Odyssey March 2002: Big Chief Elizabeth

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Odyssey, March 2002. Editor: Kris Cerone

Where Others Have Gone Before

Book Review by Craig E. Ward

Space may be the final frontier, but it is not the first. People have faced similar barriers in the past. Learning more about how they did and did not meet the challenge of a new frontier will help prepare us for the challenges of the space frontier.

Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures of the First English Colonists in America, Giles Milton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2000. ISBN 0-965-18009-3

In Big Chief Elizabeth, Giles Milton has written a book that chronicles the adventures of English explorers, scoundrels, and colonists as they struggled to gain a foothold in the new world for Queen and Country and cash in the 16th and early 17th centuries. The tale has a bit of everything: comedy, tragedy, political intrigue, sex, and violence.

The first major expedition got underway in 1536. A group that is best described as a collection of rich dandies managed to lose almost everything, including many lives, through incompetent planning and mismanagement. The affair was such a disaster that it was forty years before the English would try again.

The heart of the book tells the story of Sir Walter Raleigh (The unconventional spelling is Sir Walter's.) and his life-long struggle to create a colony in the New World. Much of the successes and failures of this struggle were tied to the waxing and waning of Raleigh's political fortunes in the English court.

Many people will have heard of the ill-fated colony on Roanoke Island. What will surprise most is how close they came to making a success of it.

There were early exploratory missions to scout out the landscape and make contact with the locals. The English knew that they would need to make use of local materials, but they failed to grasp how hard that would be. They picked a site that would be hard for the Spanish to find and destroy. They attempted to gain the cooperation of the local inhabitants by granting the Indian leaders English titles in fealty to the Big Chief, Queen Elizabeth.

The colony on Roanoke had a string of bad luck. In 1587, King Philip of Spain decided to send a large fleet, the Spanish Armada, to England to end his troubles. Just as a relief expedition was getting ready to sail, Queen Elizabeth ordered all ships to remain in port and to get ready to repel the invaders. By the time a new expedition set sail, it found the colony abandoned.

Milton makes a good case, however, that the colonists were not, at this time, themselves lost. When the English did manage another colony, this time at Jamestown in 1607, they went looking for Roanoke survivors. The colonists probably successfully moved north to the Chesapeake Bay and managed to survive and perhaps thrive until they got caught in the middle of a war between King Powhatan and a tribe that refused to be ruled by him.

Tackling a new frontier takes courage, planning, and luck. Before we take on the space frontier, it will serve us well to learn from those who did boldly go were no one had gone before.