The Mystery of Roanoke and Future Prospects

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You're not buying impressions You're buying influence Learn more by visiting aast d. com slash advertise Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipbskom and welcome to Not Just the Tutors from History Hit The podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleinn the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenos from Shakespeare to summarize relelieved by regular doses of murds, espionage and witchard Not in other words, just the tutors But most definitely also the tudors In the summer of fifteen eighty four Two men stepped onto the shore of a vast and unfamiliar continent rom there they would encounter a world that would reshape English ambitions forever They returned, not with gold or booty but with something far more powerful Stories. stories of fertile lands, complex societies and peoples who seemed to Englishize both alien and full of possibility Within months, those stories were circulating in London thing to ignite a vision of empire that was as fragile as it was seductive. This was the moment England began to turn westward in earnest driven by rivalry with Spain religious purpose Pomise of opportunity across the Atlantic All this month on not just the tutors I'm leading up to the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence on the fourth of July, with a short series of episodes which look at how the early encounters between Europeans and America unfolded In the case of this episode uncertain they truly were Today we're joined by historian Peter C. Manle, distinguished professor Andrew W. Mellon, Professor of the humumanities and Professor of History Anthropology and Economics the University of Southern California He's the author of seeven books. His latest is Contested Continent The struggle for North America circle one thousand to sixteen eighty At the heart of today's stories are individuals navigating between cultures An indigenous American named Mantio, brought to England from the Carolina coast became a crucial intermediary learning the language and customs of the newcomers while maintaining ties to his own people. Alongside him was when Chazy whose experience led him in a very different direction Returning home with a deep mistrust of English intentions Their stories capture a moment when the future of English America was not yet defined. separation and conflict existed side by side. in England Figures like Richard Hackleutt were transforming these encounters into arguments for expansion weaving together religion, commerce, and imperial rivalry into a compelling case for colonization Meanwhile Observers such as Thomas Harriet and John White attempted to record interpret the world they encountered producing narratives and pictures that were as revealing of English hopes as they were. of indigenous realities What followed? was not a straightforward march towards empire but a series of precarious experiments Dpendent on fragile alliances and shaped by profound misunderstanding Survival was uncertain Expectations were often misplaced And the balance of power was far less clear than it would later appear It's a story of beginnings. of encounter negotiation and the contested foundations of what would become the English Atlantic world I'm Professor Susanna Lipbskom And this is not just the tutors From History hit Iesmankel, welcome to the podcast Well, thank you very much for having me. I'm delighted to be speaking with you today It's wonderful to have a chance to talk about these early years of encounter. I mean, I find them deeply, deeply fascinating and It's As with many other parts of the sort of colonial story of Britain notot quite what one would expect. Things don't go as we would imagine it, given later histories. Let's go back perhaps to the beginning of Elizabeth I first's reign. When she came to the throne, did England have any colonies Well, when Elizabeth took the throne, the English presence abroad was much less than it would soon become. So the English since the age of the cabot at the end of the fifteenth century, had sort of laid a claim to the Northwest Atlantic but those early exhibitions hadn't really led to very much. And so there's not really much there other than circulation of some rather vague knowledge When she came to the throne, she was very interested as your listeners, you know know well You know she was very interested in expanding the authority of the state And she was also, I think and I you know I point this out in the book. I think she took just faith very seriously. and those two things, the desire to expand the power of the realm and also to spread Protestant Christianity Motivated her first to launch a historian typically called the Llizabethan Conquest of Ireland and then byy the mid fifteen seventies and then especially in the fifteen eighties become much more interested in what was going on on the far shores of the Atlantic Ocean By the time she really starts to invest There' been a lot of other Europeans who traveled along the Atlantic coast of North America and news is circulating through Europe And I get the sense You know, that she and her advisors especially people like Hacklet really thought that the time was ripe for the English to get involved in more thorough exploration and then especially colonization or conquest and colonization. They were very jealous of the gains that the Iberians were making And so I think for multiple reasons, she wanted to get it on the act. Yes, And what is astonishing, I suppose, is look at I mean, the Spanish have been doing this for decades by this point. The English are very late to the game Why? I mean H had Henry VII, Henry theI, Elizabethsather and grandfather not been a little bit more interested in America. What had their attitude been? And what changed when Elizabeth came to the throne I that's one of the great questions that I wish I really had better answers for. I mean when Hacklet actually does his collection of travel narratives at the end of the sixteenth century, he includes a report at an alleged report of Bartholomew, Columbus, Christopher's brother going to the court of Henry VII and basically sort of saying you know, I'm looking for someone to support me to go across the ocean and being turned down, a decision that Hackle would later sort of respin as o America's sort of ours as well in this sort of indirect indirect kind of a way You know, my sense is always that certainly with Henry VIh, he was I think he was consumed in many ways with domestic affairs. I mean, I think that the Reformation was obviously very important to him. Qy literally his domestic affairs much of the time. They Well played. Yes, exactly And I think he did have, you know, he did have some ambitions. I mean, he does launch expeditions heading the other way you know towards Bologna, sort of reclaiming what he thought believed as English territory But during his reign, you know by the time of his death, deep knowledge of North America wasn't really available yet. I mean, there was some knowledge. it was very fragmentary. I mean, so the knowledge that he and his court had really had to do with what Spanish and Portuguese explorers had been finding and then colonizing in the West Indies, then to Mexico, then down into Peru and Brazil There is this information that's circulating, but you know I get the sense that his energies were elsewhere. Elizabeth seem to have had sort of a two pronged approach. She had more interest in North America not to the extent that she really wanted to invest her own or state resources in it. But I think instead what you see in the age of Elizabeth is a shift in in policy. towards really supporting people who'd come to her saying that they will raise money, if necessary find ships that they would basically fund expansionary campaign that could help to put England on the same footing as Spain beyond that deeper than that you know, I sort of would, you know, a yield to English historians who could probably, you know, see her in more sort of in more nuanance responding to domestic affairs. I do think during her reign more during her reign than what came earlier, that there's knowledge within England of sort of rising social problems, of a sense that there's a rising number of unemployed or undemployed young people, many of them men, many of them possible threats to the social order And I think when someone like Hacklet or the older Hacklet presented to the court, look Here are these Iberians making all this money advancing Roman Catholicism, that's not in our interest. And by the way, if we would to establish colonies There are all these economic benefits, one of which would be to find work for these sort of what they sort of would think of a surplus or undereemployed men. and hence reduce tensions at home, I think these things all started to come together In fact, the oldlder Hackt puts together a plan of fifteen eighties which lists thirty one different reasons for why the crown should support colonization. So I think it's the accumulation of Knowledge both domestically as well as news coming from abroad that finally sort of clicks in And the English become more interested in colonization I would say beginning in the fifteen seventies than going into the eighties. That's really interesting. let's come back to those reasons for colonization in due course. But one of the key things, as well as sort of concerns about vagrancy and mascless men, which is such an interesting point is this sense European rivalries, and I suppose the early story of English America tells us precisely about the sense of competition in Europe. and you know, they want some of that Spanish gold, don't they Absolutely. and that that's Spanish gold and all those other treasures which are being You know, I think the lightrum would be extracted, the macrorum would be stolen, you know, from the Americas You know, that wealth is making its way back to Europe and not just to Spain. you know, to the, I mean, unless the story is changed if you take a tour of Santa Maria Mjori I basasilica in Rome They tell that they tell how it's The gold leaf paint is from gold brought over from Columbus and from those expeditions. I mean It's not just sort of the idea that, oh, we're bringing more souls into Christendom and they're following the Pope if you could see the wealth that's coming across. And I think that Elizabeth with her series of spies across the continent because everybody's spying on everyone was well aware of these gains and want it to sort of G in on it. I mean, I do think that early on she is consumed with other things, especially Ireland But then her focus shifts explicitly towards North America It's interesting that you mention Ireland again because the relationship between England's campaigns in Ireland and colonization in America is fascinating. Could you tell me a bit about how these two colonial ventures influence each other I'll do my best I mean, the English or whatever we call those people in the eleventh and twelfth century have been interested in things going on in Ireland since then and then they launched this invasion. Y under strrong Bope They have the sense that they were going to bring these you know, as they would sort of say this sort of wild population under the fold into English civilization, English culture The experience turns out to be the opposite that the English men primarily men who go to Ireland inste intermarry into Gaelic society. and part of the society and Ireland sort of treundles along on its own narrative. When Elizabeth comes in, when Elizabeth sueds to the throne, think she looks at that experience She sees that there's great advantage to Ireland. I think she's very sincere about spreading Protestant faith. very frustrated that that did not go well in Ireland. also sees, I think some economic gain to be had Also sees Ireland as a possible place to send some of these otherwise undere employed people And I think she takes very seriously the idea that they should bring Ireland into the fold differentiates her from that earlier conquest is that the military invasion that they want is much more serious much bloodier And in the age of print The stories that are coming from Ireland you know are there for everyone to read You know, we read them now as tales of, you know, incredible barbarity. You know, I think that they read them as sort of you know, celebrations and look what we're doing and we're learning how to sort of bring this population to heal as it were And they do so quite explicitly A am I trying to terrorize the native population So in one celebrated example, which I was not the first historian to find this, of course It's foundational to the story of Nicholas Canney's early work on the Elizabethan conquest. But in one celebrated example, the military commander Gilbert has his men go out into the field at the end of the day and decapitate the bodies and have them brought to his tent so that people coming through would, as the chronicer puts it, have to walk through a lane of heads to get to him knowing that there would be a psychological terror to this So this level of willingness to use violence is far different than what had happened earlier And it does, I think, signal a shift on the part of the English state. towards expanding the realm That's interesting And let's go back to those arguments you mentioned. You mentioned that the Hackler's writings are hugely influential. How does the sort of vision that we see in things like the discourse of Western planting shape English attitudes towards empire, the prospect of colonization. Yeah. That's a great question. So there are two hacklets, both named Richard, so it always gets a little confusing And the elder one who's a lawyer at the Middle Temple one day is entertaining the younger one. the younger one is the famous one And he claims he the younger one would later write in fifteen eighty nine. He would write that he walked into the rooms his of his cousin and saw a map of the world. expressed an interest in it and the older cousin says starts to point like literally with his wand, point where where various resources can be found And this sparks the younger one. He tells the story years later, but it sparks his interest sometime late fifteen seventies. And then the younger one gets sort of marised in what'sso over there. He's sort of looking' settling on his life's purpose and he decides that one of the things that needs to happen is the English need to learn more, know more about what's going on broad And so he works with them a linguist bas in Oxford, named John Florio to translate part of Jacques Cartier's narratives of earlly trip to Canada, What's modern day Canada And then he starts to gather more travel accounts, look at old maps, and begin to put together an argument. leading in fifteen eighty four document that we call the Discourse on Westernlanting, in which he lays out rather systematically the many reasons that the English should get involved in overseas colonization They start with the grand general thing that we need to spread Christianity. I think they took that very seriously They want to spread the glory of the queen They can motivate people who know that individuals who do certain things will become famous They'll be able to they anticipate that they're going to extract wealth like the Spanish and the Portuguese had extracted wealth from the colonies They by that time can enumerate various commodities that can be found at Eastern North America. He weaves in the argument looking for work And by the time you get through it all, you get this very powerful argument And you can just imagine the quQeen or Sir Frances Walsinghamving your principal advisor reading this and thinking, why are we not already doing this? right? I mean it's page after page of this very detailed thing. One of the more interesting things about the discourse is it's not published. att the time, it's actually not published until the nineteenth century The ideas behind it do fuel the younger hack' publishing agenda. And those really start to come out powerfully in fifteen eighty nine in a big collection of travel ar called Principal Navigations And in the principle navigations, Hacklet lays out an argument that says we are an exploring people, a seafaring people. There's a wider world out there lookook at all the things that English people have done in the past and then he describes English exploits across the world, basically reprinting travel narratives from across the world And he's doing it by the time he gets to part three, which is on the western hemisphere, he's doing it I've argued, you know to build the case. You know, we we've gone to Africa, we've gone to Asia, we've gone these places It is now time to really go to North America. We've started We have not gotten very far now we need to do much more. I think that's the thrust of the both the discourse and the principal navigations It's so interesting to consider the ways in which that idea of Englishness as a seafaring as an exploratory people shaped identity for centuries thereafter. It really sets the tone, which I don't think was part of the narrative of Englishness sixty years earlier at all, really One of the explorations at the time that is happening is The search for the Northwest passassage. How is that relevant to America Well, I'm really glad you asked that because the Northwest passage is central to what the English want to do and it's not just the Northwest passage,s also the Northeast passage So the English looked at the most up to date maps that they could find And they could visualize anybody in Europe who saw these maps could see that there were these alleged water roots that ran north of Russia on the one hand, the Northeast Page. And north of what we think of as Canada, the Northwest passassage They believe that they existed They were right. They do exist They believe that they existed at a time when these passages were frozen over by because of the little ice age, know this colder couple of centuries in climate history You know, the search for the Northeast passage and the search for the Northwest passage had the same goal People in England, like people across much of Europe, We're desperate to get to the Southwest Pacific Ocean too find spices, to find cinnamon and cloves and pepper and nutmeg. And we tend to think of these things as things that we put in our food, which is true But they really thought of them as part of medicine, of material Aedica. thingsings that really could be integrated to improve human health. And they knew about the spices because there had been an old spice route. Broghtvice from the southwest Pacific Ocean all the way to Northwestern Europe you know, a very long couple of years journey through the Indian Ocean around Africa, and finally ned a lot of risks along the way an overland journey like the Silk Road also long, also filled with all kinds of risks And so when Hacklet quuite literally looking at maps He basically says here we are perched at the northwest edge of Europe. We are this fabulous maritime nation And we are closer to the openings of the Northwest passassage than anybody else or by extent the Northeast passage, hope. And so it made a certain logical sense to say, Oh, if we can make it to the Northwest passassage, if we can find opening to this body of water We will be able to get to the Southwest Pacific much more quickly Now what he doesn't know because Europeans only have dim awareness is how large the Pacific Ocean is or how wide North America is So on their maps, it looked like a relatively easy jaunt almost. you find your into the passage, you'll get through relatively quickly, you'll sail south and you'll get to the Spice Islands The English and other Europeans held to this idea about the relative narrowness of North America for quite a long time So they'd never quite understood how long it would take to get through the passage In some sense, that conversation didn't matter because they couldn't find the passage So it just kept motivating them and so sailor after sailor, explore after explorer new I'm going to be the one that finds it And so you see in the Elizabethan period, various Europeans making it to North America and trying to figure out Oh, That body of water looks wide. That must be the opening to the passage And that logic would motivate people for decades how to find it because they knew that the one who found it. bring glory to the quQeen and riches to the realm goal was so great that it was worth the risk So Everyone is attempting to be the one to come off to succeed in this quest Is there a moment under Elizabeth in which This is formalised, that colonization as a goal becomes sort of in codified Well, I'm not sure there's a single moment and trying to sort of figure out exactly But she and her court think about all of this exploration can be a little a little tricky So she is well aware that she is giving permission And she is laying claim based on the explorions of the cabbs from the late fifteenth century She's laying claim to parts of North America, to large parts of North America and during her realm that sort of the idea became that we, the English, could claim territory that is not already claimed by their words a Christian prince which meant they could claim territory south of the French claims what is modern day Canada and north of the Spanish claim to what is modern day Florida basically. So that broad area in the middlemost of the east coast of the modern United States, the English laid claim to, and Elizabeth and her court granted patents to people like Sir Walter Rawley to say, okay, This is my territory. I give you permission to go there and She offers they off the court offers a series of patents that that sort of encourage exploration One of the people who they support who would become really the greatest hero of the age Some sense was Sir Francis Drake You know, Drake is also trying to get to the Southwest Pacific also has this claim famously goes, you know, through the Straits of Magellan. up the west coast of the United States and what I find one of the most revealing moments in my very long book, you know one of the revealing moments is when Drake is somewhere Probably on the modern California coast Maybe slightly in North there's a big debate among archaeologists, but whatver it's called the California cooast for the sake of argument. And he sets up camp and he meets this native population And they can't speak to each other. know there's no common language that they can talk to. And so through a series of signs He seems to believe that these people who had never seen him before Never seen a sailing ship like his before I never seen people who look like him before, dressed like him, act like him He interprets their gestures, which were probably gestures of hospitality He interprets their gestures as We are giving you America. We're giving you this part of America We accept that we'll be subjects of the quQeen On some level, that's just ridiculous But it speaks to sort of the Elizabethan posture, Elizabethan attitude But if Her subjects are the first to see a certain population. and they make some effort to negotiate with them thenen that can be part of the realm. And that claim to California lasted for decades in sort of the English colonial mind. Yes, that's so interesting. and it's It's absolutely kind of a an echo of the sort of things that Columbus had said when he came back about the native people that he had met at there. You know, I could tell from what they were saying that they were offering me the land. We do have also expeditioned by sort of the other person we mentioned in the same breath as Drake at least on his behalf, Sir Waterter Raleigh or Rwlely as perhaps is called at the time. And this is two parts of The Americaas where we have know modern day Carolinas, where we have The Algonrian people live Do we have This is a strange question to us because of course we only reach many of our conclusions about these peoples from colonial accounts. but what can we tell about Algonkin society before the English Arow I think we know quite a lot. I mean it's not just from historical accounts. There are sort of descendant communities. And archaeology, I presume is Well there's a lot of archaeological evidence and there is some surviving oral testimony among certain populations and there are people who are the descendants, who are still living in these areas. So Agonquin speaking peoples lived across much of Eastern North America? And so the people who become the center of the focus of the English in Elizabeth Peod are these Carolina Gonquians, so the people on the on the outer banks and in North Carolina And fortunately for us, in fifteen eighty four, eighty five, a series of expeditions start to go from England to explore this area And really fortunately for us who are trying to understand this hundreds of years later The fifteen eighty fifteen eighty five Voyage has on it Young mathematician, Thomas Harriet and painter, John White And white does a series of watercolors probablyably does them there, although we don't actually know that for a fact. He's certainly sketching while he's there And Harriet writes an account becomes published when he comes home as a brief and true report of the Newfoundland of Virginia Arguably the most important work describing Native peoples since Columbus' initial report of fourteen ninety three And Harriet really goes into much detail. Now he benefits from the fact that he knows Monteo Monchese, who you had referred to in your elegant opening and he is starting to learn their language and they are certainly starting to learn English. Now how much they know each other is hard to know. But in the brief and true repeport, Harriet integrates Agoncrian words that they call backo this or they called maze that it does show that he has a certain familiarity. and it's certainly when he starts to look at the customs of the peoples who are there. He seems to be having real conversations. I mean conversations about the nature of the soul and what who gods are and things like this. I mean really quite specific I mean, and quite detailed, he tells stories about how they believe when someone dies, their soul goes off to Puisla Pabaguso they tells other sorts of stories and then in one very revealing moment One of the really central moments of this text, he says paraphrase some religion they have already and though it be far from the truth They'll be the sooner reformed, right? So he understands that the people he's meeting have a fairly in depth sense of religion, spirituality, faith, whatever word we want to attach to it So they don't need to be taught the concept of the divine They just need to be taught, as he would say it, that they're doing it wrong. that they need annganism basically to move forward He is at the same time that he's learning about the customs of these people. He's also describing the physical things, what's in that environment. and he's listing them out as what he calls merchantable commodities. Here are things that we can take Now that idea does go back to Columbus when Europeans thought one way or another they were going to be able to take whatever they wanted from the Americas to Europe And so you have we have inherited. We have inherited text Dcriptions of the people descriptions of the environment And then we have this parallel set of information in John White's watercolars And in the watercolors, white depicts the people who they meet and those line up pretty well with the descriptions in Harriet's book And so White and Harriet bring this material back to England They get into the Hackleit circle. They make various connections and all of a sudden this material ends up in the hands of this Flemish engraver Tator Dbri who then creates This very important illustrated edition of Harriet's in four languages. first time that had been done sort simultaneously in which they wed together the text of Harriet images engrave versions, they're not identical they watercolors, engrave versions of white's paintings And then somebody, possibly Hacklet, invents captions pictures, which really sort of then cement the ties between the images and the text So to answer your question, I know it took a while to get to the answer. But to answer your question, The amount of information we have is actually fairly abundant for this one population We have more information about them Th we drew up many other native peoples from the sixteenth century Because of the survival of documents and because this place was so important to English colonization As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Bwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to but twwix the sheets the history of sex scandal in society twice a week, every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, brought to you by the award winning network, History Hit. There's so many things of interest in what you've just said. So let's think a little bit about those images perhaps and the reprinting of those images. I mean that's fairly new, print is just over a century a century and a half old Using images to illustrate things is starting to really become important in how people understand new ideas. So these engravings of the Watercolours by John White How influential do you think they were to shaping English perceptions and ambitions? I have argued that the engravings are very important If you were a student in the United States, you would pick up an American history textbook and it would show you probablyably one of the watercolors because they're vivid and f color and the other very They seem on the spot Most people didn't have access to those watercolors. Almost no one had access to them people could really see were the engraved versions that came out of the Dbris workshop And The engravings do a lot of visual work, white sort like a classically trained painter had painted his subject when he painted humans sort of against a blank background. and you can see that in the watercolors sometimes with some words added but basically blank The engravers who understood sort of the economy of print knew that they wanted each page to do more work. And so they created actual backgrounds So you can see in the foreground the figures that white had painted and the background people, you know hunting deer or in the background fields, which are being tended by people And so the engravings send a message, a very powerful message that here is a landscape. that we, that is the English or other Europeans published in multiple languages, that we can control Here's a landscape where the soil is Turt where the woods are filled with game animals. where the waters are almost stocked with a vast variety of Fish and shellfish, right The tone of the engravings, the tone of the book is if these people who we, the English think, are less civilized than us can create this economy Imagine what we can do And among the engravings are two depictions of towns Palestated village of Pumyok literally, which has a series of buildings within it which the caption tells us what happens in them, including one place where they practice their faith. And then the town of Sakota And if you look at the image of akota, if you're an English person, look at the image of akota, or someone on the continent looking at this what you see is a very orderly town, which I would argue, more orderly than most English or continental villages at the time perfectly straight street with you know each house along it and each having their own function And sending to me, I think sending to readers, I should say, a very clear message This already created the foundation upon which we can build our civilized society. We don't have to do the hardest work It's already done We can succeed here and as the text also suggests and as Harriet suggested people who live here are going to embrace us They are going to want our technology They're going to want our faith They are going to want to become sububjects of the Qeen They're going to become like us. They have this. optimistic faith that they'll do this And for them For these people in the fifteen eighties who had heard stories bloody conquest that the Spanish had unleashed in the Americas had heard stories of the bloody conquest of what had happened in Ireland Here was a place where it looked like There could be great success lower risk And it starts in the opinion people like Hacket It seemems obvious This should be the next field for us to try to plow It's so interesting to hear about that optimism, but also those images becausecause Am I understanding you correctly to summarize it as those landscapes are fictionalized in that they're based on what the engravers newew field woods, rivers, flowing Beautifully, stuff full of fish like it's paradise They're not necessarily coming from the American landscape because they're just using the figures. Is that correct or if I misunderstood you? I think what they're saying, I mean, I do want to be clear on this on this point. watercolers primarily focus on individuals. He has others, but I mean to focus on individuals The engravers take them, especially the portraits and invent backgrounds for them. Those invented backgrounds, I think, are drawn from their reading of the text, of their reading of Harriet Harriot describes hunting White didn't do a painting of hunting. Let's put hunting in the background, hunting deer in the background. So what's in the engravers's mind is probably the landscapes that they knew in Europe and they're looking at these words. I mean, this is one of the classic problems that engravers that illustrators have had about the Americas throughroughout the sixteenth century They get these verbal reports and they're trying to communicate them visually in part because they realize that visual images can reach people who can't necessarily read, especially if they're prrinted And so you see so this goes back to the very end of the fifteenth century struggle to how do you depict a place that you have an seem with your own eyes. How? So they trust the words of the explorer. And by the time someone is creating an engraving They are not necessarily talking to an explorer The explorer has talked to who sponsored presumably his the mostly men his mission back at the talks That person has gone to find someone who can print a pamphlet to say basically, I paid for this, I'm laying claim to this then those pamphlets or short books, but maybe make their way through the intervention of system something like Hacklet to an engrave, right So by the time you get to the engraver creating the background for these images, It's not even necessarily firsthand information Harriet's book. is as close as anyone could get to sort of first hand information because he was there was printed And it's printed actually before Hacklet prints it again in fifteen eighty nine. Harry has it printed firstvers in a small pamphlet in fifteen eighty eight. Those words are presumptively accurate All of that said Words can only go so far And when an engraver is creating The set literally the stat upon which the actors are going to walk Some element of imagination has to come into it. They're visualizing it because they're visualizing in part not only say, okay, this is what we believe is going on there but they're visualizing using visual tropes that are intelligible to their audience One of the persistent problems that Europeans had when it came to understanding America's is they could not capture the color of the Americas, the colors of things. the great historian John Elliott wrote about this in a wonderful book called The Old Worlds and the New. how to capture the vividness of certain powers. the greens, the reds of animals, of plants That problem lasted for a very long time. You know, it's sort of a sub theme in in the history of collecting in the history of science How do we know we're getting it right is that even though Europeans are extracting phhysical things from the Americas. bird because they captured birds. Here's an animal. hereere are these plants By the time they made it back to England and made it back to Europe, The colors have faded Some of these things have degraded, and it's very hard to capture it So I think there's a challenge that any engraver had to sort of get this As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Bwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history kings, queens, mistresses, servants and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodysiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to but twwixt the sheets the history of sex scandal and society twice a week every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, brought to you by the award winning network, History Hit. other thing from Thomas Harriot's account Historians have noticed is The invisible bullets So asong with the optimism about how these people are going to respond to the English There's also, it turns out, something mysterious going on. Can you talk us through that? Yeah, so in the midst of Harriet's narrative He encounters people. encounter stories of people who seem to die in large numbers. after the arrival of the English and they talk These Carolina gonquins Tail Harriet. there must be invisible people. invvisible entities that have come with the English ross and they are shooting invisible bullets into these people One way to sort of think about it, you know is it conceivable this could have been smallpox and that these bullets were leading to the postrils on the skin. We don't know the answer to that. That's's going to remain a hypothetical But the idea of those invisible warriors shooting those invisible bullets which they also said were pulled with a string from Arizon I mean that's this whole thing Is it fit the aggonquian's understanding of the English Because at one point Harriet sort of says, o, they think we're not Because how could we be people if there are no women among us? because it was an all male expedition We must be some other kinds of creatures So once you believe that they're not humans like you because there are no women there It's not that far of a leap to say Well, we got sick after you got here And we think you must have brought along these invisible agents to what to destroy our bodies So it's this fit in This idea that we have that we part of what we call the Colombian Echange. the movement of old world diseases to the Western hemisphere And the other p exchange is the movement of Western hemisphere goods to the old world. We know in retrospect that smallpox was likely the most devastating of these diseases You know, we want to instinctively say, well, that sort of lines up. I don't believe we actually know that I do think it likely I think the story is accurate to the point that some of these Europeans did spread some sort of contagion. to the Carolina Gonquins and that they did die in large numbers. and so I think that they had a better sense of how disease functions than Harriet. because Harriet mocks this Harriet says, this is not how disease friends because he believes that disease spreads when, you know, there's a comet in the sky You know, or there's some sort of miasma his his way of thinking is also not modern It's just different from theirs. And so the figure of the invisible bullets becomes sort of almost it's almost metaphorical in the way that it comes down to us as a way to visualize bodily changes, the threats to the bodies of the Carolina guns. Yes, I mean, I absolutely take your point that we can't be certain This is what's going on. We should never know But invisible bullets does seem a pretty good way of describing a pathogen, doesn't it? really? Absolutely. How does Thomas Harriet's work and these print? How does it influence English colonial plans? So Harriet's book and then especially when it gets in the hands of Hacklet becomes part of of a campaign that works in print as well as I think, you know, within the corridors of White Hall, within within the places where people power are discussing what to do So this information is coming back and mores and it comes back before Howaret. there's already news sort of coming back from the Americas And so people, English people prominent ones think, okay, well, there's something we should do more here. And in fact, one of the sort of Twists of history Is in fifteen eighty three. Hacklet is offered the chance to go to the Western hemisphere, to go on an expedition that winds up in Newfoundland. Walsingam, the quQueen's principal secretary Walssham says, Mo, I need you as a spy in Paris So Hackold says, okay, I'll go to Paris where he has an amazing life. pututting that aside He gives his place up to someone he knew at Oxford a young poet and that young poet goes and he dies on the way home. There are three ships on that expedition. under Yilbert and two of them go down had Hackt gone on that expedition? Chances are we don't know much about what we know now because Hackt helps gathered documents together, went around talking to people, wrote them up, right So we can see in the pages of a book like of the Principal Navigations. And for those who haven't seen it You know, this is a massive wor I mean, the first edition in fifteen eighty nine, which we think it was two vumes is really one gigantic volume in three parts page after page of prrince or taking the words that Hacklet had brought him that bear witness to English expeditions in simly. This are reports of English people. He weaves in other things at times And he weaves in reports that he gets suspicious about eventually. and we know that because he drops them from a later edition of the book The principal navigations, once it sort of hits the shelves, ard dimension hidden streets, you know, the size of it, but in fifteen eighty nine. then becomes sort of a go to book. because it becomes the corollary, it becomes the companion to those maps. It begins to foot a new spin on geographical information, which Europeans, which people in England, I should say are getting And it does so in a very I guess we would say patriotic way, right? He's not just sort of reprinting o, this is what Columbus did. He's reprinting what earlier English people had written about. This is about English expeditions, English explorers, English bravery Look at what we've done. If we've done all this in the past, imagine what our future can hold. And so I think there is this campaign. and I think print is central to the campaign because print helps gin up interest to people that maybe don't have access to the court for people who need to be convinced to get on a ship. and to go on this mission, which is still very dangerous and still in the waters they are being charted, but there's still much that is not known They've learned the basic pattern of the wins. They know they can get to the Americas and come back But there are all stories but there's stories about shipwrecks, not just of English shipwrecks, but Europeanhipip Brexit withrump Litter. you know, the ocean floor and also in some ways literally the books coming out of printer shops. So we know there's real danger. So that contest in print, that argument in print that Hacklet and others like can make is just as important, I would say as what goes on where the decisions are being made. And because they're not just reading what English people have done, they're also reading what other Europeans have done And to go back to Raleigh for a moment Raleigh becomes obsessed with the Oinoco and he gains the support of the queen. because he is going to go into this territory that the Spanish have claimed and he's going to sort of reclaim part or try to claim part of it for the English. It would become the great sort tragic through line of his later years, where his son dies there, he eventually would be executed. All of these things happen, But they're all happening in this age of print and he is printing what he's talking about also. with his, you know book about the new discovers of Guiana So There's a lot that's going on among these sort of intellectuals in the age of the Tutors that are really motivating action, motivating investment, motivating people to get on ships So this is an extraordinary age of changing ideas about what might be possible and And there's a drive behind it, really, I suppose and The two characters I mentioned in the introduction that we've come back to a couple of times, Manteo and Janchese, do you feel like their trip to England in the fifteen eighties is part of that as well. Is that kind of creating a sense of opportunity here I think that's a great question. and I absolutely think that's the case. I think when they joined that expedition in fifteen eighty four to return and make their way eventually to London I think, you know, there's one way, one spin you could have that but maybe they were taken captive, which I don't think was the case. I think this was I think these were people in the on the fifteen eighty four expedition We're communicating through sign language pererhaps beginning to learn some words about each other You see this in exxplorers account. They start to write down certain terms. You can see that they're trying to speak to people tryrying to teach each other words I think that Mantonanchays they get on these ships and they sail back to England And I think they see that as opportunity. I think you see that in other native voyages to England later on also, most famously Pocaontas But in this period in the fifteen eighties I think there is a sense They are going to go and theyre going they're going to see a new world. What is to them the new world? And presumably they've communicated in a way that says, okay, they're going to comeome back again And they do come back again And as you alluded to in your opening They have very different opinions about the English Manto becomes very friendly you know, with the English and this runs through the rest of documented aspects of his life And when Chasey decides these people are up to no good, I've got to warn people about what's to come That same sort of tension happened with other Native peoples who got to spend time with English or other Europeans, right Sometimes I see great opportunity And I think those opportunities are real and sometimes they see great danger. and those dangers are real What led Manteo to take one path and one chase another We're never going to know because our only record is relatively fragmentary documents that we have from this time period. You mentioned that the Alomans were astonished peopleople who therefore clearly couldn't be human, didn't have women with them is the role of women both English and indigenous in these colonial encounters, these early ones. I mean, are they present at all Eventually after that fifteen eighty four expxedition goes back When they come back in fifteen eighty five with other things A small number of English women do cross the Atlantic Ocean and it's a sign veryer quickly, the English have decided that this one place the outer banks adjacent North Mainland of North Carolina this place is a place that we could colonize. That is it's not just a place to extract resources from place to extract resources from only needs men And we know the English Because when Martin Froersher went on his journey, look for the Northwest passasss in the middle of the fifteen seventies, thought he found gold. he didn't plan to create a gold mining colony and he brought all English men, right? So we know that the English make a differentiation between places where they can just extract wealth and places they can colonize. And I think that what's happened as soon as fifteen eighty five Is it the English have decided, okay we can establish colonies here and we have to we have to have women I mean, that strikes Asesson obvious sort of way to create to think about colonies It's not necessarily obvious because another opportunity that they could have taken would be we need to establish families with the Native peoples we're meeting This is in fact what French fur traders did later on and farther north. They created families. There were not very many French women who went to the Stt Lawrence Valley. It's almost all men from France who go to St Lawrence Valley They create durable social ties familial networks, which helps their fur trade So that's an option. We tend not to think about it from the English, but that option could have existed.. doesn't seem to exist, they bring over a small number of winen It's hard to know exactly what the Carolina Gonquins are thinking The English becausecause it's in this period after the eighty five expedition It's just more Cers come leads to one of the great mysteries of American history. which is what happened at Roanoke where this would be colony disappears and Americans have been arguing about it. ever since, you know, one new theory after another, someone thinks they've cracked the code on this What we know about that early Roan no communities that there were women there, right? that the English had decided Their species of colonization in North America is going to involve English women. It's not going be men only It's not going to be men. marrying into indigenous societies. They had that less than Englishman doing that in Ireland centuries earlier They saw they heard about that with Spanish doing that with native women farther south and they condemn virtually everything that Spanish are doing so they don't want to follow that path And so they have this first tentative thing It would become a foundation for English colonization You know, after Elizabeth there should be some women and or girls along on some of these missions. But the initial mission, even to Jamestown typically are all male. I talked to Professor Mark Horton about Roanke back in november twenty twenty five and my jaw was on the floor thinking about this so called mystery Are the English dissuaded at all? by what happens at Roanoke. I think the English are Saddened by what happened at Roke. I mean, and I think that we should not just sort of say, well we see other colonial missions launching soon after. and so they didn't care. I think I think it really struck them. I think when they discovered the news in fifteen ninety after they could get there after the Armada I think this was a moment of reflection. A moment the colonization effect is much more difficult a moment when they realize We need to really communicate with les were' meeting or else it's going to lead to tragedy Now that tragedy could be A these native peoples gang up on them. The tragedy could be you know another wave of violence like the English had witnessed and launched in Ireland, right