Manteo and Wanchese, 1585 (Roanoke Colonies plaque)

Here on the harbour wall, near the Mayflower Steps, is a plaque commemorating the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Roanoke Colonies, in what is now known as North Carolina. In 1584, Walter Raleigh sent ships from Plymouth to claim land for a colony, which was established following a second expedition in 1585.

What the memorial plaque doesn't mention is the key role Indigenous North Americans played in these expeditions. These men were critically important to Raleigh's colonial endeavours, acting as translators and mediators both in England and on their return to Roanoke.

According to historian Alden Vaughan, around twenty came to England under Raleigh's sponsorship between 1584 and 1618 in order to learn English and to provide local knowledge that would be key to English efforts to establish colonies in the Carolinas. These Indigenous visitors, many of them captives, often stayed for months or years before returning to their homelands. As Vaughan has argued, these Indigenous North Americans' experience of England was an "intense indoctrination at the seat of empire" (Vaughan, “Sir Walter Ralegh’s Indian Interpreters,” p. 343).

Two Indigenous North Americans sailed from Plymouth to Roanoke in April 1585 with Sir Richard Grenville. They had accompanied the men who returned from the first of Raleigh's colonial expeditions in 1584, arriving in England in September of that year. Manteo, a Croatan werowance or chief, and Wanchese, a Roanoke man, were soon lodged at Raleigh's Durham House in London. They spent time with the mathematician and ethnographer Thomas Hariot, teaching him about their cultures and Algonquian language, before returning to Roanoke with the 1585 expedition. By all accounts, Wanchese seemed more suspicious of English interests during his time in England than Manteo. Unsurprisingly, soon after their return to Roanoke, Wanchese slipped away from the English settlers and by the following year had severed relations with them completely.

Manteo and another Indigenous man called Towaye, however, seem to have travelled to England again a year or two later because they are named on the list of participants who sailed to Roanoke from Plymouth in May 1587. Manteo in particular is credited as helping the settlers as a guide. However, no records remain of Manteo following the abandonment of the colony in 1587.