Following the maps to Jamestown

By Anne Causey Daily Progress correspondent
Published: September 28, 2008

On the one hand, we’re talking 250 miles round trip at a time when gas is expensive.

On the other, it’s the chance to see drawings from 1585 – some of the very earliest documents about our U.S. history, and they are brought out of the British Museum only once every generation.

The drawings won, and I drove to Jamestown to see John White’s watercolors. White, an artist and gentleman, accompanied Sir Walter Raleigh on five expeditions to the New World, including his 1585 voyage to North Carolina, the site Raleigh named “Virginia” for the queen. The new colony set up on Roanoke Island but became known as the Lost Colony because the colonists disappeared.

Only White wasn’t lost. He returned to England with the first pictures of the natives, plants and animals from this strange new world across the sea.

These 16th-century watercolors are owned by the British Museum and they are on display at the Jamestown Settlement until Oct. 15. The 70-plus drawings have not been in a public display for more than 40 years. “A New World: England’s First View of America” debuted at the British Museum in March 2007, then traveled to Raleigh, N.C., and Yale University in New Haven, Conn.

I confess, I am always excited by paper documents that have managed to last hundreds of years. Just the endurance of words or

art on a page is thrilling. Plus, these materials are even earlier than most of our Anglo history, which dates to 1607, the date of the founding of Jamestown.

White’s drawings are upstairs in the main building of the Jamestown Settlement. The lighting in the room is pretty low, as decreed by the British Museum. Many of the drawings were taken out of a scrapbook that was found hundreds of years later in a house that had been damaged by fire and then suffered water damage. The water caused some of the pigment to lift and create a ghostly mirror image on another side of the page.

Time also has hurt some of White’s pictures – the once glistening and shiny fish have faded to gray or black because of the chemical content of his expensive lead paint.

However, they are still definitely worth viewing, as the staff of the site will tell you, including Tom Davidson, senior curator of the Jamestown and Yorktown Foundation.

“We’re fortunate that the British Museum after a long number of years decided to put [the drawings] on display,” Davidson said. “It is literally a chance of a lifetime. They will not be out again for years. Due to the very fragile nature of the drawings, they won’t show the entire collection for many years.”

Davidson said that once the British Museum displayed the drawings in London in 2007, it offered the show to galleries in the United States. The Raleigh site, Yale and Jamestown were “particularly interested.”

My biggest surprise came at the beginning of the exhibit when I was writing notes and three different people exclaimed in shock that the “people are naked.” I somehow didn’t think that would come as a surprise for folks.

White’s maps are beautiful. There is his map of Virginia 1585, a pen and brown ink over pencil with watercolor. It’s the first map to depict the east coast of North America in detail. It’s a pictorial record of the English voyage to Virginia and shows numerous fish as well as the ships.

Raleigh’s coat of arms is colorfully displayed, and the map was a decorative frontispiece in the front of the album that was water damaged. One recognizes the Virginia-named land to be of the present North Carolina, though a portion of today’s Virginia is shown above it.

He has some drawings of plants in the exhibit — a delicate rose of Plymouth, which, in his time grew in the marshes and coasts along the Atlantic seaboard, and a milkweed plant that is no longer found on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

His animals are detailed and lively. There’s an Eastern brown pelican, a pufferfish, burr fish, flying fish, diamondback terrapin, a look-down fish, a grouper, a greater flamingo and a Portugese man of war, among others.

White produced the first images of the natives, the North Carolina Algonquians. He was accompanied by Thomas Harriot, who wrote up the accounts of the Indian’s dress, weapons, villages and other details about their culture.

The village of Pomeiooc is one of the first villages they visited. This familiar drawing is a series of huts in a circle surrounded by a palisade. Secotan is another village — this one is open and arranged along a central area, and also seems familiar.

The portraits are of real individuals. There’s a wife of the chief of Pomeiooc and a 10-year-old girl, another wife of a chief of Pomeiooc. Next to them is a chief — possibly Wingina, an important figure who with his brother ruled the tribes of Roanoke Island. Another drawing is of another chief — standing very proud in native dress, hand on a bow, which is as tall as he is. This one is his best-known and most-reproduced drawing.

Davidson pointed out that even if people are not familiar with John White, they will recognize some of the drawings that have been reproduced and printed in books and other media.

White brought the drawings back to England, where they were copied as line engravings by Theodore de Bry. His versions of White’s drawings were published with Harriot’s written account in 1590, “A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia.”

The exhibit also displays additional White’s drawings, ones that were not in that damaged scrapbook. These include drawings of Picts and ancient Britons of England’s past, portrayed with their weapons, including a very intriguing woman decorated with colorful tattoos, and grasping three spears. The images are as rich and colorful as the North Carolina natives would have been were it not for the water damage, giving viewers even more to consider.

The cost to get into the Jamestown Settlement is $13.50 for adults and $6.25 for ages 6 to 12. The price gets you into the whole shebang — a recreation of the Jamestown settlement and the Indian village, as well as the three ships, so it is well worth it. Just be sure to allow a lot of time if you are doing it all.

There is no extra charge to see the drawings.

You can call the Jamestown Settlement at (888) 593-4682 or check out www. historyisfun.org.