Fort Raleigh National Historic Site is grateful to the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum for their kind permission to allow an online image gallery of watercolors drawn by the artist and explorer, John White. The samples at the bottom of this page enable virtual visitors to experience the land and native people of the Roanoke Island region at moments of discovery by Englishmen in the 1580s. These images are meant to be used for a general study and are not to be reproduced in any form without the expressed permission of the British Museum.

Information about the explorers Thomas Hariot and John White can be found here.

Essays that discuss what the John White watercolors teach us about the Carolina Algonquian people and culture can be found here.

For further study, the following sources are also recommended:
Sloan, Kim. A New World: England’s First View of America. Chapel Hill, NC, 2007.

Hulton, Paul. America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White. Chapel Hill, NC, 1984.

A search for more examples of the John White watercolors can be done using the British Museum's collection database search feature. Enter the keyword 'roanoke' into the search box for the desired results.