The Lost Duchess (49 page)
I would just like to add a small point about names. I have tried to regularise these as much as possible and make the characters readily identifiable. So I refer to the
Lion
’s Pilot as ‘Simon Ferdinando’, who gave his name to ‘Port Ferdinando’, though he appears in historical texts under various permutations of his name in Portuguese, Spanish and English, and frequently as ‘Simon Fernandez’. I have
kept to the names used most often in the first-hand accounts. Where there has been a possibility for confusion, I have made adjustments to try and avoid that, thus Manteo’s kinsman Menatoan (whose wife was shot at by mistake in the raid on Dasemonkepeuc) becomes ‘Enato’ in the story so as not to confuse him with Menatonon, chief of the Choanoke tribe.
One problem for historians and novelists alike is that the Elizabethans did not care a jot about spelling; words were recorded phonetically and there was little consistency. Thus it was not unusual to have several permutations of a surname in a lifetime. Over forty versions of ‘Raleigh’ have been found, but ‘Raleigh’ has become the most familiar (though there’s no evidence that Sir Walter actually signed his name with an ‘i’!), and ‘Raleigh’ remains in common use, despite most English historians now referring to him as ‘Ralegh’. So I’ve used ‘Raleigh’, and, for similar reasons, I’ve used ‘Harriot’ rather than ‘Hariot’.
With variant spellings of other words, I have opted for the version that is most familiar or most memorable. ‘Algonkian’ is easier to remember than ‘Algonquian’ so I’ve adopted the former to refer to the North American Indians belonging to the language group spoken along the Atlantic seaboard. Many of the native words recorded by Harriot and White also now have several forms. I have come across at least five different versions of the word for ‘chief’. The one that I have used is that recorded most usually in White’s narrative: ‘
weroance
’ for a male and ‘
weroanca
’ for a female chief. The Algonkian words in the story come in the main from White’s paintings: ‘
nahyápuw
’ for the bald eagle, ‘
mamankanois
’ for the tiger swallowtail butterfly, ‘
wisakon
’ for milkweed, and so on.
Place names pose another problem since they were often very
different in the Elizabethan era from the names we know now. For example, ‘Puerto Rico’ was known as ‘St John’s’ and ‘St Croix’ in the Virgin Islands was known as ‘Santa Cruz’. I have tried to use names that would have been familiar to the Elizabethans and to make the locations clear in the narrative. I hope the map will help address any residual uncertainty. Often the names of tribes are the same or similar to the places they inhabited. So the Croatan tribe lived mainly on Croatoan, an island which now corresponds to part of Hatteras and Ocracoke combined. The nearest place to the Indian settlement of Croatoan is modern-day Buxton at Cape Hatteras.
I have suggested a secret brief for Simon Ferdinando, but that is only conjecture; his true role remains an enigma. On the voyage he made for Raleigh in 1585, Ferdinando grounded the flagship after attempting a risky passage in a storm through the sand banks off Virginia despite the fact that he knew a safer route lay further north. The action resulted in the loss of most of the ship’s provisions with grave consequences for the survival of the garrison commanded by Ralph Lane. On the next voyage, Ferdinando made all the colonists disembark at Roanoke rather than sail to Chesapeake as had been planned. Again, this probably doomed the colony since the Roanoke Indians had become hostile (something that White’s settlers plainly did not fully appreciate at the outset). There is no doubt that Ferdinando was unpopular; he was nicknamed ‘the swine’ by mariners, and White was at loggerheads with him throughout. He could have been a Spanish agent, or he could simply have been arrogant, careless and unlucky; another explanation is that he was under covert orders from Walsingham to establish the colony further south.
My most valuable resources in writing this story have been the
first-hand accounts of John White, Ralph Lane and others contained in
The First Colonists – Documents on the Planting of the First Settlements in North America 1584–1590
edited by David B Quinn and Alison M Quinn. Other books always on my desk were
Roanoke – The Abandoned Colony
by Karen Ordahl Kupperman and
Big Chief Elizabeth
by Giles Milton.
For anyone wanting to find out more about life for the first English settlers and their contact with native American people, nothing can beat visiting the region of North Carolina that was once part of the English ‘Virginia’, looking at the excellent reconstructions and displays on Roanoke Island at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site and the Roanoke Island Festival Park, then finding a remote spot facing the Atlantic on the islands of Hatteras or Ocracoke. Stand on those white sand shores where no one else and no building is visible, and gaze out to sea as Raleigh’s Planters would have done over four hundred years ago. The view will be much the same as it was then; let your imagination do the rest.
Jenny Barden
Dorset, September 2013
I would like to thank my steadfast agent, Jonathan Pegg, and the wonderful team at Ebury Press for all their help; my brilliant editor, Gillian Green, as well as Emily Yau and Ebury’s Press Officer, Ellie Rankine; my copy editor, Charlotte Cole; my proofreader, Margaret Gilbey, and my colleagues in the Historical Novel Society, the Romantic Novelists’ Association, and the Historical Writers’ Association and Verulam Writers for their support and encouragement. As always my gratitude goes to my husband, Mark, for making it all possible.
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