John White was an English artist who in 1585 accompanied a failed colonizing expedition to Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina and who, in 1587, served as governor of a second failed expedition, which came to be known as the Lost Colony. As an artist attached to the first group of colonists, White produced watercolor portraits of Virginia Indians and scenes of their lives and activities. He rendered the local flora and fauna and, using the English polymath Thomas Hariot as a surveyor, created detailed maps of the North American coastline. He also joined Hariot and others on an exploration of the Chesapeake Bay and made contact there with the Chesapeake Indians. Many of White’s paintings were published, sometimes in altered form, by Theodor de Bry as etchings in Hariot’s illustrated edition of A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590). They are the most accurate visual record of the New World by an artist of his generation. After the first colony failed, White led a second, which was intended for the Chesapeake but which settled again at Roanoke. The colonists included White’s daughter, Elinor White Dare, who gave birth to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in America. A poor and unpopular leader, White agreed to be a messenger back to England to inform the colony’s backers of the location change and a need for new supplies. Waylaid by the Spanish Armada, he did not return until 1590; the colonists had disappeared. White died three years later.
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