Location: US 64 at Fort Raleigh Rd., NW of Manteo
County: Dare
Original Date Cast: 2018
Recent archaeological and archival research on the attempted Roanoke Colony in coastal North Carolina has provided a rich laboratory to study exploration. Unlike the rapid Spanish and Portuguese colonization in Central and South America, European efforts to settle eastern North America progressed slowly. Prior to the 1584-1590 Roanoke Colony venture of Sir Walter Raleigh, the failure of several French, Spanish and English colonies, at least partly attributable to inadequate technical and scientific expertise, incurred financial losses that discouraged both government and private speculative investment in North American exploration and settlement.
While the travails of the Spanish and French were known among potential supporters of English North American settlement, the experience of a more recent English enterprise would have weighed more heavily on the minds of prospective investors. Between 1586 and 1588 English seaman and privateer Sir Martin Frobisher led three expeditions of increasing size and expense to the New World. While initially undertaken as a trading venture in search of a Northwest Passage to markets in Asia, the endeavor was quickly transformed into a gold mining venture when faulty English metallurgical assays misidentified as valuable gold ore a random mineral specimen from the first voyage.
Exuberant investor interest led to the mounting of two subsequent expeditions that collectively returned over 1,500 tons of what eventually proved to be worthless rock. The cumulative effect of failed ventures such as those of Frobisher and Cartier was that rightly skeptical patrons and prospective investors needed assurance that the promoters’ schemes were sound, their commercial prospects credible, and their results verifiable.
Joachim Gans, an accomplished metallurgist from Prague, played a key role in the plans of one such promoter, the English courtier Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh countered investor skepticism by incorporating scientific expertise as an integral component of exploration and colonization. His 1584-90 Roanoke Colony expeditions included recognized scientific and technical experts among the explorers, and their field research was necessary to substantiate his venture’s economic premise. Raleigh enlisted Joachim Gans as the lead metallurgy chemist for his 1585 First Colony exploration team at Roanoke, which preceded the 1587 permanent settlement colony.
Gans was initially recruited to England from the Ore Mountains or Erzgebirge of Saxony, Germany, to resolve problems in the developing English copper industry. Gans was likely one of the two “chief workmasters” whom in 1578 Queen Elizabeth had requested permission from the Duke of Saxony to recruit to aid the struggling operations of the Society of Mines Royal. It is in that context that Gans first appears in the English historical record in 1581 in a report to Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Francis Walsingham, by George Nedham, a shareholder in the Mines Royal joint stock company. Nedham’s report praised Gans’ contributions in significantly improving the company’s ore processing and smelting operations. This would be the first of several recorded exchanges between Gans and Walsingham which firmly established Gans’ expertise and credibility on metallurgical matters and their commercial prospects among prominent and influential members of the Elizabethan court and English investors.
For that reason, Walsingham likely recommended that Gans join Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1585 exploratory expedition of the Roanoke colonization enterprise. Walsingham had been active as investor in the Frobisher voyages and was also a primary supporter of English colonization efforts in general. Walsingham’s familiarity with Gans made have led him to advocate for Gans’s inclusion in Raleigh’s venture to ensure the validity of the colony's mineralogical findings, countering the failure to distinguish properly between valuable minerals and worthless rocks which had led to large financial losses for the Crown and merchant investors. In the New World Gans collaborated with Raleigh’s young assistant (and later prominent English scientist) Thomas Hariot. Together they constructed and conducted metallurgical and botanical assay experiments at what the preeminent American historical archaeologist Ivor Noel Hume called the first "Science Center" in North America. Hume excavated the center on the grounds of the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island in coastal North Carolina.
Gans arrived on Roanoke Island on Sir Richard Grenville’s 1585 expedition and returned to England with Sir Frances Drake. He is historically significant as a representative figure of an emerging scientific revolution and the rise of global capitalism. His career anticipates the scientific inquiry, technological innovation, and entrepreneurial spirit that would transform North Carolina society over centuries.
A Jewish native of Prague, Gans also exemplifies the ethnic and religious diversity among North Carolina’s early settlers, challenging the common narrative of English Protestant settlement. He was a Czech who worked in the British and German mining industries; his languages included English, German, and Hebrew. Scholars of Czech and Bohemian immigration to America regard him as the first from that nationality in America. As the first Jewish settler in British North America, Gans also takes a prominent place in Jewish historiography. In North Carolina particularly, he was a prototype for generations of Jewish immigrants in his mobility, isolation, and quest for opportunity. Less than a century later, John Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1663) would famously open the colony to “heathens, Jews, and other dissenters.” Gans’ presence in the colony asks us to reconsider our historical narrative.
Gans’ achievements in England and its fledgling American colony were considerable. He was proudly and openly Jewish, when challenged, and declared his beliefs in a period when questioning Protestant Christianity could lead to death. He was a rational empirical thinker, experimental chemist, metallurgist, explorer, colonist, and America’s first Jewish resident. He exemplified the emergence of a new kind of expert, who not only possessed deep practical skill and artisanship, but also had a deeper theoretical knowledge backing his expertise. He mastered one of the most difficult feats in early modern metallurgy: the correct assay and smelting of copper sulfide ores. He can thus lay claim to being the first American scientist and technologist. The site of his laboratory on Roanoke Island in 1585-86 has even been called the “Birthplace of American Science.”
References:
Israel Abrahams, “Joachim Gaunse: A Mining Incident in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 4 (1903), 83-101
M. B. Donald, Elizabethan Copper: The History of the Company of Mines Royal,1568-1605 (1955)
Gary Carl Grassl, The Search for the First English Settlement in America: America’s First Science Center (2012)
Joseph Heckelman, The First Jews in the New World: The Dramatic Odyssey of the Early Jews into the Western Hemisphere (2004)
Ivor Noel Hume, “Roanoke Island: America’s First Science Center,” Colonial Williamsburg, 16, 3(Spring 1994), 14-28.
Leonard Rogoff, Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina (2010)
Gabriel A. Sivan, “The Adventures of Joachim (Hayyim) Gans First Professing Jew in North America,” Jewish Affairs, 70, 1(2015), 5-15