“As lucklesse to many, as sinister to myselfe.” Such was the Elizabethan colonist John White’s gloomy assessment of his tenure as the first governor of Britain’s fledgling colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia. As White lived out his final days on an Irish plantation in 1593, he struggled to come to terms with his ambivalent legacy in the “Newe found Worlde.”
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| Anonymous portrait of Sir Richard Grenville from the National Portrait Gallery. |
In the centuries since White’s death, his story has diverged in an interesting way. Generations of schoolchildren raised in the United States can probably recall reading about the “Lost Colony” at Roanoke in textbooks. In these simplified accounts, White and his fellow colonists typically figure as doomed but visionary pioneers in a larger narrative of British-American exceptionalism. Among professional historians, White is equally famous, but for rather different reasons. In recent histories of colonial British America, it is John White the artist, rather than John White the colonial governor, who takes center stage. This is because White was a watercolor painter of extraordinary talent whose works number among the most remarkable depictions of early modern indigenous Americans ever created.
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| 'The Flyer', a Secotan Indian holy man or "conjuror" (as the British often called them) painted by John White in 1585. British Museum, London. |
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| John White, "A cheife Herowans wyfe of Pomeoc and her daughter of the age of 8 or 10 years." (1585) British Museum, London. |
In 1585, one of White’s companions in Virginia, the natural philosopher and inventor Thomas Harriot, remarked that the indigenous children he encountered in America “greatlye delighted with puppets and babes which are broughte oute of England.” White’s painting actually offers a direct visual proof of this observation: in the hands of the woman’s child, one can spot a tiny female doll wearing Elizabethan dress.
As the historian Joyce Chaplin notes in her book Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Harvard University Press, 2003), this image was later recreated by the Dutch printmaker Theodore de Bry, who used White’s watercolors to create engravings for Thomas Hariot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590). De Bry’s depiction shows the Indian girl holding not only “an English doll in Elizabethan clothing,” but “an armillary sphere,” which served as “an instructional and decorative representation of the globe and heavens” (Chaplin 36).
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| Engraving by Theodore de Bry after John White's watercolour, from Thomas Hariot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590) |
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White also had a remarkable ability for “zooming out” from a scene to create an imagined isometric perspective. His painting of an Algonquian village stands out as one of the most detailed depictions of indigenous American village life to survive from the sixteenth century.
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| Village of the Secotan Indians in North Carolina, by John White in 1585. British Museum, London. |
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| Ceremony of Secotan warriors in North Carolina. Watercolour painted by John White in 1585. British Museum, London. |
Finally, however, White found evidence of the colonists’ wherabouts. In a tree, he discovered “three faire Roman Letters carved C. R. O.”: this was a pre-arranged maker which White understood “to signifie the place where I should find them”: Croatan. White’s suspicion was confirmed with the discovery of a scene that is now almost mythical:
We found no signe of distresse; then we went to a place where they were left in sundry houses, but we found them all taken downe, and the place strongly inclosed with a high Palizado [i.e. a palisade of wooden stakes], very Fortlike; and in one of the chiefe Posts carved in fayre capitall Letters C R O A T A N, without any signe of distresse, and many barres of Iron… and such like heavie things throwne here and there, overgrowne with grass and weeds…Interestingly, White’s account here connects his two identities as governor and painter. He remarks that his men “found diverse Chests which had been hidden and digged up againe” surrounding the palisade. Among these chests, White was surprised to find objects which he knew “to be my owne”: “books” and “pictures” he had created in the years before, now “scattered up and downe…[and] spoyled.”In the end, White was unable to follow up on these strange clues: storms forced the expedition’s ships to turn back before reaching Croatan, and he returned to Britain with the mystery unresolved. The ultimate fate of the Roanoke colonists continues to be debated. Some have conjectured that White’s fellow colonists may have opted to join a local Algonquian Indian tribe and adapt themselves to the very different (and rather more effective) Amerindian methods of contending with the harsh American landscape.
It is unlikely that we’ll ever know what happened – but if White’s daughter and granddaughter really did become incorporated into an Indian tribe, it would have made a strange sort of sense. Few sixteenth century Europeans looked upon indigenous Americans with anything other than a jaundiced and prejudiced eye. Yet White’s sensitive and humane portrayals of daily life among the Algonquians tell a different story, and suggest that his own stance toward the native peoples he encountered in the New World was rather more complex. In White’s sensitive depiction of the Algonquian woman and her child holding a European doll, perhaps we can discern a foreshadowing of the hybrid Euro-American fate of his own daughter and grandchild. The intertwined tales of the failed colony White governed, the family he raised, and the artworks he created offer one of the earliest examples of the mingling of cultures that would define the history of the Americas in the centuries to come.
I'd like to close by sharing some further illustrations, which have been traditionally associated with White. According to the British Museum, the traditional attribution of these works as copies after lost originals by John White is debatable. However, even if White was not directly involved in their production, they seemingly still were produced in the Roanoke colony, perhaps by an assistant of Thomas Harriot:
In his will, Harriot mentioned his long-time servant Christopher Kellett, a ‘Lymning paynter’, and it is just feasible that these are his work, though his name is not recorded in the list of Lane colonists for 1585–6. It would be natural for a set of these to end up in White’s volume if they did eventually intend to publish them.Interestingly, the famed editor Richard Hakluyt ultimately came into possession of the paintings and provided them to none other than Edward Topsell, a writer on animals whose Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes was the subject of the very first Res Obscura post. All of the following images are owned by the British Museum. See here for a further discussion of their provenance and here for the complete collection of 117 paintings.
Further reading:
- Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
- Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Harvard University Press, 2003)
- Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (Harvard University Press, 2001)
- Kim Sloan et al, A New World: England’s first view of America (University of North Carolina Press, 2007)
