For over 400 years a simple patch hid a very important detail on John White’s “Virginae Pars” map, and some historians are now hopeful that it could provide valuable clues to the whereabouts of the “Lost Colony,” a 16th-century settlement that disappeared without a trace. The story of the map’s hidden fort quickly spread past the scholarly arena and was picked up by  the mainstream news. We asked William C. Wooldridge, author of our forthcoming Mapping Virginia: From the Age of Exploration to the Civil War, to share his thoughts on this discovery and what it might mean. Mr. Wooldridge writes:

Maps harbor many mysteries, but few are as intriguing as a recent discovery on John White’s ca. 1587 manuscript map of Virginia. According to news reports, Brent Lane of the First Colony Foundation in North Carolina noticed paper patches on the map, and subsequent investigation by the British Museum revealed that the patches covered earlier drawing, including a symbol suggesting a fort or settlement on the mainland.

A printed version of the map, titled  ”Part of America, Now Called Virginia,” has been familiar to booklovers for over 400 years.  It shows the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the area of the Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony. The manuscript with the patches (on which the printed map was ultimately though roughly based) came to light in 1865 when a transplanted Vermont Yankee, Henry Stevens, bought John White’s original watercolors, including the map, at a London auction and sold them to the British Museum. So the discovery occurred on a document well known to historians for almost 150 years. Press coverage of the new finding focused on the long-hidden mainland “fort” as a possible clue to the destination of settlers from the Lost Colony, all of whom had disappeared when John White returned to America in 1590. Archeology may eventually reveal a connection between the papered over symbol and the Lost Colony. The manuscript map does not.

What the covered-over lines and symbols do show is that mid-stream changes sometimes need to be made in the course of creating a map.  White would have worked from multiple sketches, notes and surveys, so it is easy to see how there would be occasion for corrections. The British Museum report says the southernmost patch “concealed slight changes to the coastline.” That is the kind of fix that might naturally need to be made in drafting, so a patch does not necessarily imply an intent to hide something accurate underneath it.

When John White sat down to create with graphite and watercolors a map of the part of the New World he knew as Virginia, he did not have the option of making changes by inserting a plug in a woodblock or hammering out an errant line on a copperplate. Instead, he adopted the straightforward method of affixing a patch of matching paper over the parts he wished to change. The British Museum report says this was a common expedient at the time. “They [the patches] seem to have been used to alter or correct features in the original layout, a common practice at this period.” Brent Lane says this “unattributed” assertion (by the report’s four named authors) is wrong and quotes the respected Peter Barber’s conclusion that patches were “rare.”

Common or rare, one of White’s patches covers a place where coastline or watercourses may have been changed, whether because of a slip of the hand on the first attempt, or because better information became available. The other patch covers the symbol that looks like a fort. The covered over fort could mean that White decided to limit his map to existing settlements and to delete a projected one, or that the expedition’s leaders changed their minds about establishing anything at that location. Or it could be more significant.

A much later map, John Farrer’s 1651 picture of Virginia as an isthmus between the Atlantic and Pacific, illustrated in Mapping Virginia, has not one but two fort or settlement symbols on the Roanoke-Chowan-Albemarle Sound watershed, the same watershed but not in the same place as the covered over symbol on the John White map.  (Farrer had a special interest in the region; his map accompanied a pamphlet on “Virginia. . . the South part thereof in particular Including the fertile Carolana.”)

Farrer’s multi-pointed symbols are somewhat similar to what can be seen of White’s covered over symbol. The largest of Farrer’s symbols is labeled “Dazamoncak,” the  name of an Indian village (Dasamunquepeuc on the ms. and printed White maps). Could the covered-over White symbol have been meant to refer to a large—but misplaced—Indian settlement? But the symbol is different from the pictorial symbol (a circular stockade) White and Farrer used for the Indian village of Secotan and is closer to the symbol Farrer used for Fort Orange, the Dutch settlement on the Hudson.  So do the White and Farrer symbols suggest a planned or rumored English presence? We don’t know.  But six decades after John White patched his map, John Farrer thought there was something of interest in roughly the same region.

With or without any connection to the Lost Colony, the White map’s wabi-sabi patches give us a spine-tingling close-up of the artist at work.

—William C. Wooldridge

(William Wooldridge’s Mapping Virginia will be available this fall. The John White map is one of the many illustrations in our A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia.)