This was the era of great naval exploration fueled by speculative fervor, of maritime daring and nautical disasters. In April 1586 Queen Elizabeth I acquired a new and exotic title. A tribe of Native Americans had made her their weroanza -- a word that meant "big chief". The news was received with great joy, both by the queen and by her flirtatious favorite, Sir Walter Ralegh. His first American expedition had brought back a captive, Manteo, whose tattooed face and otter-skin cloak had caused a sensation in Elizabethan London. In 1587, Manteo was returned to his homeland as Lord of Roanoke along with more than one hundred English men, women, and children. In 1590, an English supply ship arrived at the coastal colony, but the settlers had disappeared.

For almost twenty years the fate of Ralegh's colonists was to remain a mystery. When a new wave of settlers sailed to America to found Jamestown, their efforts to locate the lost colony were frustrated by the mighty chieftain Powhatan -- father of Pocahontas -- who vowed to drive the English out of America, though Pocahontas herself made valiant attempts to thwart the massacreof settlers. While Ralegh's "savage" Manteo had played a pivotal role in establishing the first English settlement in America, he had also unwittingly contributed to one of the earliest chapters in the decimation of the Native American population.

A riveting historical mystery of colonial America and Elizabethan England, of the clash between old worlds and new, of civilization and savagery, Big Chief Elizabeth confirms Giles Milton's reputation as one of our most colorful and engaging popular historians.