New world views: Get outta here to an exhibit of drawings of early Virginia

On the one hand, we’re talking some 300 miles roundtrip at a time when gas is expensive.

On the other, it’s the chance to see drawings from 1585 — some of the very earliest documents about our U.S. history, and they are only brought out of the British Museum once every generation.

The drawings won, and I drove to Jamestown to see John White’s watercolors. White, an artist and gentleman, accompanied Sir Walter Raleigh on five expeditions to the new world, including his 1585 voyage to what is now North Carolina, the site Raleigh named Virginia for the Queen. The new colony set up on Roanoke Island, but became known as the Lost Colony because the colonists simply disappeared.

White wasn’t lost. He returned to England with the first pictures of the natives, plants and animals from this strange new world across the sea.

These 16th century watercolors, now owned by the British Museum, are on display at the Jamestown Settlement until Oct. 15. The 70-plus drawings had not been on public display for more than 40 years until March 2007 when “A New World: England’s First View of America” debuted at the British Museum, then traveled to Raleigh, N.C., and Yale in New Haven, Conn.

I confess, I am always excited by paper documents that have managed to last hundreds of years. Just the endurance of words or art on a page is thrilling. Plus, these materials pre-date the founding of Jamestown in 1607.

White’s drawings, upstairs in the Jamestown Settlement the main building, are displayed in low lighting, as decreed by the British Museum. Many were taken out of a scrapbook found hundreds of years after they were drawn in a house that had been damaged by fire, then by water. The water caused some of the pigment to lift and create a ghostly mirror image on the other side of the page.

Time has also hurt some of White’s pictures. Once glistening and shiny fish have faded to gray or black due to the chemical content of his expensive lead paint.

However, the drawings are still well-worth viewing, as the staff on site, including Tom Davidson, senior curator of the Jamestown and Yorktown Foundation, will tell you.

He called getting to display the drawings “literally a chance of a lifetime.”

White’s 1585 map of Virginia, a pen and brown ink over pencil with watercolor, was the first to depict North America’s east coast in detail. White’s Virginia includes part of what is now North Carolina.

It’s really a pictorial record of the English voyage to Virginia and shows numerous fish, as well as the ships. Raleigh’s coat of arms is colorfully displayed.

The map was the decorative frontispiece in the water-damaged album.

The exhibit includes drawings of plants: a delicate Rose of Plymouth, which at White’s time grew in the Atlantic’s marshes and coasts, and a milkweed no longer found on the Outer Banks.

His animals include an Eastern brown pelican, a pufferfish, flying fish, diamond back terrapin, a grouper, a greater flamingo, and a Portugese man of war, among others.

White produced the first images of the natives, the North Carolina Algonquians. He was accompanied by Thomas Harriot, who wrote about their dress, weapons, villages and culture.

Their village of Pomeiooc is shown as a series of huts in a circle surrounded by a palisade. Secotan, another village, is open and arranged along a central area.

The portraits are of real individuals, such as a wife of the Pomeiooc chief and a chief — possibly Wingina, an important figure who, with his brother, ruled the tribes of Roanoke Island. Another drawing shows another chief standing very proud in native dress, hand on a bow.

Davidson pointed out that even if people are not familiar with John White, they likely will recognize some of the drawings, which have been reproduced widely over the years.

White brought the drawings back to England where they were copied as line engravings by Theodore de Bry. His versions of White’s drawings were published with Harriot’s written account in 1590 as a “A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia.”

Causey, who writes for The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, can be reached at .