Truckin' on the Western Branch

English explorers from the first settlement at Roanoke Island visited the “Chesapiaoc” tribes in 1585–86. News of the event probably reached tribes as far back as the Richmond fall line. Powhatan’s medicine men foretold “strangers from the sunrise” would threaten their lands. Fear of imminent invasion from the east set the stage for Anglo Indian confrontations over the next century. In 1585 English explorers sailing with Sir Richard Grenville established a fort on Roanoke Island, now in North Carolina. In the autumn of 1585, James Hariot, Richard Hakluyt, and John White led a group of explorers and soldiers north from Roanoke Island in search of land suitable for settlement. They traveled up the coast and then overland on Indian trails to reach the Chesapeake Bay. They stayed with the Chesapeake tribe for about three months somewhere near the Elizabeth and Lynnhaven Rivers. The land was bountiful and the natives friendly, convincing them that their New World colony should be on the Chesapeake Bay and not the harsh environs of the Outer Banks. John White returned in 1587 with 117 men, women, and children hoping to settle near the lands of the friendly Chesapeake tribe. When his group was deposited instead on the inhospitable Roanoke Island, White had to go back to England to get more supplies for the settlers. White, unable to return for three years, sailed into Hatteras Inlet in 1590 only to find the colony deserted and the English settlers gone.

The unknown fate of those 117 English settlers prompted divergent theories.

Some of the refugees may have traveled the Indian trails through the rich farmlands and abundant forests along the creeks and rivers of the Western Branch, through the hunting grounds of the Chesapeake and Nansemond tribes, seeking the “friendly Chesapiocs” that White had visited on his earlier 1586 visit. Helen Rountree, recognized expert on local Indian tribes, suggests that some of the “lost colonists” went northward as refugees and stayed with the Chesapeakes while others moved (or were abducted) westward to the Carolina mainland. Another theory puts the Chowan River as a possible route north. A local chief told the Roanoke explorers that it was possible to paddle from the narrows of the river upstream for three days, travel overland northeast for four days and find a kingdom on the sea, probably the Chesapeake Bay. Could the Roanoke colonists have sailed north in one of their own boats? W. E. Trout and Jeff Turner added to the Lost Colony legends in their Blackwater, Nottoway and Meherrin Rivers Atlas where they say that local residents still remember the Schooner of the Dismal Swamp. The schooner was last seen about 1850 in “The Light Streak,” a once grassed and now-overgrown area south of US 158 near Acorn Hill, on the edge of the Dismal Swamp at the extreme headwaters of Bennett’s Creek in North Carolina. It may have been about forty feet long with two masts and a coppered hull. Perhaps it was the Lost Colony’s Dorothie , John White’s missing pinnace (owned by Sir Walter Raleigh) from 1587.

Jamestown. Image by Sheally

38