How to Make Friends and Influence People: Virginia Edition

Our interview today is with John White, a newly-arrived visitor from Her Majesty's colony in Roanoke, Virginia, where he was briefly governor.  He also served as artist and map-maker in residence for Sir Walter Raleigh in 1585, and is the proud grandfather of the first child borne to English parents in the New World. We wanted to talk with him about the topic of how visitors like him tried to make friends in Virginia, and how he posed his Indian subjects for the watercolors he was commissioned to complete on his first voyage.

Q. Just what did you think you would find during your travels?  How did you prepare to meet the dark savages of the New World?
White: Well, I admit to some trepidation, but I tried not to think of them as all that different from you and I--aren't we all God's creatures?  I had several enlightening conversations with the linguist and scientist Mr. (Thomas) Hariot on our voyage over, and he told me that the science of their skin color is on account of nothing more than their different humors, and I think it may be true--their children grow more tawny over the years.  I also observed that the colors added by the juice of walnuts or other dyes colors their skin so much more than the fair and ruddy complexions common among the English.
Q. Ah, but their maidens mayn't be as fair, or did you find them so?  Doubtless you found their nakedness alluring...
JW: On the contrary: I found their women to be both modest and admirable--you can see here in these two watercolors. My daughter said she was surprised to see "so much presentment of Civility" among them. Despite appearing quite naked by our English standards (at least above the waist, I beg pardon for titillating some of your readers), these women had a modest carriage--not at all lewd as the trollops here (the only we see who bare their breasts in like fashion). I did my best to pose my subjects to show that modesty natural to all women of good comportment.

We also noted that those maidens yet unmarried are marked as such by the dressing of their hair and (as I have heard) by wearing different caps than those of the married women and girls.  The wearing of the hair, as here, tells us much about social rank and age.  But I understand the prejudice here against nakedness, which fills us with shame since the Fall of Adam and Eve.  Their defenses are rather weak, it is true, but perhaps we might improve our English textile manufactures by clothing these poor wretches.  It is a point my friend Mr. Hakluyt has raised in his promotions of these colonies to the Queen.
Q. Are you not afraid to leave your own daughter and friends in Roanoke, knowing they are like to be influenced by the bad habits of their neighbors the Indians?
JW: I confess to some fears.  I found it more shocking that the men laze about all day, some fishing or doing some other light labor.  To me, it seems they pretend to be aristocrats with a day at fox-hunting. Meanwhile, they allow women to work as drudges in building their homes and moving them, and in planting and harvesting from the fields.  It seems as though if their women wished it, they could topple their natural masters, who have become in their idleness and taste for luxury, as our young men here in England, quite unworthy of the title of man. (Have you SEEN the wigs they are wearing on the streets of London today?)  But on the whole, the Indian men, especially those of some authority, are quite noble in their body and gestures.  For effect, I drew one warrior in the same posture as I might any English nobleman sure of his bearing.
 
I trust that our friends amongst the Indians will duly protect our small band of strangers among them, although I fear that the Devil and their conjurers may make evil moves to our God-fearing Englishmen. Their wild dances and feasts do perturb me and remind me of the Devil's power over those parts.

Q. And where are you off to next, brave sir?
JW: Back to Virginia, to bounce my granddaughter on my knee and bring supplies to those we left behind.  With Her Majesty's quarrel with the Spanish, we have been unable to set sail these three years hence. We must pray that English character will prevail against the temptations of the Evil One, although I have seen that without a strong assumption of authority, the English sense of himself as separate and set aside by God might fall away.

Postscript: Raleigh's men have returned from Virginia sooner than it was expected, and it is said that the colonists planted in Roanoke have vanished--White himself is unavailable for comment, but Mr. Hacluyt tells us the poor man could only spend one day searching for his daughter, given badly needed repairs to their ship, and that his last words in a letter described his voyage as "luckless" and "sinister." 

Sources:
"John White Drawings/Theodore de Bry Engravings" on Virtual Jamestown.
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "Presentment of Civility: English Reading of American Self-Presentation in the Early Years of Colonization," William & Mary Quarterly, 54, no. 1 (1997): 193-228.
Patricia Seed, "Gendering Native Americans: Hunters as Anglo-America's Partial Fiction," Ch. 3 in American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
Abigail Tucker, "Sketching the Earliest Views of the New World," Smithsonian Magazine (December 2008).