Werowance

Among the Virginia Algonquian, a werowance was a local ruler or leader.

When English settlers arrived in Virginia, they were impressed by the power wielded by Powhatan. They described Powhatan as the ruler of many villages, exercising his authority over subordinate chiefs called werowances. The position of werowance was usually inherited through the mother’s line, but Powhatan could remove werowances at will. Larger communities were governed by werowances, smaller ones by “lesser werowances.” A female leader was known as a weroansqua. The number of werowances is unknown, but Powhatan may have had authority over some 34 villages.

The word werowance has been translated variously as “commander,” “he is wise,” “he is rich,” and “he is of influence.” The werowances were supported by a system of tribute, including such items as copper, beads, and pearls. In turn, they paid tribute to Powhatan. The extent of the werowances’ power over the people in their villages is unknown.

Further reading: Frederick W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Stephen R. Potter, “Early English Effects on Virginia Algonquian Exchange and Tribute in the Tidewater Potomac,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, eds. Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 151-172; Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries (Norman: University of

Oklahoma Press, 1990);-, The Powhatan Indians of

Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989).

—Martha K. Robinson

White, John (1540?-1606?) English artist, colonist Governor of the short-lived English colony at Roanoke, John White was best known for his series of watercolor paintings of the Carolina Algonquian whom the English met in the mid-1580s.

Little is known about the early life of John White. Born in all likelihood at some point between 1540 and 1550, he does not emerge in the historical record until the English attempted colonization of Roanoke. In 1585 Sir Walter Ralegh chose White to be the official artist on his mission across the Atlantic Ocean. It was an inspired choice. White proved to be an expert companion to the young mathematician Thomas Harriot, whose ethnographic report on the Carolina Algonquian and their world constituted vital information for English colonial planners. If White’s orders resembled those of Thomas Bavin, who was the designated artist of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s colonizing effort, he would have been instructed to depict everything that was new—each plant, animal, and fish—as well as the people they met and the communities they observed.

White, scholars have universally concluded, was an ideal person for the assignment. His depictions of the Carolina Algonquian provide critical ethnographic information about a people who have since disappeared (at least as a specific cultural group). He drew individual men and women and showed how the Indians prayed, built their villages, grew their crops, and fished with seines and arrows. Brought back to Europe, the Flemish engraver Theodor DE Bry soon prepared versions of these images that were published in an illustrated edition of Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, published in London in 1590 under the direction of Richard Hakluyt the Younger.

White returned to Roanoke in 1587 as Governor of the “Cittie of Raleigh in Virginia.” While in London before the venture, he had tried to enlist as many potential colonists as possible, although he managed to attract only 112, a group that included only 17 women and 11 children. After his return to Roanoke in July 1587, he named Manteo, “Lord of Roanoke and Dasemunkepeuc,” and relied on his expertise to help smooth relations between the Natives and newcomers. But the settlers wanted more provisions from England, and so White crossed the Atlantic once again, landing in November 1587, eager to tell Ralegh about the needs of the new settlers. Ralegh promised assistance, but when the time came to send out a relief ship the threat of the Spanish Armada suspended any efforts. By the time the English returned to Roanoke, the colonists had disappeared.

Although best known for his paintings of the Carolina Algonquian and their area, White also provided detailed paintings of the fish he encountered in the Atlantic and also rendered copies of other indigenous peoples based on earlier pictures by Jacques Le Moyne.

Little evidence exists about what happened to White after his term as governor of Roanoke. It is possible that he was the man referred to when a Brigit White became the administratrix of her brother’s estate in 1606, because that John White had been “late of parts beyond the seas.”

Further reading: Paul Hulton, America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press/British Museum Publications, 1984);-, The American Drawings of John

White, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Totowa, N. J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984).