• Prince Madoc the Welshman
• Virginia Dare the White Doe
• Batt's Grave
  
• Blackbeard's Last Fight
  
• Old Dan Tucker

In 1170, upon the death of the Welsh king in Great Britain, the succession was contested by several of his ferocious brutish sons. Twelfth century Wales was a barbarous country and the most heineous atrocities went unpunished. As the brothers, incited by the king's evil widow, slaughtered each other, the winsome youngest son, whose name was Madoc, decided to leave his bloody homeland. The twenty-year-old prince gathered together more than a hundred of his peace-loving followers and sailed into the unknown western seas, hoping to find an untroubled land where they could live happily and congenially with each other.

He found it. Beyond the ocean was a beautiful, bounteous realm peopled by dark-skinned natives who led industrious, harmonious lives. After a year, leaving behind most of his companions, Madoc went back to Wales for supplies. The report of his new homeland was ardently received by the strife-weary people, and ten shiploads of his countrymen returned with him into the west. They were never heard of again.

Five centuries later in 1666, Morgan Jones, a Welsh clergyman, sailed south from Virginia. Some weeks after landing at a dismal spot on the coast, he became so beset with hardships that he started an overland trek back north. On the banks of the Pamlico River in North Carolina he was taken captive by a Tuscacora tribe of Doeg Indians, many of whom had fair complexions and red hair. He was condemned to die the next morning.

All night Jones prayed for deliverance, exclaiming over and over again in Cymric, "Have I escaped so many dangers that I must now be knocked on the head like a dog?"

A chief of the Doegs heard him and spoke to him in the same strange but wonderful language. "You speak our tongue," he said. "You shall not die."

For four months Morgan Jones stayed with the Doegs, preaching to them three times a week in Welsh. Finally resuming his journey, he promised to go to Great Britain and come back with missionaries to instruct the tribe in the Christian faith. His death left his mission unaccomplished.

Only much later was it conjectured that the Doegs were descendants of Madoc's Welsh explorers and the blessed natives of the western seas.

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   See also Data Wales, which posits that the Welsh under Prince Madoc sailed to Alabama, not North Carolina. For another lost colony in North Carolina, check out the story below, Virginia Dare, the White Doe

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In 1587 Sir Walter Raleigh sent men and women from England to establish a colony in the New World. It was his second attempt, for the first colonists of 1585 had abandoned Roanoke Island after a number of disastrous events. The governor of the second colony, John White, had with him two Indians, Manteo and Wanchese, who had earlier been taken to London. Also in the group was Eleanor Dare, the governor's daughter, and her husband Ananias.

A month after the colony's safe arrival, Virginia Dare was born on August 18. The first English child born in the New World, she was the daughter of Eleanor and Ananias. On August 27, three days after her baptism, Governor White sailed to England for supplies. In England, his country was preparing for war with Spain, and for several years he could not get permission to return. When finally he came back, he found no trace of the colonists. Virginia Dare had vanished.

Or had she? There is a legend that she grew into a beautiful young woman, educated by her good friend Manteo in the ways of the forest. She was loved by many but especially by the handsome young Indian chieftain Okisko. When an old witch doctor named Chico turned Virginia into a White Doe because she spurned his protestations of love, Okisko was determined to undo the magic. From a kindly magician he learned that the only way to do so was to pierce her heart with the arrow of an oyster shell.

Meanwhile, the evil Wanchese, who hated the English, also had been spurned by Virginia Dare and he was determined to kill the White Doe with a silver arrow given him by Queen Elizabeth while he was in England. Wanchese well knew that a White Doe lives a charmed life and death can only come from a silver arrow.

One day, as Okisko searched along the shore for the White Doe, suddenly there she was, springing from the deep forest down to the white sands where Governor White's fort had once stood. He raised his bow, aimed his arrow, and the pearl arrow sped away. At exactly the same moment, from another direction, a silver arrow came toward the White Doe from the bow of Wanchese. The two arrows pierced the heart of the Doe simultaneously.

The White Doe resumed her form as a beautiful maiden, but she was dying. Wanchese rushed away, and Okisko looked for the last time into the eyes of his beloved Virginia Dare. He sorrowfully buried her in the center of an abandoned fort.

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Questions for Thought:

• Research Raleigh's Early Colony. What are some of the problems that plagued or might have plagued it?
• Compare this tale with the story of the "Lost Colony" at CoastalCarolina.com. What are the similarities between these two stories of Virginia Dare? What are some differences?

A hurricane inthe 1950s sank an island beneath the surface of Albermarle Sound. A shallow, muddy bottom off the banks of Perquimans County is all that remains of what centuries ago was a beautiful island with fields and trees and orchards and a lone house. During the early days of the colony, in the 1660s, it was owned by Nathaniel Batts, the very first settler to come to North Carolina and remain here. So influential and fearless was he that those settlers who followed him called him "Captain Nathaniel Batts, Governor of Roanoke.*"

Batts was a "rude, desperate man" who did not like other white settlers, preferring the Indians of the Chowan tribe. With them he went hunting and trapping, and when they were are war with other tribes, he fought alongside them. Much of the time he lived with the Indians, adopting their customs and dress. Itis no wonder that he and the chief's daughter Kickowanna fell in love. She told Batts that when her father died he would become chief of the Chowans, and so she adorned him with gaudy ornaments and a headdress of feathers befitting his future status.

>From time to time Batts would retire to his little house onthe island he owned, and there Kickowanna would come to visit him, paddling her canoe silently across the waters of Albemarle Sound. Late one afternoon shw was on her way to the island whena sudden storm came up, her canoe was overturned, and shw was drowned in the roiling waters. Thereafter Batts never left the island. Several years later, it is said, he died of a broken heart, and was buried on the island, which then became known as Batts Grave.

On stormy nights, the ghost of Batts sweeps about among the cawing sea gulls, grieving for his lost love Kickowanna.

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   * "Roanoke" in these days referred to all of at least North Carolina.

Questions for Thought

• Locate the places described in this legend on a map. How close are these places to the Dismal Swamp?

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Of the many pirates who ravaged the coast of North Carolina during the early years of the eighteenth century, by far the most fearsome was Blackbeard. He had been born in England with a name such as Edward Teach or Thatch or Thach, but because of his grizzly hair the color of midnight, he soon was appropriately nicknamed Blackbeard. Sometimes to make himself even more horrible, he would attach slow-burning fuses to some ragged tuft of his inky beard to give the impression he was about to blow up. Now even heavy-armored men-o'-war awed him, but when the odds became too great, he would retreat through a shallow North Carolina inlet and hide behind the sandbanks.

Governor Charles Eden was so cowed by this scurvy villain that he let him roam at will along the coast. Tradition says the privateer even gave the governor some of his booty. Most of his treasures the pirate buried at one place or another on the shore. At his house in the town of Bath, Blackbeard settled briefly with his thirteenth wife, but he was restless and soon back at sea, raiding vessels from Virginia and South Carolina. When Governor Eden couldn't, or wouldn't, do anything to stop him, the governor of Virginia sent Lieutenant Robert Maynard to catch the corsair.

At Ocrakoke before daylight on November 22, 1718, they met: Maynard's sloop and Blackbeard's Adventure. The two ships touched, and vicious Blackbeard jumped aboard the sloop and faced the lieutenant. Maynard drew blood first, with a bullet right through the pirate's body, but the freebooter fought on. Finally, with a mighty swish of his sword, Maynard severed Blackbeard's head from his trunk. The head dropped in the water and circled the ship three times, crying out, "O crow, Cock! O crow, Cock!" The crowing of a cock signalled the coming of morning, and Blackbeard wanted enough light to find his body. But it was too late. Maynard's men counted twenty-five wounds inthe pirate. They retrieved his head, swung it to the bowsprit of Maynard's ship, and sailed from the island.

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   See Ocrakoke-nc.com's information on "Blackbeard" for more on the pirate--who is not merely fiction!

Questions for Thought

• Locate Okrakoke Island and Inlet on the map. Would this location be an important location for ships in general? Why? Does the island have any role in North Carolina's weather? What sort of role?
• Does this story imply that there are differences between early North Carolina and Virginia? What sort of differences?

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(born around 1714; moved with his parents to Bath, North Carolina, and ultimately to Randolph County--according to the legend)

"In 1740 he married Margaret DeVane and moved inland to what is today Randolph County, and there near a spring he built his cabin. Since he had no nails, he used wooden pegs to hold the cabin together. This experience proved to him that man could get along very well without many of the things thought to be essential. He became very, very thrifty."
--from the legend of "Old Dan Tucker"

Old Dan Tucker was a fine old man;
He washed his face in the frying pan;
On Christmas morning he got drunk
And fell in the fire and kicked up a chunk.
Get out of the way, Old Dan Tucker;
You've come too late to get your supper.

Old Dan Tucker ate raw eel
And combed his hair with a wagon wheel.
He gave his neighbors the squarest deal
And died with a toothache in his heel.
Get out of the way, Old Dan Tucker;
You've come too late to get your supper.

Questions for Thought