A bird's-eye view of an Indian village enclosed by a circular palisade of quite irregular light poles, with two entrances, one in the foreground and one in the background at bottom and top left. The path leading to the front entrance is bordered with hooped sticks. The village consists of eighteen buildings of pole and mat (and perhaps bark) construction, many of them with open ends or sides or both, and some with door openings at the ends, usually off-centre. Most are rectangular in ground-plan, but some may have rounded ends. Several are seen to contain an interior platform along one or both sides and across one end, supported by two rows of posts independent of the house posts. All have simple arched roofs, except the largest, where the cupola-like roof is constructed on ridges springing from the corners and coming to a point in the centre. In three houses the open sides seem to be shaded by an arched section of roof supported on longer vertical poles. The houses are grouped irregularly about a large open space in the centre where a fire is burning and around which a number of apparently naked Indians are sitting with rattles in their hands. Other groups of men, women and children are seen standing or walking near the houses, several of them making signs with their hands towards the fire and one man is splitting timber with an axe, another is carrying wood on his back, yet another carries a bow, while a cloaked figure is dimly seen emerging from a house to the left of the fire. A dog with longish legs and tail is also shown.
Inscribed in brown ink, at the foot, "The towne of Pomeiock and true forme of their howses, couered | and enclosed some wth matts, and some wth barcks of trees. All compassed | abowt wth smale poles stock thick together in stedd of a wall."
John White (English artist, c 1540-1593) was an English artist & early pioneer of Britain's efforts to settle North America. He was among those who sailed with Richard Grenville to the shore of present-day North Carolina & Virginia in 1585, acting as artist & mapmaker to the expedition. During his time at Roanoke Island he made a number of watercolor sketches of the surrounding landscape and the native Algonkin peoples. These works are significant, as they are the most informed, eyewitness contemporary illustrations of an early Native American society of the North America's Eastern seaboard.
