P
fishing and farming methods, clothing, ceremo-
nial dances, and family life. Intended to promote
further English colonization, White’s works show
Indians to be odd but industrious, dignified, and
joyous people and their land to be fertile and rich
with game and fish. His drawings and paintings
will become well known through engravings by
Theodore de Bry that will be printed in Thomas
Hariot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found
Land of Virginia (1590).
“We found the people most
gentle, loving, and faithful, void
of all guile and treason, and
such as live after the manner of
the golden age. The people only
care how to defend themselves
from the cold in their short
winter, and to fed themselves
with such meat as the soil af-
fordeth.... The earth bringeth
forth all things in abundance,
as at the first creation, without
toil or labor.”
—colonist Arthur Barlowe after
returning to England from
Roanoke in 15841589José de Acosta proposes Asian origins for
Indians.
Jesuit missionary José de Acosta theorizes that
North America was originally populated before
the birth of Christ by humans who crossed a land
bridge between Asia and the continent. De Acosta’s
speculation is the first version of the Bering Strait
Theory (see entry for ca. 25,000 TO 12,000 B.C.) to
appear in print.
1590Virginia governor John White finds
Roanoke deserted.
After bringing 110 settlers to the struggling Eng-
lish settlement of Roanoke in present-day North
Carolina (see entries for 1584), John White returns
to England in 1587 to obtain more supplies. His
voyage back to North America is delayed when all
available English ships are sent to fight the invading
Spanish Armada in 1588.
By 1590, when White is finally able to return
to Roanoke, the settlement has been deserted. The
only evidence of the colonists are some books and
armor and the word “CROATOAN” carved into a
tree. The settlers’ disappearance marks the failure
of England’s first attempt to establish a permanent
colony in North America. Although the fate of the
Roanoke colonists will never be known for certain,
some scholars will theorize that they were absorbed
into the nearby Lumbee tribe or killed by the Pow-
hatan Indians of present-day Virginia.1598Pueblo territory is invaded by Don Juan
de Oñate.
With the permission of the viceroy of New Spain,
Don Juan de Oñate organizes an expedition to found
a new Spanish colony, to be called New Mexico,
north of the Rio Grande. Funding the enterprise with
his own fortune, Oñate travels with approximately
130 soldiers and their families, eight wagons of sup-
plies, and nearly 7,000 head of cattle. Like Coronado
before him (see entry for 1540), Oñate hopes to find
large gold and silver mines in the American South-
west. Although he will not find the riches he dreams
of, Oñate will succeed in establishing the first perma-
nent European colony in the region.
North of what is now Santa Fe, the Spaniards
invade a Pueblo village and declare it a Spanish town,
San Juan. Oñate sends messengers to other pueblos
to inform the Indians that they are now subjects of
Spain and must obey Spanish law. He tells the Pueblo