The lost colony

Part 4

by Ellen Barry

The commemorations were all local until four years ago. It was Jeffrey Brain, the day-tripper, who finally rounded up funding from the National Geographic Society and set up a 10-day dig in Atkins Bay, in 1994. The site was a difficult one, because it was inhabited before and after the era of the Popham Colony. Between the detritus of prehistoric native tribes and a 1905 military installation called Fort Baldwin, the Popham era began to look like a hopelessly tiny sliver of time.

"There were 8000 years there, and we were looking for one year," Brain says. "We dug for weeks before we found anything at all."

That year they were digging well to the left of the actual site, and had virtually given up when at last they found something. It was a fragment of English pottery, combined with the first posthole of the storehouse, that gave Brain enough evidence to come back this year. And this year culminated in the climactic uncovering, roughly one foot below ground level, of the storehouse postholes, exactly where the 1607 map said they would be, and the charred remains of floorboards. After three years mulling it over, Brain says he had a strong sense of where to look.

"I kept rewinding over and over again until I finally got to the point where I knew exactly where it was," Brain says. "My intuition turned out to be just spot on. You get to know a site as you dig. You get a feel for it."

In town, locals are taking the discovery calmly, since most had accepted Popham's location as an article of faith. But next year's dig is unlikely to suffer the fate of this year's, which was shortened by a week for lack of interest. Historians all over the state acknowledge that it is an important moment. Without Brain's efforts, Popham would likely have stayed buried forever, says Emerson Baker, who teaches colonial history at Salem State College.

"We've all known about the colony," Baker says. "It's been written up for hundreds of years. But I'll tell you, some archaeologists thought, `Well, the site may be eroded, it might be gone.' You have to give Jeff credit for deciding to go and find out."

What Brain can look forward to over the course of the next few years is a scientific investigation of life in Fort St. George. He could find the body of George Popham, for one thing, and attempt to determine what killed him. By examining what remains of the storehouse, he could flesh out historical accounts of a fire that destroyed it -- some historians claimed it was set by vengeful Indians. Are there signs of a gunpowder keg that is rumored to have exploded? Were supplies consumed in the fire? Are there Indians buried in the area? And he could discover a thousand small details about the real life of colonists -- excavations in Castine, Maine, for instance, revealed that colonists there had resorted to eating any kinds of creatures they could find, including tiny birds.

What Brain hopes to produce is a more exact answer to the question of why the colony failed. Did the settlers trade freely with the Indians? Are there contemporary Indian sites nearby? Did they ever break ground on the gardens they hoped to plant? What were they eating? Did they have liquor? Did anyone else die?

With those questions answered, the Popham story will join the store of strange facts that complicate the fable of colonization: for instance, that the noble savages -- when they were first sighted by one expedition in 1602 -- had already had so much contact with fishermen from Spain that they were speaking in pidgin Basque. That at one point, the Jamestown settlers had packed up their boats, abandoned the colony, and reached the mouth of the James River when they met a ship carrying the new governor, who ordered them to turn around. That the Pilgrims would have starved if they hadn't been bailed out by English fishermen who, in Popham's wake, worked seasonally off the coast of Maine. And, broadly, that colonization was not made up of defeats and victories, but of crapshoots and errors and blind missteps.

The way Brain tells it, the Atkins Bay site is useful to us because it was abandoned on short notice: the construction, the artifacts, and the layout are exactly what they were on that day in September of 1608 when the colonists decided this continent was not worth the trouble. Here, for the first time, Brain can describe this moment with unprecedented exactness. Four hundred years later, the frozen hopes of George Popham are beginning to take on the luster of success.

"You're standing there uncovering a moment that hasn't been seen in 400 years. This is something they couldn't do in Jamestown, because it continued to be inhabited," Brain says. "1607 is obliterated. But in Popham, we've got a slice of time."

On the outcropping in Atkins Bay that licked George Popham so many years ago, the developments are being met with cautious optimism. Stevens and her friend Bud Warren have initiated a massive project to reconstruct the Virginia, the 50-foot boat that the Popham colonists built during the summer of 1608, and that ultimately shipped them out in September. It was the first ship built in New England, and the mere fact of its construction means the colonists succeeded, Stevens says. That they boarded the boat and left New England forever does not bother her.

Stevens has already permitted excavation beneath her flagstone walkway, and she says the residents of Popham Beach are just going to have to get used to a little more public scrutiny. "When [Brain] was here before, no one paid any attention," she says, a little wistfully. "We for years tried to keep this place a secret because of the traffic situation."

Then she shrugs. What is parking in the face of history, anyway? George Popham slept here.

Back to part 3

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