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...

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...

Wingina learned of the arrival of newcomers and sailing ships during the second week of July 1584. The Englishmen went ashore, perhaps on the island the natives called Hatarask, perhaps at Wococon, or perhaps farther north, near the present-day town of Southern Shores. We cannot know for sure. The Englishmen fired their guns, frightening a large flock of white cranes, they said, that “arose under us” and took flight “with such a crye redoubled by many Ecchoes, as if an armie of men had showted all together.”¹

Someone could have heard this. Roanokes who had been fishing or hunting or...

The sojourn of Manteo and Wanchese in England lasted nine months. In the spring of 1585 they moved down to Plymouth, where Ralegh’s men prepared the ships and assembled the men and supplies for the new expedition to America. They saw immediately that the English planned a much larger undertaking than that of the year before: seven ships, including the Lyon, the Roebuck, and the Tyger, all larger than those Barlowe had commanded in 1584; six hundred men, half of them soldiers; and provisions adequate to support several hundred men on the Carolina Sounds for a year. Ralegh’s advisers had...

Granganimeo died sometime during the winter of 1585–1586. Afterward Wingina changed his name to Pemisapan and, according to Lane, began plotting against the English. The precise significance of the name change is difficult to discern. We will never know for sure what it meant. We do know that Powhatan Indians changed their names on occasion. Opechancanough, for instance, took a new name during the winter of 1621–1622, prior to the surprise attack he launched against the English colonists along the James River. The young woman known best as Pocahontas changed her name on a number of occasions during...

Pemisapan was shot, took flight, was hunted down, and was then beheaded, killed by colonists who feared that he was conspiring against them. It is a story few people know about. Most Americans, after all, are far more interested in the English struggle to conquer a wilderness than in the collateral damage inflicted upon a small Indian village and its people. Yet Pemisapan’s story mattered in deep and important ways to the Algonquian peoples who lived in Ossomocomuck late in the sixteenth century, and when the English resumed their efforts to colonize the region, his surviving followers forced them to...

It is here that the story of the Roanoke ventures, and of the killing of an Indian and its consequences, moves slowly but certainly into the realm of myth, where what we wish we knew far exceeds that of which we can be certain. On August 18, 1587, Governor White’s daughter Eleanor gave birth to Virginia Dare, “the first Christian borne in Virginia.” Meanwhile, Simon Ferdinando had finished unloading the colonists’ supplies and refitting and repairing his ships for the return to England. On August 22, the colonists, who had become increasingly edgy and frightened in the wake of the...

If we are to relate the history of English efforts to plant and nurture an empire on American shores, it makes sense, at the end, to return to Sir Walter Ralegh. He did not forget about the Lost Colonists, at least not entirely. In 1602 he sent out a small party under the command of Samuel Mace to trade with any natives they might encounter and search for whatever remained of John White’s expedition. Mace sailed along the Outer Banks, and spent the summer somewhere near Port Ferdinando, but we have no evidence that he met or spoke with any...