Manitowocs as admirable people who lacked advanced civilization but not intelligence or decency. They were to him cheerful human beings “void of all covetousness… a people free from all care of heaping up riches for their posterity, content with their state.” Of the Manitowocs, who had no interest or need to discover a new world, he wrote:
… considering the want of such means as we have, they seem very ingenious; for although they have no such tools, nor any such crafts, sciences and arts as we, yet in those things they do, they show an excellency of wit…. Whereby it may be hoped if means of good government be used, they may in short time be brought to civility, and the embracing of true religion.
His idea was to enter into an exchange: Indian knowledge of the new land and its produce for European technology and “true” religion.
Harriot’s work would help the Jamestown colony succeed a generation later. Nonetheless, the failure of the new people to give comparable respect to the Indians—not just on Roanoke, but over the whole continent for four centuries—would, more than any other cause, open a gulf between red men and white, a division not yet closed.
13
B ECAUSE of Pamlico Sound, the largest island-enclosed salt sea on the Atlantic coast, North Carolina has more water surface than all but two other contiguous states. Sizes are deceptive here: from Cape Hatteras in the Atlantic west to Hot House, North Carolina, in the Appalachians is five hundred miles.
Along highway 264, skirting the sound, grew stands of loblolly and slash pine, as well as water oaks, bayberry, and laurel. Away from the open waters, the day was warm, and in pocosins drained by small canals and natural sloughs, mud turtles, their black shells the color of the water, crawled up to the warmth on half-submerged logs.
The road passed through the fishing town of Engelhard, then down along Lake Mattamuskeet (drained in the thirties for farming but once again full of water and wildlife), to Swanquarter, around Hell Swamp to Bath. It was in Bath, the oldest town in North Carolina, that Edna Ferber went on board the James Adams Floating Palace Theater in 1925 to see a showboat performance—the only one she ever saw.
I didn’t want to drive the route I’d come the day before, so I headed toward the free ferry across the Pamlico River above where it enters the sound. Two hours later, the ferry, with a loud reversing of props, banged into the slip; three of us drove aboard, and we left in an uproar of engines, water, diesel exhaust, and birds. Laughing gulls materialized from the air to hang above the prop wash and shriek their maniacal laugh (Whitman thought it nearly human) as they dropped like stones from twenty feet into the cold salt scuds; some entered beak first, some with wings akilter, but all followed the first to see an edible morsel, real or imagined. A boy wearing an Atlanta Braves ballcap askew on his head got so excited by this excellent show, he almost tumbled in. I had to pull him back twice.
The other side of the river was warmer, the land high and flattened field after field. New Bern, on the Neuse River, was well-preserved antebellum Georgian houses. The military devastation—the repeated exchange of a town by Union and Confederate troops as the course of the war shifted—that did in so many other Southern cities did not happen to New Bern. Federal forces occupied the town early in the war and held it until the surrender. Later, as railroads developed in North Carolina, New Bern lost its importance as a port city, and “progress” came slower, the old ways remained longer. Most of all, the people retained an interest in the continuity of their past, and they made the new blend with the old. As a result, New Bern is an architecturally interesting city where the Old South still shows on the streets rather than in a museum.
It was afternoon. Maybe I should have stayed in New Bern, but I violated a rule of the road and
… considering the want of such means as we have, they seem very ingenious; for although they have no such tools, nor any such crafts, sciences and arts as we, yet in those things they do, they show an excellency of wit…. Whereby it may be hoped if means of good government be used, they may in short time be brought to civility, and the embracing of true religion.
His idea was to enter into an exchange: Indian knowledge of the new land and its produce for European technology and “true” religion.
Harriot’s work would help the Jamestown colony succeed a generation later. Nonetheless, the failure of the new people to give comparable respect to the Indians—not just on Roanoke, but over the whole continent for four centuries—would, more than any other cause, open a gulf between red men and white, a division not yet closed.
13
B ECAUSE of Pamlico Sound, the largest island-enclosed salt sea on the Atlantic coast, North Carolina has more water surface than all but two other contiguous states. Sizes are deceptive here: from Cape Hatteras in the Atlantic west to Hot House, North Carolina, in the Appalachians is five hundred miles.
Along highway 264, skirting the sound, grew stands of loblolly and slash pine, as well as water oaks, bayberry, and laurel. Away from the open waters, the day was warm, and in pocosins drained by small canals and natural sloughs, mud turtles, their black shells the color of the water, crawled up to the warmth on half-submerged logs.
The road passed through the fishing town of Engelhard, then down along Lake Mattamuskeet (drained in the thirties for farming but once again full of water and wildlife), to Swanquarter, around Hell Swamp to Bath. It was in Bath, the oldest town in North Carolina, that Edna Ferber went on board the James Adams Floating Palace Theater in 1925 to see a showboat performance—the only one she ever saw.
I didn’t want to drive the route I’d come the day before, so I headed toward the free ferry across the Pamlico River above where it enters the sound. Two hours later, the ferry, with a loud reversing of props, banged into the slip; three of us drove aboard, and we left in an uproar of engines, water, diesel exhaust, and birds. Laughing gulls materialized from the air to hang above the prop wash and shriek their maniacal laugh (Whitman thought it nearly human) as they dropped like stones from twenty feet into the cold salt scuds; some entered beak first, some with wings akilter, but all followed the first to see an edible morsel, real or imagined. A boy wearing an Atlanta Braves ballcap askew on his head got so excited by this excellent show, he almost tumbled in. I had to pull him back twice.
The other side of the river was warmer, the land high and flattened field after field. New Bern, on the Neuse River, was well-preserved antebellum Georgian houses. The military devastation—the repeated exchange of a town by Union and Confederate troops as the course of the war shifted—that did in so many other Southern cities did not happen to New Bern. Federal forces occupied the town early in the war and held it until the surrender. Later, as railroads developed in North Carolina, New Bern lost its importance as a port city, and “progress” came slower, the old ways remained longer. Most of all, the people retained an interest in the continuity of their past, and they made the new blend with the old. As a result, New Bern is an architecturally interesting city where the Old South still shows on the streets rather than in a museum.
It was afternoon. Maybe I should have stayed in New Bern, but I violated a rule of the road and
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