American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In July 1585, a collection of English soldiers and settlers supported by Sir Walter Ralegh settled on the northern end of Roanoke Island in the Outer Banks of coastal North Carolina. Ralegh placed the fledgling colony under the command of Ralph Lane, a veteran of Elizabeth I’s brutal wars against the Irish. The settlement would last for only one year-abandoned, most historians agree, when Lane recognized that he faced a massive Algonquian conspiracy led by the Roanoke weroance Wingina. Historians have been forced to rely on Lane’s account in their efforts to reconstruct the history of Ralegh’s first Roanoke Colony. In so doing, many have been careless in their acceptance of Lane’s story, specifically his contention that Wingina organized a plot to attack the English settlement with the assistance of neighboring Algonquian bands. An alternate reading of Lane’s narrative suggests that his indictment of Wingina may well have been groundless. Lane and the 107 men in his charge were to use the island as a base from which to seek a northwest passage to the Orient, as well as a harbor suitable for privateering operations. Things began badly for the colonists, however. The expedition’s flagship, the Tyger, under the command of Sir Richard Grenville, struck ground on the treacherous shoals of the Outer Banks. According to one chronicler, the ship “beat so manie strokes upon the sands, that if God had not miraculouslie delivered [Grenville], there had beene no waie to avoid present death.” Saltwater poured into the hold of the ship so “that the most part of his corne, salt, meale, rice, bisket, & other provisions that [Grenville} should have left with them that remained behind him in the countrie was spoiled." According to Thomas Hariot, who traveled to Roanoke as the expedition’s scientist and geographer, the accident left the colonists with food for only twenty days. The entire question of survival in this colonial outpost, then, was given new meaning. Unless the colonists could obtain food from the Indians-for they had arrived too late in the year to plant their own-the colony would face the prospect of starvation. Ralegh‘s Roanoke Colony was born in crisis.