of his own, which explored the Outer Banks of North Carolina and Roanoke Island looking for a site that could support a settlement and serve as a base for English privateers to prey on Spanish shipping. Roanoke was chosen on the advice of the Portuguese pilot Simon Ferdinando, who was familiar with the area from his earlier service with Spain. The next year Raleigh sent out a colonizing expedition that included the artist John White and the scholar Thomas Hariot, whose reports and drawings gave Europeans their first view of the American inhabitants of Virginia and their culture. |
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[12] Drake to the Rescue larger view
Baptista Boazio. The famouse West Indian voyadge made by the Englishe fleete. (London, 1589). In 1585, with the official support of Queen Elizabeth, Sir Francis Drake set out to terrorize the Spanish in the West Indies by attacking their cities and capturing treasure. On the way home, Drake stopped at Roanoke, where he discovered the settlers in grave straits following a harsh winter. Unloading the "several hundred" passengers he had picked up in the course of his Caribbean adventures—African slaves, South American Indians, and galley slaves (including Europeans and Moors)—Drake made room on his ships and took the Roanoke settlers back to England. No one knows what happened to the West Indian passengers so unceremoniously left behind at Roanoke. |
| Postscript to the Lost Colony: In 1587 Raleigh sent a third expedition to Roanoke under the command of the artist, John White, which was made up of families who intended to build a life in Virginia. White’s daughter was among them and she gave birth that summer to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in Virginia. But the colony soon grew short of supplies and White returned to England to arrange for additional support. The attack of the Spanish Armada in 1588 disrupted their plans and when White was finally able to return to the colony in 1590, Roanoke was deserted. The fate of the colonists has been shrouded in mystery and legend ever since. This failure at Roanoke interrupted English colonial ventures until Elizabeth I died in 1603 and her successor, James I, made peace with Spain. |
Exhibition by Susan Danforth, John Carter Brown Library