08/17/2007
Virginia Dare was the first English child to be born in the New World, on August 18, 1587 — four hundred and twenty years ago today.
She was part of the famous Lost Colony, which vanished without a trace.
When starting this webzine named after her, Peter Brimelow wrote:
"It says something about the mettle of those settlers that any pregnant woman would cross the Atlantic, the equivalent of a lunar expedition at that time — and Virginia’s mother Elenor was no less than the daughter of John White, the colony’s governor.
"Perhaps you have to have a daughter yourself to appreciate what White must have felt three years later, when he finally returned from a supply trip to England, much delayed by the Spanish Armada. The smoke he took at first to be proof of occupation turned out to be brushfires. The settlement stood abandoned. Over a hundred settlers, his daughter and granddaughter among them, had vanished. He would never see them again."
That’s from the link at the top of this page that says Why VDARE.com / The White Doe? On the Wikipedia page on Virginia Dare, you'll find us on a list of "Things Named After Virginia Dare," along with the Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge — and the first commercial wine sold after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933!
Very symbolic! — because Political Correctness, when you think about it, is a form of Prohibition.
The reason we say the first English child is that there was, in fact, as Spanish child named Martín de Argüelles, born in St. Augustine, Florida, 20 years before Virginia Dare. Time Magazine referred to him in 1941 as the First Native White. And of course, there was Snorri Porfinnsson, born in Vinland, about the year 1000. He returned to Iceland with his parents and is buried there.
However, what we call the "historic American nation", with its Founding Fathers, Mayflower, Valley Forge, and Constitutional Convention, did not originate in St. Augustine, Florida. Florida wasn’t even part of the United States until Andrew Jackson conquered in 1818. America originated with English settlers.
The first permanent English settlement, Jamestown, Virginia, was 400 years old this year. It survived Indian attacks in spite of some proto-multiculturalists who thought that if the settlers would trust the Indians, and not treat them like savages (by building fortifications, and being armed) they wouldn’t be savages. Guess what? They were.
It’s amazing the emotions that Virginia Dare inspires in modern commentators — like Tamar Jacoby, for example. She once wrote, after explaining who Virginia Dare was, that
"…Virginia Dare is thought to have eventually married into a local Indian tribe, or to have been killed by it — almost equally unfortunate possibilities [Emphasis added] in the minds of VDARE’s writers, who make no secret of their concern about the way America’s original Anglo-Saxon stock is being transformed by immigration."
I suggested recently that she must be confusing us with Ethan Edwards, in the John Wayne movie The Searchers, who thought his kidnapped niece, after years as a Comanche slave, might be better off dead. Spoiler alert — he changes h is mind. But yes, it would be unpleasant to be kidnapped from a massacred colony, and forced to marry into an Indian tribe.
In reality, nobody knows what happened to the Lost Colony. And that brings us to the White Doe, which you can see in our logo — there’s a local Indian legend that Virginia Dare survived, was transformed into a white doe, and killed with a silver arrowhead.
Other commentators just don’t get it about Virginia Dare’s Englishness. Nick Gillespie of Reason referred to her as "the 'first' European born in Britain’s American colonies," missing the point. And Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center was quoted as saying that VDARE.COM is named after the "first white child supposedly born in colonial America." Supposedly?
In contrast, you can read all about it online in Sallie Southall Cotten’s 1901 book White doe : the fate of Virginia Dare : an Indian legend, — which tells you something about the civilizational confidence of America in 1901, as well as about the legend of 1587:
"…the foundation-stones of the great structure known and respected among nations as the United States of America… were laid by Sir Walter Raleigh at Roanoak Island, on the coast of North Carolina, which was then called Virginia. The intervening years have brought great results, those early struggles have ripened into success and greatness beyond Raleigh’s most sanguine dreams. A new race has arisen, yet bearing the characteristics of the race from which it sprung. Our English ancestors, our heritage of English law and custom, of religion and home life, of language and ideals, all tempered by the development of new characteristics, bind us through him to England."
They talked like that in 1901. But that was then and this is now — when children are taught to dress up as Indians on Thanksgiving, and say things like
"Wednesday Addams: Wait, we can not break bread with you. You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, and you will play golf, and eat hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They said do not trust the pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller. [A child in the same Grade Six class.] And for all of these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.
All right, that’s Christina Ricci in the movie Addams Family Values, 1993.
But the reality is not that different. Last year, there was a teacher in Long Beach, California, who dressed up as Pilgrim and went around the classroom taking pencils and backpacks and saying he'd "discovered" them. This was supposed to make students realize how evil the Pilgrims were for discovering America. [Teachers emphasize the Indians' side, By Ana Beatriz Cholo, Associated Press, Nov 21, 2006]
I wrote about this idiot last year, at Thanksgiving. It just occurred to me that, as he’s in California, it would be more appropriate for him to dress as a Conquistador, with a mock-Spanish accent.
See how far you get doing that in the classroom.
But it’s a whole change in attitude throughout society, this loss of civilizational confidence, motivated by white guilt. As Peter Brimelow went on:
"Today, Virginia Dare seems to be vanishing from American education too. But she was a fixture for earlier generations. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt felt free to give a speech commemorating the 350th anniversary of her birth. At one point, I planned to pay homage by bestowing her name on the heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in Alien Nation, about the flight of the last white family in Los Angeles. It seemed … symmetrical.
"I was dissuaded."
What we've been covering in VDARE.COM since 2000 is displacement of Americans from their jobs, homes, cities, and to a certain extent, whole states. There are now 300 million people in America, Hispanics have replaced African-Americans as the largest minority, there are well over a 1300 mosques in America, and things don’t look good.
What I’m talking about here, and what VDARE.com is about, is that the American nation, begun so precariously four hundred and twenty years ago, is capable of being ended by mass immigration. The mountains will still be there, and the rivers, and many of the buildings, (including the Statue of Liberty). But it won’t be America.
Here’s what Peter Brimelow wrote in Alien Nation in 1995.
"For the purposes of immigration policy, however, the point to grasp is this:
"In the context of the grand upsweep of world population over the next century, something that appears now perfectly predictable, one of those unpleasant details could easily be the snuffing out of the American nation — like a candle in a gale. " [Alien Nation, p. 54]
I want to remind you, though, that the progress of mass immigration, and the displacement of Americans, is not inevitable. The decision to have mass immigration, and to not enforce the immigration laws that already exist, is a political decision. And political decisions can be changed — sometimes overnight.
The Pilgrims didn’t give up, and neither did the California pioneers in 1849. So there’s no reason why you and I should give up today.
The American nation started with one little girl on Roanoke Island. Don’t let it end with you.
VDARE.com on Virginia Dare
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.