Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter
Volume 8, Numbers 1 & 2 (November 2002/ May 2003)

Book Review
A Swashbuckling History
by Richard C. Taylor, East Carolina University

Giles Milton. Big Chief Elizabeth: How England’s Adventurers Gambled and Won
The New World. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000. Big Chief Elizabeth:
The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Just as Powhatan’s men lifted their clubs to separate John Smith’s brains from his skull, the chief’s beloved daughter Pocahontas threw herself between the clubs and their intended victim and so saved Smith’s life. Only in a “popular history,” where the rules of evidence and history writing are relaxed, can this legend be repeated uncritically. And so Giles Milton in this adventure story aims rather for the legendary yarn, the spell-binding epic, than the precision of academic history. Milton’s book begins, aptly enough, with a map: a “circular sheet of parchment,” once belonging to the explorer Sir Humfrey Gilbert, that represents a mid sixteenthcentury conception of what would later be understood as North America. It is this America of the imagination and the dreamers and scoundrels who pursued its treasure that the author pursues in this narrative.

The narrative takes its readers through the myriad of misadventures and false steps that followed in the wake of John Cabot’s voyage to North America in 1497—Cabot’s “discovery of the continent,” as Milton puts it. The author is silent on evidence of earlier exploration, and the objection that the “savages” who lived there—yes, he actually uses that term unitalicized throughout Chapter One—might also have a claim to “discovering” the place is unaddressed. The unfortunate Gilbert is the first real protagonist, or anti-hero perhaps, of the story. From the explorer’s vantage point, Milton initiates one of the central motifs in the narrative: a kind of adolescent fascination with prurient matters. There is rapturous description of the garments covering the “private parts” of the “comely wives” of the “cannibalistic savages” whom Gilbert encountered. The reader is treated to a visual representation and vivid description of the native people “hacking corpses into juicy gobbets and munch[ing] ravenously on arms and legs.” In the explorer’s (and author’s?) imagination, the reward for surviving the “monstrous beasts that stalked America’s forest” was the nearly inexpressible pleasure of half-naked indigenous women. Of course, the book does develop an “appearances versus reality” theme, of which the aforementioned Gilbert became a victim—lost at sea rather than, as poetic justice might warrant, his becoming one of the juicy gobbets.

Several men subsequently compete for leadership of the “American project,” most prominent among them Sir Walter Ralegh. A long interpolated account of the “swashbuckling” Ralegh and his flirtation with Queen Elizabeth reviews well mapped terrain. Ralegh’s young acquaintance, Thomas Harriot stands in sharp contrast: a sober and physically unappealing character who nonetheless assumes a central role in Ralegh’s colonizing ambitions. The landing in Roanoke and the encounter with Manteo, a native of Croatoan, Milton claims, inaugurate “the myth of the noble savage.” Manteo travels to England, teaches his native tongue to Harriot, and helps inspire further interest in colonial exploration.

In spite of soothsayers warning of ill tidings in the year 1585, and one of them predicting a “particularly awful year for ‘effeminate persons’ and those with venereal disease,” Ralegh hired Sir Richard Grenville (another swashbuckler—a lot of buckles are swashed in this narrative) to lead another expedition westward. After a series of dangerous encounters with the Spanish, the Tiger and the Elizabeth head towards the Outer Banks. Landing on Wococon, Harriot, Grenville, Manteo, Ralph Lane, and the artist John White encounter the native people. White is apparently taken by the “partially exposed breasts” of the women, as his watercolors reveal. With Manteo leading the way, the group encounters a tribe of “superstitious Indians” who make a “terrifying hullabaloo.” Fortunately, “one of the women was virtually naked”—again, the author’s principle of selecting narrative detail remains consistent. In the midst of such a scene, and in spite of incredible hardship, Ralph Lane, appointed governor of the settlement, attempts to erect a “sandcastle.”

The narrative then turns to Sir Francis Drake’s efforts to rescue the “half-starved colony on Roanoke.” This section focuses on the intense rivalry between England and Spain, personified by Drake as the piratical nemesis of the Spanish. Harriot, meanwhile, had returned to England, where he published A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), which reveals his apparent detestation of the aforementioned half-naked indigenous women and the certainty that he was apparently “never going to share his eiderdown with a shaven headed maiden.” Harriot’s book also provides Milton an opportunity to range over a broad spectrum of subjects pertinent to understanding Elizabethan culture. There is a bit of the history of tobacco here, then an account of widespread “whoring” and “drunkenness” that apparently occupied the English populace. Milton gives a housewife’s “day in the life” which gives prominence to “jumping into bed to ‘make merry.’” He writes, “Others joshed that women existed solely for men’s comfort, claiming that ‘wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.’” His appropriating and misrepresenting this famous passage from a Bacon essay (unattributed, of course) is a reminder why there are rules of fair play in writing history writing and why popular history is less useful for academic historians.

Milton’s account of sixteenth-century English New World exploration takes artistic license—fictional license essentially—with conflicting sources. Scholarly argument about “what really happened” is rendered invisible, and in its place, the author spins a plausibleseeming but essentially fictional narrative.

But if this book should be lumped with historical fiction, the author never clearly signals where his narrative is based on extant historical sources and when it is purely speculative. Readers are left wondering how much of this tale is based on “what really happened,” and how much of it is a hodgepodge assembled from Smith’s diaries, Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Voyages, Thomas Harriot’s Report, and centuries of myth-making about Queen Elizabeth, Sir Walter Ralegh, and the usual cast of heroes and villains. Not surprisingly, given the title, King James I serves as the ultimate villain, spoiling all the fun in 1603 and thereafter.

As a work of the historical imagination, Milton’s book leaves a great deal to be desired. The subtitle for the book’s English publication is itself problematic: did England “win” the whole New World? The subtitle altered for consumption in the United States would seem to respond to obvious objections to the original: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America. To what extent was Elizabeth a central player in the drama Milton sets out to create? Milton tells of Governor Ralph Lane’s success in convincing the chief Wingina to accept the Queen as “Weroanza Elizabeth of Virginia,” and, of course, Elizabeth’s handling of the Spanish, her personal jealousy, and her tumultuous relationship with Ralegh are included in the mix. But the reader does not sense Elizabeth’s centrality in this narrative. The book is more nearly an account of sixteenth-century English failure: the sundry factors that led to the belatedness of the English in western colonization. In fact, one of the difficulties this book poses is that there is not really a narrative focal point, a dramatic center. Rather, it is a series of loosely connected episodes, replete with mysterious quotations for which sources—and sometimes even speakers—remain unidentified. Precise dates are seldom given, and the reader must somehow attempt to tie together the various voyages in the absence of clear narrative transition.

Another expectation of academic history is that it reveal new information, or at least a new intepretation, of known events. If the author has made any discoveries here or is reinterpreting history in any significant way, he certainly does not signal this intention. In some sense, the book seems to celebrate ancient English colonial prejudices: Native Americans are “savages” and “cannibals” capable of performing “a terrifying hullabaloo,” the women doing so “virtually naked” or with “partially exposed breasts.” Rotting corpses, beheadings, and the aforementioned breasts all hold a prominent and recurring place in Milton’s narrative. The unfortunate Thomas Ogle, a fellow traveler of Drake’s, “was caught with his hose around his ankles and two young lads in his bunk. . . After being convicted of sodomy by his peers, Ogle cheerfully ‘confessed the fact’ and was ‘hanged for buggery’” (159).

Surely there is room for page-turning histories that draw on the imagination of the author-historian and are freed from the constraint of footnotes. With that loosening of scholarly restraints comes certain reasonable expectations, however. Such a work ought to offer a new interpretation, or at least a new slant on events even as well known as those narrated by Giles Milton. It might well have the novelistic pleasures of suspense and character development. The story, here, is too disjointed for narrative continuity, and its principal characters step in and out of the spotlight. The author might, instead, have taken a cue from his own title and constructed a narrative framed by Queen Elizabeth’s point of view: the exploration as it might have seemed from the royal perspective. As it is, the book has limited value for historians or for general readers.

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