History’s earliest map depicting Ocracoke Island was made in 1585

By Kevin P. Duffus © 2026

History’s earliest map depicting and identifying Ocracoke Island, then called Wococon, is held in the collections of the National Archives of England and Wales about six and a half miles west of London.

The nearly four-and-a-half-century-old map, hand-sketched on French paper, is 15-3/4 inches by 12 inches. The artist is unknown but the watermark on the paper has been analyzed to date to 1585.

The features and the handwritten legends on the westward-facing map are crudely drawn—or perhaps hurriedly. If a casual observer glanced at the map, even someone familiar with the Outer Banks and the vast Pamlico estuary, they probably would not realize what they were looking at. The observer might think that the map had been made by a child.

Though small, the map is immensely significant. The British Archives classifies it as “A Sketch-Map of the Discoveries of the 1585 Expedition.” Not until the mid-20th century was it properly identified as “the earliest English map of [the coast of North Carolina] made from direct observation.”

In other words, the Elizabethan who sketched and labeled the island of Wococon for the first time, among many other important landmarks inside the sand banks, was present in 1585.

Upon the success of the first of the Roanoke Voyages in 1584 and the return to London of the native-Americans Manteo and Wanchese, Sir Walter Raleigh organized and funded a massive expedition consisting of seven ships and 600 sailors, soldiers, and specialists to return to the land named Virginia.

The expedition that arrived at Ocracoke Inlet on June 25, 1585, included a veritable who’s who of Elizabethan notables.

Leading the expedition was Raleigh’s 43-year-old cousin, Sir Richard Grenville. Six years after circumnavigating Pamlico Sound and traveling up the Pamlico River to the Algonquin capital town, Secotan, Admiral Grenville lost his life as one of Britain’s greatest naval heroes while commanding a courageous rearguard action against 55 Spanish ships near the Azores, allowing the English fleet to retire to safety.

One year after passing through Ocracoke Inlet, Sir Thomas Cavendish made history by becoming the second English mariner after Sir Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe.

Also at Ocracoke was John White, the artist of enduring fame for his painting of Pamlico Algonquians.

He was also the grandfather of Virginia Dare and the heartbroken governor of the Lost Colony who tragically had to abandon his family, never to see them again.

Arguably the greatest among them was the scientist, mathematician, astronomer, and ethnographer Thomas Hariot.

Twenty years after surveying the Pamlico shoreline with his early version of a spyglass, then called a perspective glass, Hariot became the first to draw an astronomical object through a telescope when he mapped the surface of the moon, months before the better-known Italian astronomer Galileo did so, thus marking the beginning of the era of modern astronomy. Yes, Hariot was among the first European visitors to Ocracoke.

Lastly, Ralph Lane, the military commander of the expedition and the first Roanoke colony, was among the Elizabethan notables passing through Ocracoke inlet in the summer of 1585.

Lane might be best remembered for having coined the beloved North Carolina tourism slogan, “The goodliest soil under the cope of Heaven.”

Lane (or his assistant) was likely the amateur cartographer who drew the rough sketch map that first depicted Ocracoke Island.

The map was included in a packet of letters Lane dispatched from Roanoke Island to London in early-September 1585, marking the first trans-Atlantic mail ever dispatched from North America to England.

This article is an excerpt of Kevin Duffus’s lecture “The 1585 Exploration of Pamlico Sound” and his forthcoming book The Long Ride—Journeys into the Past of the Carolina Coast. Kevin can be scheduled for presentations and book signings by emailing: contact@thelostlight.com.