Kinfolks (19 page)

Meanwhile, Sir Richard Grenville returned from England to Roanoke Island with new recruits, only to find neither his colonists nor freed slaves of any nationality. He left a dozen soldiers, some German miners, and a Jewish mineral expert from Prague named Joachim Ganz to guard the island until a new expedition could be launched.

When this new expedition arrived in 1587, they found no soldiers, slaves, miners, or colonists — only one skeleton. Soon, a new settler who'd gone crabbing alone was found dead. The colonists under their watercolor-painting governor, John White, accused their long-suffering Indian neighbors of having murdered him (probably true). As punishment, they killed the chief of the Roanoke Indians whom they held responsible. Then they burned down a Roanoke town. Unfortunately, the hostile Roanoke who'd lived there had left, and some of the few Indians who still liked the English had moved in.

As usual, the colonists ran out of food, and by now all the Indians were hiding when they saw them coming with their empty baskets. These Indians must have felt a mix of exasperation, pity, and contempt for the colonists with their greed, incompetence, and capricious violence. At least the Pilgrims took Squanto's fish and learned to plant them so as to fertilize their corn crops, proving the wisdom of the old saw that if you give a man a fish, it feeds him for a day — but if you teach him how to plant a fish, he won't raid your traps.

By now the Indians were dying left and right from European diseases, as well as from war with the English and starvation caused by feeding the invaders winter stores already depleted by an ongoing drought.

John White sailed to England for more supplies. The arrival of the Spanish Armada off the English coast delayed his return. When White finally made it back to Roanoke Island three years later (on the third birthday of his granddaughter, Virginia Dare, supposedly the first English child born in America), the island was once again empty. The word
CROATOAN
was carved on a tree, minus the Maltese cross the colonists had been instructed to carve if they were in danger. Though how they thought they'd have time to carve anything at all while being attacked by Indians remains a mystery.

A tribe called the Croatan lived about halfway down Cape Hatteras and were probably the colonists' last remaining Indian fans. Some historians believe the Croatan may have already absorbed Grenville's soldiers and/or the three original missing colonists, and perhaps some of the dumped slaves as well.

“Why would the Croatan have wanted such a sorry bunch?” Ina interjects.

I explain that one named Manteo, the son of the Croatan
weroansqua
(“female ruler,” and perhaps the origin of the word
squaw)
, had traveled to England in 1584 with Captain Edward Barlowe, who scouted Roanoke Island in preparation for the first colony there. Manteo learned English and adopted English dress. With him went an adviser to the chief of the Roanoke named Wanchese. When both returned to Virginia, Wanchese immediately defected and warned his tribe about the threat posed by the English. But Manteo remained loyal to the English and persuaded his mother's tribe to assist them.

One North Carolinian historian maintains that the Croatan were originally named the Hatteras and that the members of the Lost Colony started calling them Croatan because they had evidence of Croatian ancestry for them. Although this may sound like one of Diane's theories, it's not as far-fetched as it first sounds. In the sixteenth century, the Croatian republic of Dubrovnik (earlier known as Ragusa) produced ships that were the largest and sturdiest in the world. Spain chartered some of them and their Croatian crews for its treasure fleets. Croatian sailors also sailed with Columbus, the Cabots, and Verrazano. Various place names along their routes are thought to be of Croatian origin.

In addition to the possibility of Croatian sailors being shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, one Croatian historian has found evidence in the Ragusan archives of Croatian emigrants to America in 1510-20. Another claims that ringleaders of a failed peasant revolt in Croatia in 1573 established a settlement in America.

A researcher named Charles Prazak has listed a number of ostensibly Croatian words found among the Algonquin tribes of coastal Virginia and North Carolina. For example, the head of the Powhatan Nation was himself called Powhatan, and the Croatian
pohotan
means “cruel leader.” Pocahontas's real name was Matoaka, and the Croatian
matorka
means “big little girl.”

Captain Barlowe said of some local Indians he encountered on his scouting mission in 1584, “They were of color Yellowish and their hair black for the most part, and yet we saw children that had very fine auburn and chestnut-colored hair.” He himself assumed they were descended from stranded Europeans. He also reported that some coastal Indians spoke of “at least two Spanish ships wrecked within living memory,” from which they had salvaged some iron spikes.

In 1709, an explorer named John Lawson (killed by the Tuscarora two years later) visited a tribe on the Outer Banks whom he called the Hatteras, who claimed descent from the Croatan. Lawson believed them to be descendants of the Lost Colonists and said they reported that “several of their ancestors were white people and could talk in a book as we do, the truth of which is confirmed by gray eyes being frequently found among these Indians and no others. They value themselves extremely for their affinity to the English and are ready to do them all friendly offices.”

Lawson also reported that “the ship which brought the first colonists does often appear amongst them, under sail, in a gallant posture, which they call Sir Walter Raleigh's ship.”

Other historians believe that at least some of the Lost Colonists headed north to live with the Chesapeake tribe on the southern shore of Chesapeake Bay. This tribe was slaughtered twenty years later by the Powhatan from the northern side of the bay. Chief Powhatan showed Captain John Smith of Jamestown a musket barrel, a brass mortar, and some chunks of iron he claimed were seized during this raid.

Reports later reached Jamestown that four Englishmen, two boys, and a young girl had survived this attack and were “living to the south with Indians who had stone houses of more than one story.” Several search parties were launched from Jamestown, but these survivors were never located. However, a Jamestown colonist named George Percy reported seeing an Indian boy of about ten with “a reasonable white skinne” whose hair was “a perfect yellow.”

“But the oddest part of this whole thing,” I tell Ina and Nellie, “is that John White, the governor who went back to England for supplies and was delayed in returning by the Spanish Armada, had a daughter and granddaughter among the Lost Colonists. When he finally arrived at Roanoke Island and found them missing, he had good reason to suspect that they were living nearby with the Croatan. Yet he never dropped by to check on them. He had various excuses — a storm that drove his ship southward, a need to pick up fresh water, a leak in his ship, etc. But he went back to England and never returned.”

“No one could accuse him of being an overprotective parent,” Nellie agrees.

After a lunch of taco salads at Wendy's, we head down the Outer Banks, passing through the beach town of Nags Head. I mention having once vacationed nearby with my family. Nellie knows my parents and knew my grandmother from socializing with them for years. Ina knows them, too, from playing tennis with my sister and watching the town tennis tournaments with my parents. She never met my grandmother, but she reports seeing her almost daily while driving into town. She says my grandmother would nose her silver Cadillac into the road from her driveway without looking in either direction. She assumed the other cars would stop to make way for her, which they did.

I explain where Nags Head got its name: in the nineteenth century, town residents reportedly hung lanterns around the necks of their mules and led them up and down the dunes on stormy nights so that ships at sea, struggling amid the swells, would mistake the bobbing lights for those of another ship and would believe themselves in open water — until their ships ran aground on the reefs, where the locals could plunder them.

The Outer Banks are hardly more than spits of sand thrown up from the maw of the ocean, but they provide a barrier behind which stretch quiet bays. According to John White's lovely watercolors, the various Algonquin tribes speared fish from dugout canoes in these estuaries. The existence of these dunes and shoals explains why North Carolina developed more slowly than Virginia or South Carolina. Islands appear and disappear under the pounding surf, and inlets open and close like the shells of oysters. This coast offered no real deepwater ports such as Newport News or Charleston.

The trade winds and currents in the Atlantic carry ships in a giant clockwise oval from Portugal, past the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, then up the eastern coast of Florida. Veering eastward above Bermuda, the currents continue to the Azores and back to Europe. If a storm hits a ship off the Florida or South Carolina coast, it can be driven northward onto the Outer Banks, which are nicknamed the Graveyard of the Atlantic. An estimated 10,000 people have been shipwrecked there over the centuries, and nearby houses from colonial days are said to be framed with beams salvaged from wrecked ships.

As for the fate of the passengers, who knows? No doubt many drowned. Of those who crawled ashore, some may have been killed by natives. Others were most likely saved for slavery or adoption.

Some old-time Melungeons reportedly insisted they were descended from stranded Portuguese sailors. The Portuguese were the world champion sailors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and some undoubtedly ran aground along this coast. It would have been a long, hard four-hundred-mile trek from the Outer Banks to Newman's Ridge. Early exploring parties could cover as much as twenty miles per day on good days, so a drive that had just taken us seven hours might have taken them a month. Or Melungeon progenitors could have moved inland more gradually — a few dozen miles farther west with each generation.

“The only thing that's clear anymore,” I tell Ina and Nellie, “is that most of what we learned in school was garbage. The Southeast wasn't an empty wilderness when Europeans ‘discovered' it. It was crawling with nearly two million Indians and an unknown number of Europeans, Middle Easterners, and Africans. I'm quite annoyed to have been the innocent repository of so much misinformation.”

I glare at them, since they're both teachers. Then I tell them about a hundred Huguenots in South Carolina who survived Spanish attacks by fleeing to Indian villages. About a group of African slaves who escaped inland from a colony established in 1526 south of the Outer Banks by a Spaniard named Ayllon. About a dozen more examples of people roaming the Southeast who weren't supposed to be here at all, according to my history texts.

Ina glances at Nellie in the backseat. “Sorry,” she says to me with a shrug. “But we've got our hands full chasing down drug dealers.”

We drive two hundred miles southwest to Lumberton, the main town for the Lumbee Indians, whose name is said to have originated from the Lumber River on which many now live. A nearby settlement of French Huguenots encountered them at their present location in 1709. The Lumbee claim descent from the Croatan, the Hatteras, and the Lost Colonists. Many researchers scoff at this notion.

The approach to the town is bleak. Down-at-the-heels trailers dot the fields. Pawnshops and deserted flea markets alternate with defunct car dealerships. Many signs are in Spanish, reflecting the recent influx of Hispanic migrants into the Southeast. The customers in a supermarket parking lot appear as ethnically varied as pedestrians in midtown Manhattan.

We park near a courthouse with huge white pillars out front. While Ina and Nellie stroll around town, I grab some books from the back of my car, which has begun to resemble the Bookmobile that used to creep along the roads near our farm when I was a kid, the way the ice cream truck did in town.

I look up a list of the most common Lumbee surnames and compare them to the roster from the Lost Colony. Thirty-seven of forty-eight Lumbee surnames appear on the Lost Colony list. Some are so common that they'd be found anywhere in the South — White, Jones, Johnson, Smith, etc. But others are more unusual — Bridger, Berry, Sampson, Viccars, Dare. A few of the most distinctive Lumbee names — Oxendine, Locklear, Chavis, Lowry — aren't on the Lost Colony roster, suggesting that those families may be more recent arrivals.

But for me the Lost Colony has just been found. Like any sane settlers who were starving and under attack, they joined a friendly tribe and had babies with Indian spouses. Eventually their descendants moved inland, no doubt hoping to escape the depredations of advancing settlers. And the current generations are now farmers and tradesmen in and around this small North Carolina town that appears to be a cross between
Gone with the Wind
and
The Grapes of Wrath
.

But clearly the concept of lily-white throats brutally slashed by tawny savages suited the xenophobic English sensibility better than the notion of cheerful miscegenation. When Englishman John Lawson concluded in 1709 that the Hatteras were descended from the Lost Colonists, he said darkly, “Thus we see how apt Human Nature is to degenerate.”

However, none of the Lumbee surnames corresponds to the five traditional Melungeon ones. And, again, it would have been a difficult slog into the unknown, along a route densely populated by other Indian tribes, to reach Newman's Ridge. It's possible, I guess, but it seems a long way to go just to find bad farmland.

On the journey back home, somewhere near Hickory, we pass a truck that has painted on its sides

DIXIE COFFINS: MEETING THE DYING NEEDS OF THE SOUTH FOR 50 YEARS
.

Ina tells about her sister-in-law's sister, who loved Coca-Cola so much that her family laid her out in her coffin with one waxen hand clutching a Coke can. I suppose it's no different from ancient burials in which warriors were armed for the afterlife with their finest weapons, or pharaohs with their favorite concubines.