Introduction

On March 25, 1584, Queen Elizabeth I of England charged Sir Walter Raleigh to:

That same year Raleigh sent two captains, Philip Amades and Arthur Barlowe, from England to Hispaniola and the Canary Islands; from there, the captains were instructed to scout the lands northeast of those already claimed by Spain, to wit, Florida. This land — now encompassing the Carolinas and Virginia — was claimed on behalf of England and named Virginia, in honor of the Virgin Queen.

Securing a Permanent Colony in the Claimed Lands

With land claimed in the New World, an expedition was mounted to establish a settlement. The first expedition failed. Led by Sir Richard Grenville in April 1585, it encompassed 600 men of which 105 remained in the colony while Grenville returned to England for additional provisions. (See Appendix I.) However, when almost a year passed without Grenville’s return, the remainder of the expeditionary force took advantage of Sir Francis Drake’s arrival to seek return passage to England.^[1]

The second expedition, organized by John White in 1587, fared better. It sailed with seven ships filled with Devon families intent upon establishing a colony in that part of Virginia called Roanoke, a word deriving from the speech of native peoples. (See Appendix II.) Two years after founding the Cittie of Raleigh, houses had been built for almost all families residing in the colony, and the colony had celebrated the birth of its first children born in the New World. The first child, grandchild of John White and child of Ananias and Eleanor Dare, was named Virginia in honor of the sovereign.

Native Inhabitants of the New World

Upon establishing the Roanoke colony, the settlers encouraged relations with the native inhabitants, of which there appear to have been a diverse group, including Croatans, Mangoaks, Chaonists, and Sequotanes, as well as Roanoke from which the region took its name. [Lane, Dunbar 1960] Not acquainted with native edibles, the colonists traded copper for grain and maize, as well as for leather and coral. It was also reported that natives assisted the settlers’ efforts to hunt game, fowl, and fish, although such efforts apparently failed to provide sufficient food stocks for the entire colony. [Lane]

Native Plants and Wildlife

The European settlers found the New World abundant with commodities known to yield victual and sustenance of man’s life. The first expeditionary force noted that a great variety of berries grew wildly, including raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries. Along with maize, native grain, which could be made into bread, grew in the area. Two other plants — more properly called roots — which could be saved for winter consumption were cassida and chyna. The settlers discovered that while some roots could be eaten much in appearance as they were dug, others had to be boiled before use as a foodstuff. As more fully described below, other plants included beans, and several crops previously unknown to the Europeans:

Information Processing

Information processing, especially text markup, was primitive in the colony. For example, most text stores were in XML! Documents may have looked like this:

<teiHeader>
  <fileDesc>
    <titleStmt>
      <title>Farming in the New World</title>
      ...
    </titleStmt>
  </fileDesc>
</teiHeader>

Notice the paired Tags: <title> and </title> and the primitive use of indenting. Unusual features of the colonists’ data processing practices included:

Roanoke — a Failure?

The Roanoke colony is conventionally regarded a failure. After returning to England in 1587 to secure additional provisions and armaments for the colony, John White returned to find the settlement deserted, its homes and buildings dismantled. To this day, the fate of the Roanoke settlers remains unknown. However, while the Roanoke colony did not flourish, it does merit its place in history. Raleigh’s efforts — along with those of countless other explorers to the New World — introduced New World plants such as potatoes and tomatoes to England, as described in section “Native Inhabitants of the New World”. But perhaps most important, the loss of Roanoke exposed the pitfalls in attempting to establish a settlement in a foreign environment. Those hard lessons may have made Jamestown’s later success in 1607 possible.