up tame turkies about their houses, and take apes in the
mountains, and where, at Ritanoe, the Weroance Eyanaco, preserved
seven of the English alive--four men, two boys, and one young maid (who
escaped [that is from Roanoke] and fled up the river of Chanoke), to
beat his copper, of which he hath certain mines at the said Ritanoe, as
also at Pamawauk are said to be store of salt stones."

This, it will be observed, is on the testimony of Machumps. This
pleasing story is not mentioned in Captain Newport's "Discoveries" (May,
1607). Machumps, who was the brother of Winganuske, one of the many
wives of Powhatan, had been in England. He was evidently a lively
Indian. Strachey had heard him repeat the "Indian grace," a sort of
incantation before meat, at the table of Sir Thomas Dale. If he did
not differ from his red brothers he had a powerful imagination, and was
ready to please the whites with any sort of a marvelous tale. Newport
himself does not appear to have seen any of the "apes taken in the
mountains." If this story is to be accepted as true we have to think of
Virginia Dare as growing up to be a woman of twenty years, perhaps as
other white maidens have been, Indianized and the wife of a native.
But the story rests only upon a romancing Indian. It is possible that
Strachey knew more of the matter than he relates, for in his history he
speaks again of those betrayed people, "of whose end you shall hereafter
read in this decade." But the possessed information is lost, for it is
not found in the remainder of this "decade" of his writing, which is
imperfect. Another reference in Strachey is more obscure than the first.
He is speaking of the merciful intention of King James towards the
Virginia savages, and that he does not intend to root out the natives
as the Spaniards did in Hispaniola, but by degrees to change their
barbarous nature, and inform them of the true God and the way to
Salvation, and that his Majesty will even spare Powhatan himself. But,
he says, it is the intention to make "the common people likewise to
understand, how that his Majesty has been acquainted that the men,
women, and children of the first plantation of Roanoke were by practice
of Powhatan (he himself persuaded thereunto by his priests) miserably
slaughtered, without any offense given him either by the first planted
(who twenty and odd years had peaceably lived intermixed with those
savages, and were out of his territory) or by those who are