The Lost Colony of Roanoke

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how one of the most perplexing historical mysteries of early American history is that of the lost colony of Roanoke. It examines how the initial contact between the settlers and the Roanoke Indians included a biological clash at the microbiological level in the form of disease and how disease weakened and reduced the native population. It also examines how, because of the intellectual and religious interpretations available to the American Indians at the time, the virulence of the diseases acted as a kind of unintentional, but effective weapon of fear for the settlers.

From the Paper:

"When first exposed to the early English colonists in what would become the Southern United States, the native population experienced an almost immediate, precipitous "depopulation" that was mainly due to imported European diseases that the native populace had not been exposed to ever before. Thus, the Roanoke Indians had not built up immunity towards European ailments in a way that the settlers, who had experienced exposure to such microbes all their lives, had been able to form within their bodies. In coastal North Carolina alone, measles, smallpox, and colds caused a death rate of up to a quarter of some of the native villages near the Roanoke colony. "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Adams, Stephen The Best and Worst Country in the World: Perspectives on the Early Virginia Landscape.Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
• Chaplin, Joyce E. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
• Feest, Christian F. "North Carolina Algonquians." From the Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 15, 271-281. Bruce Trigger, Editor. Smithsonian: Washington, DC, 1978.
• Kehoe, Alice. Introduction to North American Indian Studies. 3rd Edition. Prentice Hall, 2004.
• Miller, Lee. Roanoke. New York: Arcade, 2001.

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