Manteo, Wanchese, and Towaye

In 1585, England established its first settler colony at Roanoke in what is now North Carolina. There, the colonists encountered the Roanoke people, with whom they had extremely complicated and sometimes violent relations. Key to the process of colonization was the extraction of information about Indigenous homelands, and the Roanoke Colony was an exemplar of this. In particular, the work of English polymath Thomas Harriot , especially his Brief and True Report , offered readers insights, filtered as they were, into the realities of Indigenous lifeways, language, and geography. Harriot also produced an orthography (spelling system) for the Roanoke language. But Harriot’s work was not his own; it was done in collaboration with three Roanoke men, all of whom spent time at Durham House, Sir Walter Raleigh’s home on the Strand, where Harriot lived. As such, these accounts of Ossomocomuck, the Roanoke homeland, are neither simply products of that place or of London: they are entangled products of both. Most importantly, their ability to inform the English about tribal enmities, and the sources of riches, encouraged the colonial venture to Roanoke. What happened to Towaye, who was definitely there in 1586, is unclear. Both Manteo (from Croatan Island) and Wanchese (from Roanoke Island) had first been brought over in 1584 and returned home to Ossomocomuck with Sir Richard Grenville’s expedition to settle a colony. There, Manteo became an ally and interpreter to the colonists, while Wanchese led his people to take up arms against the English. Manteo would return to London with Towaye in 1586 to further aid in planning for the restoration for the already ailing colony. The eventual disappearance of the Roanoke colony by 1590 is one of the great mysteries of North American history.

Thrush, Indigenous London, 33-36, 58-61; Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 21-29. Image by John Thomas Smith – John Thomas Smith, Antiquities of Westminster (1806); https://archive.org/stream/antiquitiesofwes00smit#page/n35/mode/2up, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16149507