Cate of the Lost Colony - Lisa Klein [115]
Nothing is known about the particular customs of Manteo’s people, the inhabitants of Croatoan (known as Hatteras Island today). They did have a female chief who was Manteo’s mother. They probably spoke an Algonkian language like the Powhatan and other tribes of tidewater Virginia and northern New England, and possessed similar religious beliefs. Knowing no other way to craft a character so remote from my own experience, I have adapted Algonkian legends in order to convey how Manteo might have understood himself and his world before and after the English came into it. An immense help in this regard was Michael Leroy Oberg’s book. He analyzes the colonization effort from the Native American perspective, showing how the English failed to understand the native’s society and upset its balance. His title, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, refers to the killing of Wingina and its consequences.
Now, about my treatment of Sir Walter Ralegh. I have opted to spell his name “Ralegh” rather than the more familiar “Raleigh,” because the first was more common in his time. (Spoiler alert! Skip the rest of this paragraph if you haven’t read the book yet.) Despite his association with the Virginia colony and its most famous export, tobacco, Ralegh never went there. At least not officially. No biographers are specific about what Ralegh was up to from March to October of 1590 (the time of John White’s final voyage). They assume he was in London serving the queen. There is only one extant letter from this period with Ralegh’s signature: a recommendation for an unemployed vicar, written in a clerk’s hand. I am pretending it was signed by a deputy to conceal that Ralegh had secretly left the country. It is not impossible that Ralegh sailed to Roanoke Island with John White, but there is no historical evidence to support my fiction. This is the one occasion where I stretched the truth for the sake of a good story.
I do take considerable license with Ralegh’s poetry, selecting verses that seem to illuminate his fortunes in love and politics, then editing and rewriting them for a modern reader. (His poetry is known for its obscurity.) His poetic works were not published until years later, but like most poets of his time, he shared his poems among friends. So consider the poetic fragments here to be his works in progress, or early drafts. The letters and papers of Ralegh are fictitious but based on historical sources.
What happened to Ralegh after the failure of his Roanoke colony? In 1592 he seduced and married one of Queen Elizabeth’s ladies, Elizabeth Throckmorton. The queen threw them both in the Tower for a time, and he was banished for five years. During that time he sailed to South America, pursuing a dream of gold, and published The Discoverie of Guiana. In 1602 he made another effort to locate the colonists; some said that this was an effort to keep his Virginia patent from expiring by claiming English planters still lived there. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and under King James Ralegh was imprisoned on suspicion of treason, where he wrote The History of the World, only getting as far as 168 BC. He made a voyage to Guiana in hopes of finding gold, but it was unsuccessful, and in 1618 he was finally executed on the old treason charges.
The 1590 voyage was not the end of attempts to locate the Roanoke colonists. The Jamestown settlers tried to find them. On an expedition inland in 1607, one of their leaders, George Percy, reported: “We saw a Savage Boy about the age of ten yeeres, which had a head of haire of a perfect yellow and a reasonable white skinne.