Roanoke Colony - Thomas Harriot

Thomas Harriot

Born in 1560, Thomas Harriot entered Raleigh's employment in the early 1580s, after graduating from Oxford University. While he did not accompany them on the first voyage, Harriot may have been among the men of Arthur Barlowe's 1584 expedition of the colony. He trained the members of Raleigh's first Roanoke expedition in navigational skills and eventually sailed to Roanoke with the second group of settlers, where his skills as a naturalist became particularly important along with those of painter and settlement leader John White.

Between their arrival in Roanoke in April 1585 and the July 1586 departure, Harriot and White both conducted detailed studies of the Roanoke area, with Harriot compiling his samples and notes into several notebooks that unfortunately did not survive the colony's disappearance. However, Harriot also took descriptions of the surrounding flora and fauna of the area, which survive in his work A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, written as a report on the colony's progress to the English government on the request of Raleigh. Viewed as propaganda for the colony by modern historians, this work has become vastly important to Roanoke's history not only because of Harriot's observations on wildlife, but also because of his depictions of Indian activities at the time of the colony's disappearance.

In the text, Harriot reports that relations between the Roanoke Indians and the English settlers were mutually calm and prosperous, contradicting other historical evidence that catalogues the bloody struggles between the Roanoke Indians and both of Raleigh's commanders, Sir Richard Grenville and his successor Ralph Lane. Harriot recounts little to none of these accounts in his report to England and does not mention the disorderly state of the colony under either Grenville's or Lane's tenure, correctly assuming these facts would prevent Roanoke from gaining more settlers. Ironically, Harriot's text did not reach England, or the English press, until the year of 1588, by which time the fate of the "Lost Colony" was sealed in all but name.