Biography

Born in England and educated at Oxford, Thomas Harriot was employed as a young man by the explorer Sir Walter Ralegh. In 1584 he accompanied Ralegh's New World expedition to Roanoke, where, as a naturalist, he collaborated with painter John White to study the landscape and its inhabitants. Although Harriot must have kept notebooks, none of them survives. The existing record of his observations is A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), an optimistic account of native culture that seems to have been written at Ralegh's direction. Although this work lacks candor -- Harriot avoids mentioning how the colonists fled a brutal storm by ship -- it does acknowledge how the Indians were gradually devastated by disease and provides detailed descriptions of these native peoples in their soon-to-be-changing natural environment.

Explorations

Among the English accounts of the New World, Harriot's Brief and True Report gains distinction from its association with the famous "Lost Colony" at Roanoke Island, a mystery which paradoxically helped to give later colonists, and citizens of the American republic, a way of engaging imaginatively with wilderness. A landscape haunted by English ghosts is, after all, a landscape that ghost-loving English men and women can connect with.

1. Harriot's Brief and True Report may read like a grocery list of cultural traits for the Native Americans near the Roanoke Island fort, but observation of another culture is always an act of selection. What customs, cultural practices, and technologies does he select and emphasize? Why would these especially interest him and his implied audience?

2. Harriot describes a Native American belief which provokes "wonderful admiration" in the European visitors: "There could at no time happen any strange sickness, losses, hurts, or any other cross unto them, but that they would impute to us the cause or means thereof, for offending or not pleasing us." Harriot finds it strange, in other words, that the native peoples would seek supernatural explanations for all sorts of natural misfortunes. Were the European colonists themselves free of such beliefs? Think about historical narratives of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, from Bradford through Rowlandson and Mather, and try some comparisons.

Other sites to consult:

• An archive edition of A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Maintained by Melissa S. Kennedy at the University of Virginia, this site includes a biography of Harriot, a history of the Report, and notes on the text.
• Thomas Harriot. Anniina Jokinen's site of Harriot resources, including links to biographies, essays, images, an online text, and correspondence.