The Head in Edward Nugent's Hand by Michael Leroy Oberg

Author:Michael Leroy Oberg [Oberg, Michael Leroy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775), Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Native American Studies
ISBN: 9780812203417
Google: 7PTSBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-02-12T01:07:28+00:00

CHAPTER 5

VENGEANCE

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 live with the consequences of their treacherous attack.

Governor Lane tells us that he would have remained on the island had not the hurricane arisen, but he needed to justify to Ralegh the decision to abandon his post. The simple fact is that he knew he could not safely remain on Roanoke. The slaying of Pemisapan and the savagery of the English attack made this impossible. When Drake lost the few ships he could spare in the storm in the summer of 1586, Lane seized the opportunity to evacuate. He and the English colonists abandoned Ossomocomuck in a hurry. Much was lost. The sailors, pulling themselves together in the hurricane’s aftermath, cast the colonists’ excess baggage overboard. They had been at sea with Drake for over a year, and badly wanted to return home. As a result, Harriot’s notes and research material and much of John White’s artwork ended up on the ocean floor. Three of Lane’s men, if they did not die in the skirmish at Roanoke or in the assault on Dasemunkepeuc, were left behind in the rush to depart. We already have mentioned the several hundred African slaves and Central American Indians whom Drake may have deposited somewhere on the Outer Banks. These would have been a first and almost entirely forgotten “Lost Colony,” ignored by generations of American mythmakers who chose to believe, as one antiquarian put it, that only men of “the purest Anglo-Saxon Blood” colonized America.1

But something more may have been lost in 1586 at Roanoke Island. The English, at least in part, had launched their invasion of America on waves of benevolent intent. Sir Walter Ralegh had premised his plans for America on a “dream of liberation,” in which Englishmen would carry civility and English Christianity to America, bringing benefits to natives and newcomers alike. Ralegh’s empire, if it had lived up to expectations, would have been an Anglo- American empire.2

It did not live up to those expectations, of course. Algonquians had little interest in playing along, once they recognized what the English expected of them. For Wingina’s people to follow the path of progress and civility that Harriot, Hakluyt, and others believed them capable of would have required that they abandon their religion and the cultural assumptions on which it was based. Ralegh’s empire failed to live up to his expectations, as well, because of the violence of Lane’s soldiers and the diseases his men carried.

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