Encountering the animals of Roanoke at the British Library

Blog series Americas and Oceana Collections

Author Alexander Peacock is a 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow based at Queen’s University in Canada.

It is a curious thing to be an historian interested in the role wild animals played in the history of the British Empire. On the one hand, the British Library possesses a wealth of primary sources describing England’s first encounters with North America’s exotic fauna. On the other, the actual historical animals they describe – which were living and breathing creatures, even if they were unable to speak for themselves – can often feel as elusive as their counterparts out in the woods today.

As an Eccles Fellow, my research in the Library focused on the Roanoke colony of the 1580s. This was the first, albeit unsuccessful, English attempt to establish a permanent foothold in North America. Located in present-day North Carolina and often referred to by contemporaries as Virginia, Roanoke’s founders and backers, notably Sir Walter Raleigh, primarily envisioned the colony as a privateering base for use against the Spanish [Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony, Second edition (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007)].

The discovery of exotic fauna might not, then, have been the principal impetus lying behind the Roanoke voyages. Yet having said this, the written accounts and drawings produced following the enterprise expressed considerable interest in American animals.

Promotional tracts, such as Thomas Harriot’s A briefe and true report (1590), drew attention to an abundance of wildlife in Virginia to argue in favour of further colonisation efforts. Animals formed part of what Harriot listed as Roanoke’s ‘marchantable commodities’ and native sources of food [Thomas Harriot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (Frankfurt: 1590), 9-10, 19-21.].

For Harriot, the presence of so many animals hinted at the bountiful life the English could expect in America. Yet by reducing everything from birds, fish, and bears to food, Harriot engaged in an act of culinary imperialism: eating an animal helped make it familiar and represented a powerful assertion of possession [Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 65].

Eating the New World’s animals was for the English a form of conquest, and animals became the unwitting advertisements for colonisation.

Imagery of animals, along with Harriot’s text, also underscored America’s potential bounty. Edited by the engraver and goldsmith Theodor de Bry in Frankfurt, the 1590 edition of Harriot’s A briefe and true report was printed with a series of twenty-three images. These engravings, based upon Roanoke colonist John White’s original paintings, depicted the Algonquian peoples of North Carolina and influenced the popular image of the New World for centuries to come [Kim Sloan, A New World: England’s First View of America (London: The British Museum Press, 2007), 83].

Here, too, animals had a role to play. Sloane MS 1622, an unpublished account of the Jamestown settlement written by William Strachey in 1619, contains hand-coloured copies of the de Bry engravings. They depict the Algonquians effortlessly hunting and fishing in a paradise, with animals swarming in the backgrounds but also frequently in the foregrounds.

Some Englishmen also wished to better understand and document the new and strange animals they encountered in America. Artist John White was specifically tasked with painting Virginia’s flora and fauna, reflecting that the Roanoke venture was conceived as a voyage of discovery [Sloan, A New World, 42].

Add MS 5263 and 5265 hold copies of White’s drawings dating from the early 18th century, when they came to the attention of naturalist Sir Hans Sloane [Sloan, A New World, 12].

Despite not being as famous as the de Bry engravings, these paintings were influential in their own way. Several of these images, such as that of the blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata), formed the basis for some of Mark Catesby’s plates in his The History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731) over a hundred years later. White’s paintings of animals thus helped forge and influence the relationship between natural history and imperial expansion that was to be so central to the British Empire in the 18th century.

The British Library’s collections speak to how central animals proved to the Roanoke venture. At the same time, these are all human-made sources. They describe and depict animals from an anthropocentric point of view, and one can be left feeling that the real animals remain at a distance. You might get near them, but you can never stray too close to these animals.

Well, almost never. One day, I was browsing Add MS 5267, ‘Drawings of Fish’, when, turning a page, I unexpectedly encountered something which was not a drawing. There, attached to the paper, was a real dead fish. Pressed and dried – horribly so for an aquatic creature – and still adorned with its flaky yellow scales, the fish was about the size of a human hand and, irrespective of an attempt to fashion some fake eyes, quite evidently dead.

Despite its grotesqueness, this dead fish was the closest I came to any real animals. It serves as a reminder that one of the chief difficulties of animal history remains our reliance on anthropocentric sources; there is a much greater distance between the historian and a past animal than between them and past peoples [David Gray Shaw, “A Way with Animals: Preparing History for Animals,” History and Theory 52:4 (2013): 1-12].

At the very least, my research at the British Library showed that the human and natural worlds are inescapably connected. Looking at these sources, it is difficult to see the Roanoke colony without its animals.