Posted on 10/25/2006 9:13:12 PM PDT by FLOutdoorsman
MANTEO - At an archaeological dig at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, Phil Evans stepped into a meticulously measured pit and started shoveling dirt.
The Durham lawyer is no scientist. But he couldn't miss this. After 30 years of searching, he still wants to pinpoint where the English failed to establish their first permanent colony in North America.
Nearly every North Carolinian knows that a band of English settlers vanished from Roanoke Island about 1589, creating the legendary Lost Colony. No one knows where they went. An outdoor production replays the mystery year after year.
But the full story is more complex. Two colonies were launched on the northern edge of Roanoke Island in the 1500s, on what is now called called Fort Raleigh in Manteo. Despite failing to sustain a settlement, they were England's earliest land grab in North America.
It is a drama that has riveted Evans for years, first as a park ranger and later as a private citizen. The many unknowns haunt him. Exactly where did the English build cottages on Roanoke? Where did they erect a fort? Was there more than one fort?
To help find answers, Evans now leads the nonprofit First Colony Foundation, which raises money to search for colonial remains.
"It's a great story," Evans said. "But it's hard to take people around and convince them this is the site of the first colony when there is no archaeological evidence for it. "
Archaeologists, including a team that uncovered remnants of the first permanent English colony in Jamestown, donate their time. The National Park Service helps, too. But it couldn't get done without Evans, whose foundation raises thousands of dollars each year to pay for lodging, food and some labor, researchers say.
"I doubt there would be a First Colony Foundation if Phil wasn't around," said Nick Luccketti, senior archaeologist for the Jamestown digs in the 1990s. "His enthusiasm is so great it's infectious.''
On first glance, the chatty, gray-haired guy in the frayed khakis looks nothing like a mover or shaker. At this month's two-week dig, he was a self-proclaimed assistant, tackling grunt work when he could duck out of his law practice.
But Evans, 53, has been hooked on the details of America's past since growing up in Lowe's Grove, a country crossroads outside Durham. He was the type to prefer trips to Civil War battlegrounds or historic Williamsburg over ballpark outings.
After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1975 with a history degree, he worked as a ranger at Fort Raleigh. He soaked up everything others had learned about the place, showing a keen memory for details.
"I'd mention to Phil that I was trying to remember a fact I'd read, and he'd say it's in that book, third shelf from the bottom, on page 210," said Linda Pearce, a fellow ranger with Evans at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.
On the right track
Evans helped uncover the most recent archaeological evidence that proves the official park site is in the right neighborhood. In early 1982, he found a barrel and hollow log -- likely remains of English colonial wells -- in the shallows of Roanoke Sound. Carbon dating pegged them to the 1500s.
In the 1990s, Evans persuaded Ivor Noel Hume, then the chief archaeologist at Colonial Williamsburg, to dig at Fort Raleigh. Evans intrigued the in-demand scholar with tantalizing evidence: Remains uncovered at Fort Raleigh in the 1960s by another archaeologist resembled a piece of a fort Noel Hume had found in Virginia.
What Noel Hume discovered, however, wasn't the long-sought fort. His team instead exhumed ruins of a 1585 workshop set up by scientist Thomas Hariot and metallurgist Joachim Gans. The pair were among the first group of 108 men that Sir Walter Raleigh dispatched to North America to create a colony here. Out of food, that group returned to England in 1586, well before the Lost Colony settlers ever left their motherland.
Discovery of the workshop was a conquest as well as a setback. Remains of the structure lie both inside and out of earthen walls that many had considered the site of the colonial fort. Since a fort was unlikely to have cut through a building, the workshop's discovery challenged that belief.
And Noel Hume's team turned up no other evidence of a settlement -- human bones, glass bottles, pottery, remains of buildings.
"What we thought had to be certain cannot be certain," Evans said.
Still, the story of Fort Raleigh is of growing interest to U.S. and British historians -- something Evans hopes will sustain support for his foundation. Many now view English settlements there, particularly the earliest one, as a key to the success of Jamestown, established to the north in 1607.
Observations published by Hariot probably helped English entrepreneurs raise money for trips to North America's mid-Atlantic regions. He saw great promise in the minerals, lumber and herbs they found on Roanoke Island.
"If they hadn't been encouraging, Britain probably wouldn't have come to this part of America for years," Noel Hume said.
On top of that, lessons learned about local Indians on Roanoke better equipped Jamestown settlers to get along with native peoples. For instance, archaeologists in Jamestown have found sheets of copper and pieces of the metal cut into many decorative shapes.
In a book Hariot published after returning to England, he noted how local Indians liked to adorn themselves with copper. Trading copper with Powhatan, a powerful chief, might have protected the Virginia settlers from attacks, said Luccketti, a Jamestown researcher working in Manteo this month.
An eroding site
Finding more of the Roanoke settlements might clarify those connections. The trouble is, nature is not on the side of research. Land at Fort Raleigh has disappeared, eroded by Roanoke Sound.
"It's a race against time," said Eric Klingelhofer, director of historical archaeology at Mercer College and another veteran of Jamestown digs.
That is why archaeologists funded by the foundation last year focused on underwater studies off shore, digging 7 feet into the sand and scouring it with metal detectors. This month, they found shards of what looks like 16th-century pottery by the beach, but not a whole lot more.
Evans gets excited whenever they find anything. He has no need to learn where the lost, second wave of colonists went; that might wreck the allure of Fort Raleigh. But he is burning to know exactly where all those English souls passed their days.
"Where is the settlement?" he asked. "Where is the original fort?"
CROATAN
Within the last 10 years genealogists have started using the DNA samples of people now living to piece together information about common ancestors.
Proof that the survivors went native may be discovered as DNA research continues.
"Despite failing to sustain a settlement, they were England's earliest LAND GRAB in North America."
LOL. Those evil White people again.
Are you suggesting that the English settlers who vanished from Roanoke Island went “native’ in the same way that sailors of the Bounty went “native” on Pitcairn Island?
That’s an interesting hypothesis and one I haven’t heard about before.
It does make some sense in that the desire for survival is a strong force among all humans and the natives may not have objected to their assimilation and could explain the reason for the lack of human remains at the settlement site.
But aside from some native Indians with surnames from the colony's roster and antidotal suggestions that some Indians looked more like Englishmen, what is the archeological or anthropologic evidence to support this hypothesis?
The English settlers who vanished from Roanoke Island could have just have reasonably died from a combination of starvation, disease and Indian raids.
The issue of surnames, if adopted in later times can be explained as having nothing to do with the original settlers as well as inter marriage among later English and natives could explain the “English” looking Indians. It could be a more recent phenomenon and not related to the original settlement.
Interesting theory though.
I was surprised to learn that at the time the English attempted their first colony St. Augustine was thriving to the point where it had schools and a road system. I didn't learn this in school though...I had to read about it later myself.
I wait for that, and for another similar "mystery" about the disappearance of the Greenland colonists when the Medieval Warm slid into the Little Ice Age. I suspect they gradually increased their hunting and went for longer and longer hunting trips as agriculture became less productive. They had met and knew of the indigenous folks and it would be natural to accompanythem on occasional then more than occasional walrus and seal hunting trips. I would bet that the Inuit have traces of Nordic genes.
All true, but the individual Indians that looked like Englishmen observations were made in the first years of Jamestown. After 20 years the few Roanoke adult survivors would likely all be dead just because living "native" in those environs meant generally that a thirty year old was a respected elder and a 60 year old was next to mythical.
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Croatoan -- I think. The name of a local tribe and/or a local island.
That's it.
Thanks!
Thanks, I thought this all sounded faintly familiar, lol.
Archaeologist promises to return Croatan ring (N.C. / Lost Colony)
Durham Herald-Sun (Durham, NC) | September 3, 2002 | The Associated Press
Posted on 09/04/2002 10:21:06 AM EDT by Constitution Day
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/744407/posts
Volunteers To Dig Into Croatan Indian Village Site Again ("Lost Colony")
Virginian - Pilot | 5-28-2006 | Catherine Kozak
Posted on 05/28/2006 9:25:38 PM EDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1639893/posts
For those unfamiliar with NC geography, Roanoke Island is just inside the Outer Banks chain of barrier islands. The city of Roanoke, VA, and the town of Roanoke Rapids, NC have only a vague connection to Roanoke Island: both are far upstream on the Roanoke River, which empties into Albemarle Sound 60 miles or so west of Roanoke Island.
The Native American connection is controversial, with some among the Lumbee tribe, now centered in Robeson County, south of Fayetteville and approximately 200 miles SW of Roanoke Island, claiming descent from the Croatroan tribe. Quite a few Lumbees have blue eyes, which some cite as evidence of intimate contact with the British colonists.
As always, history involves conjecture and disagreement. North Carolina's status as home to the first "permanent" English settlement is disputed (does a failed "permanent" settlement count?); our claim to being the home of the First State University is challenged by some Georgians; and our claim to being First in Flight based on Wilbur and Orville Wright's 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk (only 15 miles or so from Roanoke Island) is challenged by Ohioans who point out that the brothers were from Dayton and fabricated the plane there.
More tenuous is our claim as Andrew Jackson's birthplace near my present abode (most historians, not to mention Jackson himself, think he was born just over the line in South Carolina), and more unrealistic still is the claim of Charlotte as the site of the Mecklenburg [County] Declaration of Independence, May 20, 1775, thus predating the Declaration of Independence -- a claim few outside of North Carolina take seriously.
History is fun, but not to be taken too seriously. It's usually written by the winners, and revised to their will. If historical facts of relatively recent vintage can be the subject of so much disagreement, it boggles the mind to ponder how truly ancient history has evolved after the fact.
Addenda: Whale oil, sugar and later, cotton founded this country.
I own a brick from the original fort. It was dug up by my mom in the 1950's. Croatan.
Odds were definitely in favor. ;')
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