History buffs will love what’s happening on the Outer Banks today through Saturday. The OBXZ History Weekend: Searchers of New Horizons is taking a hard look at the history of the area.
Today it was Thomas Harriot. Tomorrow The Native Americans and the Lost Colonists’ Fate and General Billy Mitchell and wrapping things up on Saturday the Aviators, the Magnificent Mean and Women and Their Flying Machines.
It’s a lot to pack into three days, but if today’s symposium on Thomas Harriot is any indication, there are going to be two more amazing days.
Thomas Harriot is an often overlooked presence in the story of the Lost Colony. He is best known for an amazing book he wrote, “A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Published in 1590 with etchings of the drawings of John White, it is an extraordinary example of genius in marketing.
Produced for his patron, Sir Walter Raleigh, the book depicts life in the area around Roanoke Island with remarkable detail, describing the corn, as an example, as “…about the bigness of our ordinary English peas and not much different in form and shape: but of divers colors: some white, some red, some yellow, and some blue. All of them yield a very white and sweet flour: being used according to his kind it makes a very good bread. We made of the same in the country some malt, whereof was brewed as good ale as was to be desired. . . .”
But Harriot was much more than a master of marketing. As presenters from Australia (via Zoom) New York, England and California described the man, what emerged was someone who could truly be described as a renaissance man.
When Wanchese and Manteo, indigenes people who returned with the first expedition to England, were staying with him, he learned their language and developed a phonetic alphabet to translate their language into English.
He was experimenting with algebra before anyone even knew what it was. He was fascinated by astronomy; he was fascinated by what was called alchemy in the 16th century, but what we would now describe a chemistry and how various compounds could combine.
Hearing the life story of Harriot, his involvement with the saga of the Lost Colony, only deepens the mystery of what happened to those 120 first colonists.
The Outer Bank has so much happening all the time. Plan your visit and be sure to stay in a Brindley Beach Vacations home.