Machumps

When Namontack returned to England, Machumps was on board with him. On their return to America some time later their ship, the Sea Venture, was hurricane stricken and wrecked off the Bermuda coast. Vaughan places the two aboard, although he elucidates their narrative erasure from the earliest major accounts of these events, which he puts down to ambivalence about “ethnic others”. The accounts, Vaughan reports, indicate that Machumps murdered Namontack on Bermuda, although they do not reveal why, and Powhatan himself later claimed not to know what had happened to the young man. Horn explains that Machumps’s account of what happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke was taken down by William Strachey in London. Strachey was a supporter of the Blackfriar’s Theatre, so we place the flag roughly in the vicinity of one of the two original Blackfriar’s Theatres for lack of knowledge of Machumps’s movements in London.

Vaughan, Alden T. “Namontack’s Itinerant Life and Mysterious Death: Sources and Speculations” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 126:2 (2018): 170-209; Horn, James. A Kingdom Strange: the Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Hachette, 2010.