ABSTRACT
Thomas Harriot matriculated at Oxford on 29 December 1577 as a member of St Mary Hall, and was awarded a BA degree in Easter Term, 1580. He was a leading member of the first English colony in America, at Roanoke Island North Carolina in 1585-86. Harriot was the first English natural philosopher to study the botany, fauna, and local customs of a region of North America.13 In the late 1580s he was one of Ralegh's colonists in a devastated Munster. A careful examination of Harriot's life and subsequent reputation shows that wittingly or unwittingly he provoked a series of controversies, some of which run on to the present day. Harriot, posthumously and unwittingly, gave rise to two further heated and long-running controversies, this time concerning his achievements in mathematics and astronomy, respectively.
