Europe’s eye-popping first glimpse of the Americas

Coronavirus has cast a dampener over this year’s Mayflower 400 celebrations due to a hidden enemy with which the Pilgrim Fathers were all too familiar: within months of their arrival in America more than half of them had died of a disease whose principal symptom was violent coughing.

There was no official artist on the Mayflower. Its ragtag party of Separatist Puritans had only been granted a charter on condition that their religious affiliation, banned in England, was not formally recognised. So we can only imagine how the New World looked to the cabin-feverish colonists who made landfall at Plymouth in December 1620, lustily shaking ‘the desert’s gloom/With their hymns of lofty cheer’, if you believe Felicia Hemans’s patriotic poem — or coughing their guts up.

There had been an artist on Sir Ralph Lane’s earlier expedition of 1585, the first attempt to found an English colony in North America, on Roanoke Island off what is now North Carolina. John White was commissioned as mapmaker and illustrator to this expedition, and promoted two years later by Sir Walter Raleigh to the position of governor of Roanoke and any future ‘Cities of Raleigh’. But White was better at painting than governing. His Portuguese navigator, known as ‘the swine’, stopped obeying orders; he attacked the wrong Indians — ‘we were deceaved, for the savages were our friendes’; and he was eventually obliged to leave his daughter and new granddaughter Virginia, the first English baby born on American soil, on Roanoke while he returned to England for supplies. When he finally made it back in 1590, on his granddaughter’s third birthday, he found the settlement deserted.

The ‘Lost Colony’ was never found, and White returned to England a broken man convinced he had been born under ‘an unlucky star’. But one man’s evil star is another man’s lucky one.