Histories

Story of Forgotten Colony Emerges with Help of Map

The Denver Post, Friday, 1 Dec 2000
By David Brown, The Washington Post

POPHAM BEACH, Maine - Occasionally when twins are born prematurely and under difficult circumstances, one dies, the other lives, and it's never clear why. Chance and circumstance seem to favor one. The other is lost, and its history remains forever brief and mysterious.

Post-Elizabethan England gave birth to such a set of twins - two American colonies - in 1607. One was named Jamestown. It survived; its descendants are alive today. The other was named Popham. It was abandoned, its remains were buried and forgotten.

You can read about Jamestown, the famous colony in Virginia, in any American history textbook. Some day, that may also be true of its lost twin, the Popham Colony, whose grave has been found and is being meticulously unearthed in Maine.

The remnant of the Popham Colony, on a bluff where the Kennebec River enters the Atlantic Ocean, is one of the most important archaeological sites ever found in the United States.

It is undisturbed, and consequently can tell its whole story to researchers capable of reading its stained soil and broken artifacts. Equally significant, it's a record of failure. Because the colony lasted only 13 months - August 1607 to September 1608 - the site is uncontaminated by the material of long-term settlement. What remains is a time-capsule from the dawn of English-speaking America.

Jamestown struggled through Indian attack, attempted mutiny and starvation before becoming, after a dozen years, a prosperous settlement of 5,000 people. Popham Colony suffered few of those initial depredations, but fell victim to an unexpected twist of fate.

Its first leader died. The man who succeeded him inherited the family title and lands when his older brother died in England during the colony's first year. When the heir heard the news, he returned home without delay, and the rest of the settlers went with him.

Something other than the Popham Colony's mere preservation makes the site so informative. It comes with a feature unique among the first English settlements: a map.

Drawn seven weeks after arrival by a man named John Hunt (who was probably a military cartographer), the map shows a modified star fort fitted to a headland. It has a "scale of feet & Paces." Each building is located, labeled and sketched in profile (or "elevation," in architectural terms).

The Hunt map is the only record of what buildings in early English colonies actually looked like. It provides an unprecedentged visual picture of an era in American history whose only remnants are underground and in pieces. But is it accurate? In this season's dig, the excavators found the "footprint" of the house occupied by the colony's second-in-command. It's the second structure located, and was exactly where the Hunt map said it would be.

"I now believe it's a perfectly reliable guide to the archaeology of the site," said Jeffrey P. Brain, the researcher in charge of the project. "It is a document that every archaeologist would kill for."

The Hunt map shows 18 buildings. How many were actually erected - and how many were wishful thinking - is a question whose answer will be revealed with painful slowness as the Popham Colony site is excavated over the next five years.

"It's a no-brainer that this site is nationally significant. It's of just absolutely supreme importance," said Robert Bradley, an archaeologist with the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, which is funding the dig with a grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Apart from what it may add to the history of colonial America, the Popham Colony site reveals a more general truth: Much of America's European past is only now being found, 400 years after the fact.

The Popham Colony's story begins with a charter from James I to the Virginia Company, allowing it to settle the east coast of North America. The company was divided into two ventures - the London Company, which had the rights to the southern coast (roughly Cape Fear to the Potomac River), and the Plymouth Company, which had the northern coast (Long Island to New Brunswick). Whichever company established a successful colony in its own zone could then move to claim the zone between.

The colony was named after its main financial backer, Sir John Popham, the Lord Chief Justice of England. His nephew, George Popham, was the leader and had the title "president." Second to him, named "admiral," was Raleigh Gilbert, a relative of the maritime adventurer Sir Walter Ralegh (who spelled his name differently from many of his kinsmen and descendants).

About 100 colonists sailed from Plymouth, England, on May 31, 1607, aboard two ships, Gift of God and Mary and John. They took formal possession of the Kennebec River site on Aug. 19.

There followed a flurry of construction of what the colonists called Fort St. George. They erected enough buildings to store supplies and house the 45 people who stayed for the winter. The rest returned to England on the two ships in October and December.

George Popham died of unknown causes the following February, and Raleigh Gilbert assumed command. A resupply ship in the spring found "all things in good forwardness." The colonists had finished building a sailing ship, which they named Virginia of Sagadahoc (Sagadahoc being the Indian name for the Kennebec). They had traded for furs with the natives,and gathered sarsaparilla root for sale back home as a medicinal.

In the fall, however, a ship brought news that Raleigh Gilbert's brother John, who had no children, had died. Raleigh was John's heir, and it didn't take the admiral long to calculate where his best prospects lay. He folded the colony's tent and everyone headed home.

The Popham Colony became a footnote in history, although it was never entirely forgotten.

In the early 1990s, Brain, an archaeologist with the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., learned of the site while vacationing nearby. He had spent most of his career at Harvard and done most of his digging at Indian sites in the Mississippi Valley. Like most Americans, he knew nothing of the Popham Colony. But after a little research, he became convinced it deserved another, closer look.

In 1994, he and some assistants dug for several weeks, finally coming across a few artifacts from the 1600s and a single "post mold" - the pulverized, underground end of a wooden post. Brain thought it might be a remnant of the storehouse, the fort's largest structure, but further digging that season failed to find another post mold, so he wasn't certain.

Because of funding problems, excavation didn't resume until 1997. By then, Brain had made a crucial deduction. To best fit the site's topography, the Hunt map needed to be rotated 20 degrees to the east of magnetic north. Brain theorized the single post mold he'd found might be one of the nine on each side of the storehouse as depicted on Hunt's map.

When he returned to the field, he drew a line through the post mold in the proper orientation and began to dig. Soon, the excavators found five more, right where the map said they'd be.

"It was probably the most exciting moment I've had in archaeology," Brain said of unearthing the first predicted one. "To be able to have a hypothesis and confirm it so precisely. It was a eureka moment."

Since then, the team has found more than a thousand artifacts. Shards of North Devon ceramic from England and salt-glazed Bellarmine stoneware from Germany. Pieces of bottle glass. Fragments of plate armor. Buttons. The most unusual item is a caulking iron, which looks like a small hatchet head and is used for sealing the joints in ship hulls.

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