Science / Medicine : The Cradle of American Science : Remains of New World’s First Research Center Found on Island Where ‘Lost Colony’ Vanished
Although statesman and technical tinkerer Benjamin Franklin usually gets credit as the nation’s first real scientist, a new archeological dig on a sandy island off North Carolina has found a research laboratory dating to the 1580s, about 200 years before Franklin ever went out to fly his wet kite.
“We’ve found the birthplace of American science,” said Ivor Noel Hume, director of the dig at Roanoke Island’s Ft. Raleigh National Historical Site. The find is an old, buried laboratory once used for metallurgical research. Hume is a retired senior archeologist at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.
Although specialists seeking metals were part of early expeditions to the New World, Hume said the laboratory represents “the first time they planned to stay for any length of time and actually set up a research center.’
Hume, in a telephone interview, added that “it’s the first archeological evidence we have for a laboratory in America.”
Remnants found at the site include fragments of glass, crucibles, pots for ointments, and broken distilling apparatus. Hume said the thin shards of glass--perhaps used in apothecary work--are the oldest examples of English glass ever found in America. Other artifacts include a piece of metallic antimony, slag, clinkers from a forge and traces of molten materials.
The site on Roanoke Island is where the legendary Lost Colony was supposedly situated. Two groups of Englishmen--both sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh--had settled there, the first in 1585, the second in 1587. The second group vanished.
Roanoke Island today is a sandy stretch of land 12 miles long by three miles wide, between the North Carolina shoreline and the Outer Banks, occupied by vacation condominiums and small fishing communities.
The first settlement, Hume said, was established after a scouting party had visited the island for six weeks. That settlement was abandoned a year later, however, as relations with local Indians deteriorated. Although the Indians had first been described as “friendly, civilized and welcoming them as brothers,” Hume said the men in the colony “managed to fall out with the Indians in a hurry.”
While relations with the Indians were going sour, Hume said, the colonists were also awaiting a resupply mission from England led by Admiral of the Fleet Sir Richard Grenville. “Grenville hadn’t shown up with the supplies by late fall,” Hume said. When a fleet did arrive, it turned out to be that of Sir Francis Drake, fresh from forays against the Spanish to the south. “They were disappointed by it not being Grenville, so they decided to go home. The Indians were harassing them.”
Grenville arrived later to find a colony empty except for three men who had been inadvertently left behind. Drake’s fleet had pulled out quickly because a hurricane threatened, Hume said.
Raleigh sponsored a second group of settlers--this time including women--who also set up a colony on the island and then simply disappeared. Among the missing was Virginia Dare, the first child born of English parents in America. She was the granddaughter of the colony’s governor, John White, who returned from a three-year visit to England to find no sign of his 115 followers.
Hume said no evidence has yet been found to indicate where the colonists lived. One word carved into a tree trunk--Croatoan--offers the only clue to the settlers’ fate. It was the name of a nearby Indian village.
“Our work tells us that if we want to learn more about the 1585 group and the 1587 Lost Colony, we have to look somewhere else, and that somewhere else probably isn’t far away,” said Bonnie Keel, a National Park Service archeologist. “It may be just a matter of 100 or more yards” from the lab site.
Nicholas M. Luccketti, executive director of the Virginia Company Foundation in Jamestown, Va., concurs.
“And because most previous excavations have focused on the fort area,” he said, “the settlements may be well preserved.”
In the current digs, Hume and his colleagues reported, the area under study was apparently the original dirt floor of the laboratory, which still contains evidence of research activity. The site may have been covered by a small, crude, shed-like structure inside a wooden fort built by the first colonists.
“The objects relate to some kind of smelting operation. But a lot more analysis will be needed to determine what kind of furnace these scientists were using and what they were smelting,” Hume explained. “Metal trace elements scattered through our soil samples may tell us more.”
He said the researchers who probably set up the laboratory were easily identified from historical records. Two key people, metallurgist Joachim Gans and scientist Thomas Hariot, probably used the laboratory to help assess the mineralogical potential of the new territory.
Gans, the first Jewish scientist to visit America, “could determine for the English whether commercially valuable ore existed in North America,” Hume said. “One of the primary objectives of the 1585 expedition was to find copper and precious metals.”
His laboratory partner, Hariot, was described as a respected scientist closely associated with Sir Walter Raleigh. After returning to England, Hariot wrote one of the first accounts of the new region’s natural resources. And in one journal entry Hariot described testing done to determine the metal content of copper ornaments worn by an Indian chief: “The aforesaide copper wee also founde by triall to holde silver.”
According to William Kelso, resident archeologist for the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, near Charlottesville, Va., “This is the beginning of science on this continent, trying to extract natural resources to build a country’s wealth.”
