At the encouragement of Sir Walter Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth I of England sends a company of soldiers to North America to establish a colony. The men settle in what is now North Carolina, on Roanoke Island. The Indians in the area welcome them as trading partners, and the English, neglecting to plant their own crops, come to rely on them for food. The dependent colonists soon earn the Indians’ ill will. When a silver cup is missed from their supplies, the settlers accuse the Indians of theft and burn one of their villages to the ground. Afraid that an Indian attack is imminent, many of the English return home in late 1585. The colony is kept alive by a new group of 110 settlers, who arrive at Roanoke in 1587. (See also entry for 1590.)
John White uses drawings and paintings to document Indian life.
Soon after the founding of Roanoke in present-day North Carolina, English settler John White begins work on a collections of drawings and watercolors illustrating the customs of Indians living nearby. The images record the Indians’
A watercolor by John White depicting the various fishing methods used in the 16th century by Indians in present-day North Carolina (NationalArchives, Neg. no. 208-LU-25I-4)
Fishing and farming methods, clothing, ceremonial dances, and family life. Intended to promote further English colonization, White’s works show Indians to be odd but industrious, dignified, and joyous people and their land to be fertile and rich with game and fish. His drawings and paintings will become well known through engravings by Theodore de Bry that will be printed in Thomas Hariot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590).
“We found the people most gentle, loving, and faithful, void of all guile and treason, and such as live after the manner of the golden age. The people only care how to defend themselves from the cold in their short winter, and to fed themselves with such meat as the soil af-
Fordeth____The earth bringeth
Forth all things in abundance, as at the first creation, without toil or labor.”
—colonist Arthur Barlowe after returning to England from Roanoke in 1584
World History
