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 the moon, I’m sure we would have done everything we could to rescue them. But again, I’m making the mistake of trying to look at the past as if it’s the same as the present.
After Roanoke, the English waited twenty years before they tried again to start a settlement in the Americas. This time they targeted a site a little farther north, on the James River in Virginia. The Jamestown settlers heard rumors about sightings of people nearby who had fair skin and blond hair—or people who wore English clothing or spoke English or lived in English-style houses. And there were suggestions that some of those people might have been the remnants of the Roanoke Colony. But the Jamestown residents put very little effort into searching for them. This is frustrating for historians, but understandable. The Jamestown settlers were struggling just to survive. In their first year, all but 38 of the 104 original Jamestown settlers died.
So what really happened to Virginia Dare and the rest of the Roanoke Colony in “original” history? The most depressing possibility is that everyone died not long after John White left. Maybe some of their Indian enemies killed them all. Maybe a Spanish raiding party murdered them. Maybe everyone starved to death.
What John White found in 1590—particularly the lack of a cross alongside the word CROATOAN—would seem to indicate that, if nothing else, the colonists did manage to get safely off Roanoke Island. Some historians theorize that the colonists might have split into two groups: One group could have gone to the Chesapeake area as originally planned, while a smaller group stayed with the Croatoans, close enough to Roanoke to watch for White’s return. A modern Indian tribe in North Carolina known as the Lumbee claims that the Roanoke colonists intermarried with Native Americans and became their ancestors. One study of these Indians in the late nineteenth century found that 41 of the 95 surnames represented among the Roanoke colonists were carried by members of this tribe.
Others tell different stories about the colonists. Captain John Smith said that Powhatan, the powerful Indian leader near Jamestown, claimed at one point that he had killed all the Roanoke colonists. (Powhatan was also Pocahantas’s father, as you might remember if you were paying attention in Social Studies and/or watched the Disney movie.) Another sad possibility is that some of the Roanoke colonists might have become slaves of a rather cruel tribe farther inland from the coast. There were reports of unusually light-skinned people working for that tribe, along with the reports of light-skinned people living more happily alongside other natives.