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Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America

Amazon.com Price:  $14.75 (as of 06/05/2019 07:32 PST- Details)

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Description

A riveting historical mystery of Colonial America by the writer of Nathaniel’s Nutmeg

In April, 1586, Queen Elizabeth I acquired a new and exotic title. A tribe of Native Americans, “savages,” had made her their weroanza-a word that meant “big chief.” The news was received with great joy, both by the Queen and by her favorite, Sir Walter Ralegh. His first American expedition had brought back a captive, Manteo, whose tattoed face and otter-skin cloak had caused a sensation in Elizabethan London. In 1857, Manteo was returned to his homeland as Lord and Governor, together with more than 100 English men, women and children.In 1590, a supply ship arrived at the colony to discover that the settlers had vanished.

For almost twenty years the fate of Ralegh’s colonists was to remain a mystery. When a new wave of settlers sailed to America to found Jamestown, their efforts to locate the lost colony were frustrated by the mighty chieftain, Powhatan, father of Pocahontas, who vowed to drive the English out of America. Only when it was too late did the settlers discover the unbelievable news that Ralegh’s colonists had survived in the forests for almost two decades before being slaughtered in cold blood by Powhatan’s henchmen. At the same time as Sir Walter Ralegh’s “savage” had played a pivotal role in establishing the first English settlement in America, he had also unwittingly contributed to one of the most earliest chapters in the decimation of the Native American population.

The follow up to his best-selling Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, Giles Milton’s Big Chief Elizabeth is a sprawling, ambitious tale of how the aristocrats and privateers of Elizabethan England reached and colonized the “wild and barbarous shores” of the New World. Milton’s story ranges from John Cabot’s voyage to America in 1497 to the painful but ultimately successful foundation of the English colony at Jamestown by 1611. Then again, the main focus of the book is Sir Walter Raleigh’s elaborate and tortuous attempts to establish an English settlement on Roanoke Island, in present-day North Carolina, following the first English voyage there in 1584. Scouring contemporary go back and forth accounts of the period, Milton creates a colorful and entertaining account of the greed, confusion, and misunderstanding that characterized English relations with the Native Americans, and the violent and tragic conflict that continuously ensued.

Milton has a good eye for a surreal or comical story, such as the colony’s first encounter with Big Chief–or Weroanza Wingina, whose exotic title “quickly captured the imagination of the English colonists, and they began referring to their own queen as Weroanza Elizabeth.” The Elizabethan cast is also dazzling: the flamboyant and ambitious Walter Raleigh, who provided the money in the back of the Roanoke ventures; the “sober” ascetic scholar Thomas Hariot, who provided the brains; and hardened adventurers, like Arthur Barlowe and Ralph Lane, who provided the muscle. The myths and stories also come thick and fast, from John Smith and Pocahontas, to the importation of the fashion of “drinking tobacco,” but the problem with Big Chief Elizabeth is that it lacks a central driving story. In any case, it reads like an entertaining, but rather labored jog through early Anglo-American history, something that has been done with greater skill and originality by, for one, Charles Nicholl in his fascinating book The Creature in the Map. Those who enjoyed Nathaniel’s Nutmeg will probably like Big Chief Elizabeth, but with some reservations. –Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk

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