A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  Glad to be back on less contentious ground, I asked Gannon a final question: how did he and his family celebrate Thanksgiving?

  “The traditional way, with turkey,” he said. “Salt pork is not a favorite of mine. Garbanzo beans I can leave on my plate. Hardtack? No thanks.” He smiled. “But I’ll take the red wine and drink to Menéndez. And I hope I’ll always be remembered as the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving.”

  CHAPTER 11

  ROANOKE

  LOST IN THE LOST COLONY

  Licence my roaving hands, and let them go

  Before, behind, between, above, below.

  O, my America! my new-found-land . . .

  How blest am I in this discovering thee!

  —John Donne, Elegy,

  “To His Mistress Going to Bed”

  WHEN AMERICANS RECALL their English forefathers, they conjure folk of modest means who fled the Old World to live and worship as they chose. These refugees brought Anglo virtues—stoicism, the work ethic, respect for the rights of man—and forged a society of freedom and opportunity that underpins our own.

  This uplifting narrative isn’t altogether true to the Jamestown and Plymouth settlers. But it’s even further removed from their forgotten English predecessors: a motley crew of slave traders, tourists, castaways, and Tudor knights more akin to conquistadors than to hungry Virginians or pious Pilgrims.

  In 1558, when Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, the notion that England was to rule North America would have seem as farfetched as present-day New Zealand colonizing Mars. Elizabeth’s island realm of only three million people didn’t yet include Scotland, much less a global empire. England had just lost Calais, its last toehold on the European continent, and had no presence at all in North America, apart from cod-fishing boats off Canada.

  England also had a long record of futility when it came to exploring the New World. In 1496, four years after Columbus’s first sail, another Italian navigator, John Cabot, won a license from King Henry VII to “seeke out, discover and finde” new lands. Cabot reached Newfoundland the next year but barely ventured ashore, discovering only some animal dung and a fishing snare. He gave the snare to King Henry, who dispatched Cabot on a second voyage to America. The mariner never returned. “He is believed to have found the new lands nowhere but on the very bottom of the ocean,” a contemporary observed.

  In the decades that followed, most of the English who attempted voyages of discovery were dilettantes. Typical was Richard Hore, a leather seller and dabbler in cosmography who sailed in 1536 with thirty gentlemen “desirous to see the strange things of the world.” Upon spotting a canoe paddled by “the natural people of the countrey,” the gents gave spirited chase. Their prey got away, leaving only a boot and a “mitten” as souvenirs for the tourists.

  Then food ran out, forcing the English to forage for herbs and roots. Some of those who went ashore mysteriously disappeared. One man, drawn by the “savour of broyled flesh,” came upon a fellow scavenger and asked why he wasn’t sharing his victuals. “If thou wouldest needes know,” the cook replied, “the broyled meat that I had was a piece of a mans buttocke.”

  The English were spared further cannibalism by the arrival of a French fishing vessel, which they seized in place of their own and sailed home. The king, now Henry VIII, was forced to repay the angry French from “his own purse.” After that, Henry lost what little appetite he had for American adventures and returned to the business of dissolving marriages and monasteries.

  Elizabeth, like her father, was preoccupied by problems at home and wary of trespassing on Spain’s claims to America. But she quietly abetted the looting of Spanish treasure by seamen on “journeys of pickery.” The most accomplished of these thieves was John Hawkins, the privateer who visited the French at La Caroline in 1565. Hawkins’s niche was seizing slaves from Portuguese ships and ports in Africa and then selling them in the West Indies, while plundering Spanish galleons along the way. The queen lent Hawkins a royal ship called Jesus of Lubeck, and later knighted him. His coat of arms bore an African bound in cords.

  In 1567, Hawkins lost a sea fight with the Spanish and had to abandon a hundred of his men on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico. Some of them wandered north, becoming the first English party to travel the American interior. Three survivors eventually reached the Atlantic and hitched a ride home on a French vessel.

  At first, their adventure attracted little notice. But in the 1570s, a small circle of influential Englishmen began advocating colonization of America. To buttress their case, they debriefed the last of the castaways still alive: David Ingram, a sailor from Barking, in Essex. A colorful storyteller, Ingram told of Indians wearing penis gourds, cannibals with “teeth like dogs teeth,” and creatures such as elephants, red sheep, and “fire dragons.” But what riveted his interrogators were his tales of America’s wealth: pearls “as great as an acorn,” rivers with gold nuggets “as big as a man’s fist,” and an Indian city with streets broader than London’s and banquet halls perched on pillars of silver.

  Ingram’s vague coordinates seemed to place him in a legendary land of riches called Norumbega, which had appeared on European maps for fifty years, at roughly the site of today’s New England. In this northern region, Ingram said, a river led west to the sea—evidence of the long-sought Northwest Passage. He also told of Welsh-speaking Indians. This dovetailed with yet another legend, about a Welsh prince named Madoc who had sailed to America in the twelfth century.

  For proponents of colonization, the message of Ingram’s account was plain. England had missed out on the easy wealth of the Indies, and its voyages to the far north of America had thus far yielded little except salt cod and fool’s gold. But somewhere in between lay Norumbega, a rich land with a shortcut to the Orient, and a territory that, thanks to Prince Madoc’s long-ago voyage and John Cabot’s brief visit in 1497, was rightfully England’s.

  An early map of the North American coast, including “Terra Norumbega”

  The first man to try and make good on this claim was Sir Humfrey Gilbert, a rash courtier who took as his motto “Quid non,” meaning “Why not?” Gilbert won his knighthood for ruthlessly suppressing the Irish; among his other atrocities, he made prisoners approach his tent on a path lined with the severed heads of their kinsmen. England’s brutal campaign to quell and colonize Ireland in the sixteenth century became a training ground for many of the men who later went to America, where they likened Indians to “the wild Irish.”

  Gilbert, however, was a Renaissance killer. He dreamed of founding a college to teach sword-fighting, Hebrew, and other skills suited to a lettered knight. He also wrote florid treatises on sailing to Cathay (Columbus’s old dream) and “How Her Majesty May Annoy the King of Spain.” In the 1570s, he won a charter from the queen to discover “remote, heathen, and barbarous lands” not yet “possessed of any Christian prince,” in other words uncolonized by France or Spain.

  Early English ventures to America, like those of the Spanish, were privately funded. But the source of finance was different. De Soto paid for his expedition with the pot of gold he’d amassed in America; Gilbert turned to England’s emerging entrepreneurial class, granting a monopoly on trade to the Merchant Adventurers of Southampton. He also peddled, to speculators and friends, vast grants of American land he hadn’t yet seen, much less possessed.

  Leaving the queen a portrait of himself, Gilbert sailed in 1583 with five ships, 260 men, and “for solace of our people, and allurement of the Savages,” musicians, Morris dancers, hobbyhorses, and “petty haberdasherie.” Four of the ships reached Newfoundland, where Gilbert took possession with an archaic English rite: the presentation to him of a twig and a piece of turf. He also proclaimed the first English laws in America, which included an ordinance that anyone who insulted the queen would “loose his eares.”

  But Gilbert hadn’t come to settle dismal Newfoundland. His object was the golden land of Norumbega, somewhere to the south. En route, in rain and fog, the lar
gest of his ships wrecked on shoals, drowning eighty men and taking down most of the fleet’s provisions. Another ship had already sailed home with a cargo of sick men. Left with too few settlers and supplies to establish a colony, Gilbert reluctantly turned toward England, in an overloaded ship called the Squirrel.

  Nearing the Azores, the Squirrel and its last remaining consort, a ship commanded by Edward Hayes, ran into “outragious Seas.” One afternoon, “oppressed by waves,” Hayes came within hailing distance of the Squirrel and saw Gilbert in the stern, calmly reading a book. “We are as neere to heaven by sea as by land,” Gilbert cried out. That night, the Squirrel was “devoured and swallowed up of the Sea.”

  SIR HUMFREY’S GALLANT demise rarely merits more than a footnote in histories of early America. But his failure, like that of De Soto, had far-reaching consequences for the future United States. His royal charter passed to his half brother, Walter Raleigh, who cast his eye at a different territory “not actually possessed of any Christian prince”—the little-known coast lying north of Spanish-held Florida.

  Raleigh, then aged about thirty, cut an even more extravagant figure than his older brother. In portraits, pearls stud his silk clothes, his fur cloak, his ears, even his long dark hair. Raleigh was one of Queen Elizabeth’s closest minions; his courtly offices included “Esquire of the Body Extraordinary.” He wrote poetry in praise of the queen’s beauty and won enduring fame for escorting her across a puddle in Greenwich. “Meeting with a plashy place,” reads the only account of their muddy stroll, “Raleigh cast and spread his new plush cloak on the ground, whereon the Queen trod gently.” Elizabeth rewarded his attentions with properties and profitable sinecures.

  Raleigh, like his brother, was a warrior-gentleman who fought duels and performed brutal service in Ireland. But he was prone to seasickness and preferred the comforts of court to the hardships of overseas travel. He was also a patient planner, unlike Gilbert. Rather than quickly launch a large expedition to America, he dispatched two ships on a reconnaissance voyage, of which one of his scouts, Arthur Barlowe, gave an eloquent account.

  In the summer of 1584, the English arrived off the coast of today’s North Carolina. Like other early voyagers, Barlowe smelled America before he saw it: a fragrance so sweet that it was “as if we had bene in the midst of some delicate garden.” He found the sandy shore just as enchanting. A flock of cranes, stirred by a single musket shot, “arose under us, with such a crye redoubled by many Ecchoes, as if an armie of men had showted all together.”

  Natives along the coast accepted gifts of clothing and immediately set to fishing, offering the visitors their catch. Even more hospitable were native women who greeted the wet, weary English at an island “they call Roanoak.” The natives “tooke off our clothes, and washed them, and dried them again; some of the women pulled off our stockings, and washed them, some washed our feete in warme water.” Indians also marveled “at the whiteness of our skinnes, ever coveting to touch our breastes, and to view the same.”

  After a pleasant stay of several weeks, the English sailed home, carrying furs, plant samples, and “two of the Savages being lustie men, whose names were Wanchese and Manteo.” There is no indication whether they came willingly or not.

  Raleigh took the Indians into his home, dressed them in taffeta, and put them under the tutelage of a brilliant young scholar, Thomas Hariot, so that he could learn Algonquian and they English. Barlowe believed the Indian name for the region he’d scouted was Wingandacoa. Hariot soon learned this was actually a phrase meaning “You wear fine clothes.”

  In the event, Raleigh chose a new name for his American domain. He christened it Virginia, in honor of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. By the terms of Raleigh’s charter, his grant extended six hundred miles from the site of his planned colony, though not to lands possessed by Spain. “Virginia” therefore denoted a territory stretching roughly from the Carolinas to Maine. The queen knighted Raleigh on the occasion of Twelfth Night, and Sir Walter fashioned a seal proclaiming himself “Lord and Governor of Virginia,” a realm that existed only on paper and that Raleigh would never visit.

  He also appealed to the queen to give more than her name to the American enterprise. As principal lobbyist, he enlisted “a very good Trumpet,” Richard Hakluyt, a famous chronicler of European voyages of discovery, and a man who sought to stir England from its “sluggish security.” In a pamphlet he presented to the queen, Hakluyt spelled out twenty-three reasons for “Western Planting,” as the English termed colonization of America. This position paper was a capsule of the hardheaded thinking that would drive English expansionism and set it apart from that of other nations.

  In contrast to the Spanish, Hakluyt didn’t engage in legalistic or theological debate about the rights of America’s “naturall people.” Instead, he emphasized the economic benefits of colonization. America’s timber, minerals, and other resources would free England from dependence on European sources. And trade between England and its colony would greatly expand commerce. Wool, for instance, would find a ready market among American settlers, “to whom warme clothes shal be righte welcome.”

  Colonization would also “unladen” England of its surplus people. This population was a source of great anxiety in Elizabethan England, where rapid growth and economic change had vastly increased the ranks of “vagabonds.” In America, Hakluyt wrote, these wandering poor and unemployed would find work and serve England, rather than being “devoured by the gallowes.” Colonization had strategic value, too, creating a counterweight to Catholic Spain, and a base for harassing its ships.

  But English colonization, as conceived by its pioneers, was principally a mercantile mission: about commerce rather than converts, and markets rather than military conquest. “Whosoever commands the trade of the world,” Raleigh later wrote, “commands the riches of the world and consequently the world itself.”

  Though Hakluyt and Raleigh’s vision was prescient, it was beyond the means of Elizabethan England. The queen, wary of Spain’s growing naval power and ambitions in northern Europe, could ill afford a major effort in America. So Raleigh had to rely instead on his own purse and on the proceeds of piracy by seamen sent to Virginia. This lucrative high-seas looting would cause delays and complications that ultimately sealed the colony’s demise.

  RALEIGH’S FIRST COLONIAL fleet sailed in 1585, under the command of Sir Richard Grenville, a brutish noble who slew a man in a street brawl and chewed glass as a parlor trick. En route to Virginia, Grenville raided Spanish ships; after dropping off colonists, he soon left to loot some more. During his short stay ashore, he also burned the homes and corn of Indians who failed to return a silver cup stolen by “one of the Savages.”

  The 108 men he left at Roanoke Island included an apothecary keen to sample New World plants, a Jewish metallurgist from Prague, and the first scientific research team in America: Thomas Hariot, the Oxford-educated polymath and tutor to Manteo and Wanchese (both of whom returned to Roanoke with the English), and John White, a talented artist sent to sketch the specimens Hariot collected.

  The colony’s commander, Ralph Lane, was a military engineer and, at least initially, a competent leader. The English quickly built a fort and traded for enough food to weather the winter. Though hapless at hunting and fishing, they managed to plant some corn. In all, only four of the 108 men would die during their first year in America, a remarkable record in the annals of early settlement.

  The colonists, however, soon became restive. Like the Spanish and French before them, many of the English were intent on easy riches, and disappointed to find only small traces of precious metals. The colony was also plagued by too many men “of a nice bringing up,” Hariot wrote, accustomed to “daintie food” and “soft beds of downe.” Finding no such comforts in Virginia, “the countrey was to them miserable.”

  Hariot, by contrast, found the New World delightful and catalogued its bounty under headings titled “Of Roots,” “Of Fruites,” “Of Beasts,” “Of Foule
.” He saw value in everything, from pumpkins to pine tar. Above all he extolled tobacco, which he thought purged phlegm and “other gross humors, and openeth all the pores and passages of the body.” Hariot believed smoking explained why “Indians are notably preserved in health, and know not many grievous diseases.”

  They would not remain so for long. The four colonists who died while at Roanoke, Hariot wrote, were “sickly persons before even they came thither.” This may explain what happened when the English visited Indian settlements. “Within a fewe dayes after our departure from every such towne, the people began to die very fast, and many in a short space.” Neither Hariot nor the Indians knew the cause.

  “This marveilous accident,” he added, put Indians in great fear and awe of the English. Not only did the strangers appear unafflicted, they also had no women among them. Some Indians “therefore were of opinion that wee were not borne of women,” Hariot wrote, “but that wee were men of an olde generation many yeeres past, then risen againe to immortalitie.” Since Indians often died of disease when colonists were many miles distant, natives also believed the English capable of “shooting invisible bullets into them”—which in a sense they were, with microbes rather than guns.

  Colonists also inflicted damage by more visible means. Like the French in Florida, the English soured relations with their neighbors by stealing crops and fish. Then, fearing reprisal for these acts, Ralph Lane launched a preemptive strike and beheaded an Indian chief. By the summer of 1586, a year after their arrival, the English were short of food, anticipating a counterattack, and anxiously awaiting Sir Richard Grenville, who had promised to return with more men and supplies.

  Instead, the fleet that finally appeared was commanded by the famous privateer Sir Francis Drake, who was on his way home from sacking Spanish ships and colonies, including St. Augustine. His loot included hundreds of African and Indian slaves; some were offloaded to make room for the Roanoke colonists, who decided to seize the chance to go home with Drake. Soon after they decamped, Grenville finally arrived, having been diverted by conflict with Spain and looting of foreign vessels. He left eighteen men at Roanoke to hold the fort Lane had just abandoned.