Drawing on history

RALEIGH -- Kim Sloan, a curator from the British Museum in London, wandered Roanoke Island and the Outer Banks in a reverie, feeling the wind and sand in a place that she had only studied from afar.

Sloan recognized the box turtles that gentleman-explorer John White had drawn in the 16th century, and with little effort imagined the land as his fellow settlers had found it. White had meticulously rendered the environment and inhabitants of what is now coastal North Carolina in watercolor drawings that gave Europeans their first images of North America.

White was governor of the British colony founded on Roanoke Island in 1587 and the grandfather of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World. Practically every American schoolchild has seen his drawings in textbooks. But only belatedly has his pivotal role in history been fully recognized.

Little is known about the man, but his drawings have survived 400 years through fire, water damage and neglect. Now the British Museum has brought them out of protective storage -- a once-in-a-generation occurrence -- to show them in the United States on a three-step exhibition that opens Saturday at the N.C. Museum of History.

"People will see what a miracle it is, really, that these drawings survived at all," Sloan said.

Two years after her first visit, Sloan planned to return to North Carolina this weekend to help with the final installation of the 75 surviving watercolor drawings for "A New World: England's First View of America." The works form the core of a sprawling exhibition that the Raleigh museum amplifies in a companion show, "Mysteries of the Lost Colony," with artifacts, an Indian village and costumes from the outdoor drama of the same name, and an interactive exhibit exploring theories about what happened to the colonists.

White took part in five voyages across the Atlantic in the 1580s, most of them sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh with the aim of colonizing the land. From the very first trip, White probably worked alongside scientist Thomas Harriot to make a record of what they found for the court and patrons back in England.

According to Sloan, White probably executed his drawings for Sir Walter, Queen Elizabeth or other patrons after returning from his second voyage, in 1585. He made maps of the land, illustrations of the ships and pictures of native plant and animal life, including scenes of the Algonquian Indians who lived in villages on the island.

On his third trip to the New World, White traveled as governor of a colony he would found with his daughter, her husband and other Brits in search of a new life. Within weeks of his granddaughter's birth, White rushed back to England for desperately needed supplies for the 117 colonists. Sir Walter's attempts to arrange a return voyage were hampered by England's sea battles with Spain. White eventually embarked on a return in 1588 but had to turn back. He finally made it back to Roanoke Island in 1590.

The colonists were gone. But the saga of White's drawings was just beginning.

Natives were idealized

In 1590, Flemish publisher Theodor de Bry published Thomas Harriot's report on his explorations and illustrated them with engravings based on White's drawings. While the watercolor drawings had been seen by a privileged few, de Bry's engravings, published in four languages, brought this first glimpse of North America to a far wider audience.

The drawings, while accurate in their depiction of the Algonquians, were also idealized. They portrayed a friendly native population who lived in English villagelike settings and worked their crops.