2. Women and Cultural Encounters
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The first English child born in the Americas was a girl named Virginia Dare, the granddaughter of the man who led the 1587 Roanoke expedition, one of England's first attempts to colonize North America. Her mother, Eleanor, had made the entire sea journey while she was pregnant and encountered the New World under conditions impossible to imagine. The settlers had arrived too late for a sufficient growing season to last the winter, so the leaders returned to England for more supplies. But war broke out between Protestant England and Catholic Spain, delaying the return voyage. After Elizabeth defeated the Spanish Armada in a naval battle of epic proportions, the expedition leaders were able to return with supplies. But when they arrived, they found the settlement abandoned with no trace of its inhabitants. What happened to this “Lost Colony” and little Virginia? Were they killed? Did they starve? Were they absorbed into the local Indigenous tribes? Theories abound, but no one knows for certain.
For some, this lost colony may have signaled a bad omen about further colonization.But for the English, it did not. In 1607, the English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia was established. No women were among this initial group of Jamestown settlers because they were not seen as necessary in what was intended as a military and commercial colony. The failure at Roanoke led the English to seek success and stability before bringing women to settle.
Because no English women joined the journey, this early period of cultural encounters is marked for its tolerance of interracial marriages. English men had long been exposed to evocative ideas about Indigenous women and their sexuality. For the last century, European explorers had returned with tales and sketches of the scantily clad and sensual Indigenous women. Some saw these marriages as a means of establishing peace and permanence in the Americas, while others saw them as morally wrong. We know the marriages were common enough because, by 1691, Virginia passed a law banning them. This law also suggests that, by the time it passed, there were enough English women in the colony to make it reasonable and feasible.
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