Description
Namontack, a servant of Chief Powhatan, was swapped, with diplomatic intent, with Thomas Savage, a young labourer also in his early teens, and placed under the charge of Christopher Newport, who returned with him to England for roughly a two month stay, his experiences of which he would have recounted in detail to Powhatan. Vaughan describes him returning to England for a second time with Matchumps, the brother of Powhatan’s young wife, Winganuske. James Horn suggests that Namontack visited Thomas Harriot at Syon House in Hounslow (where Harriot was employed by the Earl of Northumberland) and that the two likely conversed in Algonquian.
Bibliographic sources
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.