The lost colony

On October 3, Salem archaeologist Jeffrey Brain discovered a colony 13 years older than Plymouth. He doesn't have anything against the Pilgrims. He's just saying they were tardy.

by Ellen Barry

The president of the second colony of Virginia died an unpleasant death. Coastal Maine had not turned out to be tropical, as he had somehow expected, and the winter of 1607 is recorded as savage. The firewood was too green to burn, and inside their wattle-and-daub huts the men were fighting like polecats. With the French to the north and the Indians to the west and a near-mutinous second-in-command, George Popham was dying surrounded by hostiles. Snow was falling in very great abundance.

But Popham gritted his teeth and thought of posterity. John Abbott's 1875 History of Maine records his last words along these lines:

"I die content. My name will always be associated with the first planting of the English race in the New World. My remains will not be neglected away from the home of my fathers and my kindred."

He was wrong on both counts. Within a year, Popham's men would pack their bags and scrap the whole America scheme -- "their interest in the undertaking was of the slightest kind," wrote the historian Henry Burrage in 1914. Back in England, they would report that America was "over cold, and in respect of that not habitable by our nation." The Pilgrims would walk away with the credit for settling New England, and Popham's bones would end up in an unmarked grave, possibly under a parking lot. It would prove just another disappointment for George Popham, spectacular loser to Miles Standish in the horse race for historical standing.

But after 400 years of deepening obscurity, things began to look up for George Popham three weeks ago, when Jeffrey Brain, an archaeologist affiliated with the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, dug up the floorboards of Popham's storehouse. Locals always knew about the colony -- none of them really required any proof -- but no archaeologist had ever found one piece of hard evidence linking the Popham story to a point in time or space. Until now.

With the dig over until next year, Brain returned to his Salem office in a state of high excitement. Because the colony was abandoned, the discovery will allow Brain to scientifically recreate the conditions of 1608. With access to evidence rather than the contradictory historical accounts, he will be able to clarify the 400-year-old mystery of why Popham failed. Most important, Brain's discovery will reinject this story into the historical record. The colony predated Plymouth by 13 years and was peopled by speculators who hoped to form a trade network. To them, America was a source of portable goods, pure and simple. Ultimately, Popham upsets the traditional narrative of settlement: that of pilgrims hoping to build a more ideal state. So when he dug through to those floorboards, it was a big moment.

"There's no question about it. I've been a professional archaeologist for 40 years. I've enjoyed my career immensely," he says. "I've had some really good moments. This tops them all." On the phone to a colleague, he is more specific: "The amount of encouragement is really astounding, considering the deafening silence there was before."

As good as this news is for Jeffrey Brain, it's even better for George Popham, whose memory has taken some abuse over the years from the direction of Plymouth. Because Brain doesn't see the Popham story as a flat-out failure. Instead, he retells it as a courageous venture that could just as easily have reduced the Pilgrims to a footnote in nine-point type.

"I find their courage, their audacity inspiring," says Brain, who taught archaeology at Harvard and has the handshake of a longshoreman. "How many of us would go off into a totally new world? The closest thing to it today is the space program, and I'm glad there are people willing to be astronauts, but I wouldn't go out there. How many people would actually go out and do those things?"

And at the risk of appearing sentimental about a colony that miscalculated, underpacked, fled, and ultimately set back colonization for quite a few years, the archaeologist reveals one small, rather touching detail. Whenever he goes to the spit of land on Atkins Bay, he plants a cross of St. George.

On to part 2

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.