The Head in Edward Nugent's Hand: Roanoke's Forgotten Indians

THE HEAD

in

Edward Nugent’s

HAND

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

DANIEL K. RICHTER AND KATHLEEN M. BROWN, SERIES EDITORS

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

THE HEAD

in

Edward Nugent’s

HAND

Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians

Michael Leroy Oberg

Copyright © 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

A cataloging-in-publication record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4031-3

ISBN-10: 0-8122-4031-6

FOR

Mary and Peter

CONTENTS

Prologue

CHAPTER ONE    Ossomocomuck

CHAPTER TWO   Granganimeo

CHAPTER THREE     Wingina

CHAPTER FOUR     A Killing and Its Consequences

CHAPTER FIVE     Vengeance

CHAPTER SIX      Lost Colonists, Lost Indians

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

PROLOGUE

In the end an Irish man serving me, one Nugent . . . undertooke him, and following him in the woods overtooke him, and I in some doubt least we had lost both the king, and my man by our own negligence to have been intercepted by the savages, we met him returning out of the woods with Pemisapan’s head in his hand.

—GOVERNOR RALPH LANE

Drive onto Roanoke Island. Whether you take the bridge from Nag’s Head or come from the mainland by way of Mann’s Harbor, you will be greeted with a road sign bearing the same message. Roanoke Island, the sign reads, was the birthplace of America’s First English Child, 1587.

And so one story has been privileged and remembered above all others. It has been that way for a long time. North Carolina’s Edward Graham Daves, the first president of the Roanoke Island Memorial Association, resented what he considered the unwarranted historical attention lavished on the English settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth Plantation to his north, the respective stomping grounds of flamboyant Cavaliers and stern Calvinists. So what if those colonization efforts produced permanent settlements? Daves argued in 1893 that the attempts at Roanoke and the birth of Virginia Dare were events of supreme importance in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race in America. On this island, Daves asserted, the seed was sown which was eventually to yield the richest harvest: the direct fruit of these efforts was the colony of Jamestown, and Raleigh is the real pioneer of American civilization. Another North Carolinian, O. R. Mangum, wrote in 1906 that to Roanoke Island belongs a unique honor for all ages to come. It was the birthplace of the first girl of English parents in America, for shortly after the arrival of the colonists Virginia Dare was born. With this, North Carolina won the distinction of being the mother of the first white child born of Anglo-Saxon blood on the continent of America. The nation was thus founded on the Carolina Sounds, and not in Virginia or Massachusetts. And so it went. Roanoke, wrote one historian, was the first stone laid in the great structure of English colonization and expansion. It was, another argued, the first home for the first fore runners of the English-speaking millions now in America, where was turned the first spade of earth to receive English seed. At Roanoke, as well, began the life of the English church in the new world.¹

But what of the Indians who greeted these colonists and ultimately decided their fate? They were here first, but their stories were considered irrelevant by Daves, Mangum, and scores of other early historians. History and memory, it is clear, often walk hand in hand. Certain stories become part of the record. They are meaningful, significant, and resonant. They provide important answers to what we consider the important questions. They help us make sense of ourselves, or they educate or entertain us. Other stories we cast aside. They are uninteresting and trivial, it seems, so we forget them. We must be honest about this. We make choices about the stories we want to tell. We can continue to cast the story of Roanoke in mythic terms, if we choose, and view it as the opening act in the great drama of English colonization in America. This is what the Roanoke Island Memorial Association did when, in 1896, it erected a monument at the site of Fort Raleigh, on the northern tip of the island, commemorating the birth of Virginia Dare and the baptism of England’s first Christian Indian convert, Manteo. Or we can follow in the footsteps of the Memorial Association’s successor, the Roanoke Island Historical Association, whose efforts to retrieve the island’s past from historical oblivion culminated in the commissioning of the Lost Colony pageant and efforts to reconstruct a fort at what is now the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.²

Efforts such as these can shape how we remember historical events and help define the record and the significance of the past. Many who know anything at all about Sir Walter Ralegh’s colonizing ventures, for instance, learn it from Paul Green’s symphonic drama, The Lost Colony, staged at the Waterside Theater on the Fort Raleigh site for the first time in 1937 and, with a few exceptions, every summer since then. Green made his choices about the stories he wanted to tell. In the opening act, an announcer tells the audience, in case they do not already know, that we are gathered here this evening to honor the spiritual birthplace of our nation and to memorialize those heroic men and women who made it so. Ralegh and his circle of supporters, Green’s announcer continues,

conceived the idea of building a new nation in the new world, and on this very site was laid the first foundation for it. Here these pioneers of a new order, of a new form of government, lived and struggled, suffered and died. And in the symbol of their endurance and their sacrifice let us renew our courage and our hope, and by doing so prove to ourselves and to the world that they did not die in vain. For as we keep faith with them, so shall we keep faith with ourselves and with future generations who demand of us that a nation of liberty and free men shall continue on the earth.³

This was inspiring stuff at the time, and Green’s audiences, viewing his play as the menace of totalitarianism and the fear of war tightened its grip on Europe, perhaps did not mind that he chose to depict the island’s natives as benighted cretins, superstitious and violent, who utter their lines in monosyllabic Indian-speak. This was, after all, an American, and not an American Indian, drama.⁴

The knowledgeable National Park Service rangers at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, just outside the theater where Paul Green’s play is staged, still describe the Roanoke ventures as the first chapter in the story of how this continent came to be occupied by English-speaking peoples. We can tell this story, too, but we must remember that there is more than one way to look at the past.⁵

We can, for instance, view Roanoke and the attempt to settle there not as a heroic beginning, but as an English failure and an Indian victory, even if the fruits of that victory were decidedly ambivalent. The story can be turned around, if we choose, and told from the Indians’ perspective. All too often, Indians, like those who greeted Ralegh’s colonists, have been viewed as part of the past, as noble relics doomed to extinction. This belief has informed much of the writing of American history, and it always has been part of the story of Roanoke. Walter Clark, for instance, who spoke at Roanoke Island in 1902, seemed to believe that all Indians had become extinct. Where the smoke of a lonely wigwam rose, Clark asserted, now the roar of great cities fills the ear and the blaze of electric lights reddens the sky.

Where then amid vast solitudes the war-whoop resounded, boding death and torture, now rise a thousand steeples and anthems to the Prince of Peace float on the air. Where the plumed and painted warrior stealthily trod the narrow war-path, mighty engines rush. Where a few thousand naked savages miserably starved and fought and perished, now one hundred millions of the foremost people of all the world live and prosper.⁶

In 1908 North Carolina’s lieutenant governor Francis Winston exhibited a more direct variant of this historical amnesia that has cast native peoples upon the dustbin of history. The Indian is gone, Winston said, a conclusion that for him followed logically from his belief that there is no room on earth today for vicious, incompetent, and immoral races. White civilization is triumphant because it is best.⁷

Settlers move in and Indians retire, a story that seemed to repeat itself consistently as the American frontier advanced westward across the continent. For these North Carolinians the process bore a certain inevitability. The frontier was, as Frederick Jackson Turner described it, the outer edge of the wave and the meeting point between savagery and civilization.⁸ Except that here, at Roanoke Island, it does not seem to have happened that way. The Indians did not retire, at least at the outset. White civilization was not triumphant, at least at the beginning. The colonists did not advance: they went home, or they disappeared. Here, at Roanoke, the Indians may have won. This, in itself, makes Roanoke a unique story.

The Indians stayed and the colonists disappeared, but with enormous and shattering consequences for all, including ourselves, for this particular story of Roanoke might help us understand our history differently. Indeed, the attitudes that cast native peoples as relics, as doomed warriors fighting the forces of time and modernity, endure. Many Americans continue to believe that native peoples, defeated and on the path to extinction, disappeared in the face of European invaders who are too often described as being more sophisticated, developed, modern, or advanced. Perhaps, by looking at this familiar and foundational story anew, we can challenge these colonial assumptions.

The following is an attempt to tell the story of the Roanoke ventures from the perspective of the Indians who confronted and attempted to make sense of Sir Walter’s colonists. At Roanoke, we can tell this story of encounter free from the tragic burden of subsequent events. We can view the relations that developed between native peoples and English men and women at Roanoke in terms other than of inevitable decline. Roanoke provides us with a perfect opportunity to examine, in close compass, what happened when natives and newcomers first encountered each other, in one of the few recorded settings where Indians were not defeated and driven off.⁹ The challenge in telling this story in this fashion comes from trying to view the English as the Indians understood them, and reconstructing, as much as the scant source material allows, the debates, discussions, and divisions that developed in Indian village communities as they struggled to make sense of the newcomers. To reverse the focus of the Roanoke story we must emphasize events different from those that have concerned previous historians. In particular, we shall look at the killing of one Indian, and its consequences, in early America.¹⁰

The story you are about to read is that of a human head or, more precisely, how the head of an Algonquian leader named Wingina came to be held by a young colonist one summer day in 1586. Wingina’s murder and decapitation is a story of violence and encounter; of living and dying; of philanthropy and racism; of gloriously idealistic hopes for a new world and, ultimately, of lost colonies and lost tribes. It is a story that encompasses the British Isles and the Carolina coast, English manor houses and Indian longhouses, fortified outposts and palisaded Indian villages. For while the story of the head in Edward Nugent’s hand is intensely local, tightly focused in terms of both time and space, it is also transatlantic, involving the movement and interaction of peoples, European and Native American, along the margins of the Atlantic world. It lies at the heart of the story of Sir Walter Ralegh’s dream to create an Anglo-American, Christian, New World empire, but also of the attempts of native peoples who lived in dozens of politically autonomous native village communities to make sense of the newcomers who threatened, even in very small numbers, to transform their world in dark and frightening ways.

The story of the head in Edward Nugent’s hand, however, is significant for reasons beyond what it tells us about how Indians understood their early contact with Europeans. Telling this story forces us to consider the question of just what constitutes a historically significant event, and who decides and why. The brutal act of violence executed by Edward Nugent is almost never specifically mentioned in history textbooks. His name, and that of the weroance he beheaded, are not commonly known. The crime, it seems, has been erased and silenced and forgotten, deemed not relevant to the larger narrative of American history. But the killing of this Algonquian leader had important consequences for the native peoples of the Carolina Sounds, and the short-lived English attempts at settlement brought misery and suffering that are difficult to imagine.

But we must imagine. Telling the tale of the head in Edward Nugent’s hand is not an easy task. Historians agree only on the basic outlines of the story. Armed with a patent from Queen Elizabeth I, Ralegh sent two members of his household, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, to search out the site for a potential colony. In the summer of 1584 they discovered Roanoke Island, a location off the coast of present-day North Carolina that they described as a New World Eden. Ralegh fitted out a larger expedition the following year. A total of 108 men, among them scientist Thomas Harriot, artist John White, and military governor Ralph Lane, would remain on the island from August 1585 until June 1586. By that time, Lane and his men had alienated the Indians in the area and, fearing a possible conspiracy, attacked the native village of Dasemunkepeuc, not far from today’s Mann’s Harbor. One of Lane’s servants, an Irish boy named Edward Nugent, beheaded Wingina, the weroance, or leader, of several Algonquian communities in the vicinity of the English outpost. Fearing the possibility of Indian retaliation, Lane’s colonists returned to England aboard a fleet commanded by Sir Francis Drake, which earlier that spring and summer had terrorized Spanish outposts in the Caribbean and along the Florida coast. A relief expedition commanded by Sir Richard Grenville, and carrying supplies for Lane’s company, arrived shortly thereafter. Grenville left fifteen men on the island to hold the fort, but they quickly disappeared.

In 1587 another group of colonists, this time under the leadership of John White, left England. Made up of families rather than solitary soldiers, the group intended to settle on Chesapeake Bay, to the north of Roanoke Island. The expedition’s pilot, however, a Portuguese mariner named Simon Ferdinando, deposited the colonists once again on Roanoke. After the birth and christening of his granddaughter, Virginia Dare, in August 1587, White went home for additional supplies. He was delayed in his return by the crisis of the Spanish Armada and a string of rotten luck. By the time he finally returned in 1590, the colonists had disappeared, becoming the Lost Colonists of American myth and memory.¹¹

These events form the building blocks for an Anglo-centric narrative focusing on the attempts by a small group of Englishmen to settle on North American shores. Indians are pushed to the margins, at best playing bit parts in a story centered on the English. Yet the English may not be the appropriate focus, for Roanoke is as much a Native American story as an English one. If the English colonists came to what they considered a new found land, they created a new world for the Indians.¹² We should take a close look at the Indians who greeted and confronted Ralegh’s colonists. The English intruded into a Native American world at Roanoke. They stayed only a short while before they disappeared. Because Wingina’s people, and his allies and enemies, in the end determined so much of the fate of the Roanoke ventures, it seems only fair that we concentrate upon them, and how they understood the arrival of the English. And if we recast the story in an effort to understand how and why an Indian weroance was murdered, and with what consequences, we can arrive at a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of what happened during this, the dawn of English settlement in America.

To tell the story in this way, we must look with a fresh and creative eye at the extant sources. Only a handful of first-hand written accounts remain from the Roanoke ventures, all of them in one way or another terribly incomplete. The colonists who left us these accounts—Harriot, Lane, White, Barlowe, and a small number of others—did not write down everything they experienced. A variety of influences informed what they decided to include or exclude. The elements of native society that they did describe—religion, ritual, and belief, especially—they did not entirely comprehend. They observed, and attempted at times to describe what they saw, but they also judged and, in places, condemned. And they give us only one side of the story. No Indian voices appear unfiltered in the English documents. No Algonquian tells us directly what he or she thought of the changes that began to occur after the English arrived. We face a significant challenge, then, in trying to extract from a handful of English documents the Indians’ understanding of historical developments that brought dramatic and heart-breaking changes to native communities along the Carolina coast. We must read carefully English descriptions of the Indians’ actions, and attempt to interpret their meaning.

Not only is the historical evidence less than we should wish for, but archaeologists have also been unable to answer many of the questions about the Roanoke colonies. No one, for instance, has found the site of the settlement occupied by the Lost Colonists in 1587. It could be underwater now, a victim of the shifting geography of the Carolina Outer Banks. It could be buried, undiscovered as yet, somewhere on the grounds of the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, or beneath the present-day town of Manteo, on the island’s eastern shore.¹³ Nor has the site of Wingina’s village on the island been thoroughly excavated, though the historical sources and some archaeological evidence suggest that it was on the northern tip of the island, not far from the fort the colonists erected.¹⁴ More than 125,000 tourists visit the mid-twentieth-century reconstruction of the earthwork at Fort Raleigh. Experts do not agree about the nature of this earthwork. A sign at the fort site identifies the structure as Lane’s Fort, but it obviously could not have provided protection for the hundred men in Lane’s charge. It may have been a stronghold, or it may have been erected by the small holding party Grenville left on the island in 1586. The few artifacts that have been recovered do not allow for a positive determination.¹⁵

We can move past the limitations and biases inherent in these scattered and difficult sources; indeed, we must if we are to understand the story of the head in Edward Nugent’s hand. By critically reading these accounts, comparing their contents carefully with what we know about other Algonquian peoples in other times and places, we can begin to piece together how Wingina’s people saw themselves, their place on the land and in the cosmos, and how they saw the English newcomers who, though few in number, began to effect immediate transformations in their world.¹⁶

From these sources, we do know some things, but with imagination and creativity we can learn more. Writing history, after all, is fundamentally an act of imagination. We know that an English colony was planted, and that this colony failed to take root. But we know as well that an Indian leader was killed and beheaded, which sent shock waves throughout Indian country. If we recast this as an Indian story, an Algonquian story, we shall see that the English men and women who vanished are only one part of a broader story of lost colonies and lost tribes in early America.

CHAPTER 1

OSSOMOCOMUCK

In the summer of 1584 Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, soldiers and sailors both in the service of Sir Walter Ralegh, first reached the Outer Banks of what is today the state of North Carolina. The new land, the home of Wingina and his people, impressed Barlowe. The soile, he wrote, is the most plentifull, sweete, fruitfull, and wholesome of all the world. The Indians welcomed the English, Barlowe noted. They entertained the explorers with all love, and kindnes, and with as much bountie, after their manner, as they could possibly devise. Barlowe found the people most gentle, loving, and faithfull, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age.¹

And so it is here, in this New World Eden, where most stories of English colonization begin. History, in this sense, is all too often depicted as commencing with the arrival of the newcomers on American shores. But we are interested in a different story. In order to understand the murder of Wingina and its consequences, we must recognize that the peoples Barlowe and the sailors who accompanied him encountered had long histories of their own on this continent. Wingina’s story begins well before Ralegh’s ocean-weary settlers clambered out of their ships’ boats onto the sands of the Carolina Sounds. It is time for us to establish the setting, and the scene of the crime. In order to understand why a young colonist beheaded Wingina and why this act of violence mattered, we must understand something of the beliefs and values Wingina and his people carried into their encounter with the English newcomers. The Indians of the Carolina Outer Banks, these peoples of rivers, sounds, and sea, did not consider the place they lived a new world, and the English explorers intruded into an environment where Indian rules prevailed.

FIGURE 1. Map of Ossomocomuck.

At first, the English thought that the Indians called this new land Wingandacoa. The newcomers placed that name proudly in patents and documents and proclamations once they returned home, until they learned that it did not refer to a place at all. As Sir Walter Ralegh remembered later, "when some of my people asked the name of that Countrie, one of the Salvages answered Wingandacon which is to say, as you weare good clothes, or gay clothes." The natives’ own name for the region into which these oddly-attired Englishmen had intruded was Ossomocomuck, a term that cannot be translated with certainty, but may mean something as appropriate and simple as the land that we inhabit, the dwelling house, or the house site.²

Ossomocomuck consisted of the coastal region of the North Carolina mainland, from the Virginia boundary south to today’s Bogue Inlet. Its limits to the east included the thin barrier islands of the Outer Banks and a number of larger islands located on the sounds between the two. Roanoke was one of these sheltered islands. It extended westward along a line that ran with the Chowan River south through the present-day locations of Plymouth, Washington, and New Bern.³ The geography of this region shifts constantly. Grasses cover the islands. In places there is soil suitable for agriculture, as well as stands of timber for housing and fuel. Still, wave and wind continually reshape the Carolina Sounds; they always will. Rain in the Carolina interior can swell rivers, and as these waters flow out to sea they deposit sand and sediment that close old inlets between the barrier islands and open new ones. Severe storms, the famous Atlantic hurricanes, only intensify the mutability of the Outer Banks. According to one study, Roanoke Island has seen its northern shoreline recede nearly a quarter of a mile since the late 1500s, and the federal government today devotes significant resources to preserving and maintaining the basic geographic shape of the Carolina Outer Banks. It is and was a world of water, and the relationship of the people who lived there to estuary, sound, and shore played a critical role in shaping their identity. The names of places all bore the mark of their relationship to water: Secotan, the town at the bend of the river; Aquascogoc, the place for disembarking; Weapemeoc, where shelter from the wind is sought; Dasemunkepeuc, where there is an extended land surface separated by water. Roanoke was named for the people who rub, abrade, smooth, or polish by hand, a reference, most likely, to the shell beads produced by the island’s inhabitants.⁴

Wingina’s