A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  “I’m glad they’re lost,” he replied. “The natives should have knocked them off before the English breathed on them. Instead, the natives were dumb schmucks and said, ‘Be my friend.’ Whole lot of good that did them.”

  Carl Bornfriend was about as Indian as Mel Brooks’s Yiddish-speaking chief in Blazing Saddles. But in his embrace of all things Native American, he was kin to Charles “Sweet Medicine” Shepherd. “I don’t dig white history,” he said. “It’s the native stuff I care about.” The son of a Jewish furrier in Philadelphia, he’d come to his vocation young. “I grew up around dead animals, picking up drowned rats and asking my father, ‘What’s this?’ By the time I was ten, I’d started collecting and preserving stuff, and over time it grew into this mess.”

  He led me through the museum, a converted shell shop that was now a warren of rooms crammed from floor to ceiling with exhibits, in little apparent sequence. Tomahawks, snake skins, buffalo skulls, stuffed alligators, turquoise jewelry, pipes, moccasins, Hopi drums—some of it valuable, a lot of it not. “Any museum curator will tell you to limit the number of things in each exhibit case, and the length of your captions, because people can’t take it all in,” Carl said. “I ignore that advice completely.”

  He also ignored the interest of visitors like me in the Roanoke mystery. “That’s the first thing people always ask when they come here,” he said. “ ‘What can you tell me about the lost colony?’ ”

  He walked me to the only display that related to Roanoke: a wall hung with reproductions of John White’s sketches of Indians. Unlike Charles Shepherd, Carl didn’t regard White’s art with reverence. “His natives look like Sumo wrestlers, or some suckers in London that White stopped and said, ‘Put on a breechclout.’ I don’t think the natives looked anything like this. It was all White’s imagination.” He chuckled. “Or, should I say, a whitey’s imagination.”

  Carl’s scorn extended to the colonists White left behind. “We’re supposed to feel sympathy for these people? Oy vey. The English came to pillage and they got what they deserved.”

  “Even Virginia Dare?” I asked.

  Carl smiled. “Maybe the natives ate her. She was new and plump and tender. That dago, Columbus, the natives should have rubbed him out, too.”

  Carl’s museum had one other display with some connection to the Roanoke story. He showed me a box full of shards, bones, and shells that Fred Willard had found after a 1993 hurricane, at the site of the Croatoan settlement I’d gone looking for. Archaeologists had since uncovered an early English ring and other European artifacts, though it wasn’t clear whether these were trade goods acquired by Indians, or items left at Croatoan by refugees from Roanoke.

  Carl didn’t care either way. “I want to show what remains of the natives who were here before the whole horrific white story started,” he said, closing up his museum for the day. “They’re the lost people we should care about.”

  On his way home, he led me to the Croatoan site, tucked down a dirt road on the sheltered side of the island. Despite Manteo’s friendship, Roanoke colonists wrote little of Croatoan, noting only that Indians went there to fish and hunt. By the mid-1700s, very few natives remained on the island. Now, there was only a thicket of live oak, greenbriar, and poison ivy. Much of the former Indian settlement lay under beach houses.

  “White man’s dreck,” Carl said, before driving off. “As usual, that’s all that’s left.”

  AFTER WANDERING THE shore for a while, I walked across the road to the ocean side of the island. This was dominated by Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, at two hundred feet the tallest brick beacon in the nation. A board by the lighthouse offered a typical weather forecast: “Sunny. Cloudy, too. Rain possible.” The cape’s fickle and stormy weather, coupled with ocean currents that drove ships onto the twelve-mile shoal just offshore, had earned Hatteras its nickname: “Graveyard of the Atlantic.” It was the resting place of some six hundred vessels, including Civil War ironclads and powerful steamships.

  In my reading about Roanoke, I’d often wondered why sixteenth-century mariners seemed reluctant to supply or rescue the colony, or to stick around once they got there. Greed was the explanation usually given: time ashore was time away from piracy. But gazing from the lighthouse at the whitecaps off Hatteras, it seemed remarkable that Elizabethan seafarers had braved this coast at all, in wooden ships, without weather forecasts, or proper charts, or modern navigational gear, or a beacon. On top of the cape’s many hazards, English ships visiting Roanoke often arrived here in hurricane season.

  I ran through blowing rain, from the lighthouse to the wide beach facing the ocean. Here, at the exact elbow of the Outer Banks, I could scan 270 degrees of ocean, from south to east to north. If any of the lost colonists did come to Croatoan, this spot was where lookouts would have kept watch for ships.

  John Lawson, the English naturalist who visited the island’s gray-eyed natives in 1701, recorded “a pleasant Story that passes for an uncontested Truth amongst the Inhabitants.” The vessel that brought the first English, he wrote, “does often appear amongst them, under Sail, in a gallant Posture, which they call Sir Walter Raleigh’s Ship.” If, as Lawson believed, the islanders were descended from lost colonists, the legend of the phantom ship may have spoken to the longing of their English ancestors, who watched and waited in vain for Sir Walter to come to their rescue.

  The Roanoke story was filled with shadows like this: traces and rumors and clues, all feeding the mystery of the colonists’ fate. But after working the case for ten days, I’d started to wonder whether trying to solve it wasn’t just futile but misguided. For all the beguiling unknowns surrounding Roanoke, the story’s eerie power derived from what was known.

  Roanoke’s colonists weren’t so much lost as abandoned. By their patron, Raleigh; by the pilot who left them at Roanoke instead of the Chesapeake; by the many other mariners delayed or detoured by piracy en route to Virginia; by an English nation that gave low priority to their rescue; even by John White, who seems to have been easily daunted and resigned to their abandonment.

  Nor was the colonists’ stranding unusual in sixteenth-century America. The continent was filled with missing persons. The Spanish hunters who rode off from their ravine camp in the Texas plains and vanished in a sea of grass. Sailors cast ashore by frequent shipwrecks. A French boy the Huguenots left behind when they fled their first attempted colony. Three men whom Ralph Lane sent from Roanoke to the interior, and then abandoned when the colonists hastily caught a ride home with Sir Francis Drake. The hundreds of slaves Drake left ashore to make room for them.

  Very few of these missing persons were ever seen or heard from again. Nor did anyone much bemoan their loss. Abandonment was an occupational hazard in early America: a cost of doing business, like salt pork or iron nails.

  The Roanoke colonists, at least, were remembered and celebrated. Centuries after their disappearance, people still sought some connection to them, as literal or spiritual ancestors. As seminal Americans: the first English, the first white baby, the first to marry Indians, or, for Charles Shepherd, a source of triracial identity. I’d even come across an article in the Journal of Croatian Studies alleging that shipwrecked sailors from Dubrovnik had mingled with Indians of the Outer Banks, “who then acquired the name Croatoan.”

  As implausible as this sounded, it was kin, in one sense, to the many other fantasies about Roanoke: almost all of them imagined the colonists assimilating peacefully with natives and their Arcadian surrounds. But the known elements of Roanoke’s story made it hard to conjure such a romantic or redemptive end. At Fort Raleigh, I’d read a recent tree-ring study, which showed that White’s colonizing party arrived the same year as a severe drought, the worst in coastal North Carolina for eight hundred years. Starving colonists would have had to trade or steal from Indians whose own crops were lean. Also, if Virginia’s Chesapeake tribe did take the English in, the natives would likely have been ravaged by disease even before any possible slaughter by Po
whatan.

  And what of the colonists who came here, to Manteo’s homeland, to keep watch for English ships? Hunched against the sand at Hatteras, I swept my gaze from north to east to south and back again, like the modern lighthouse beam. It was spring, wet and windy, but mild compared to the winter storms and late-summer hurricanes that so often hit this coast. Even so, I found it hard to focus on the horizon for more than ten minutes, and doubted I could spot a distant vessel in the gray expanse of turbid sea and lowering clouds.

  How long did the colonists keep watch, day after day, month after month? At what point did they finally surrender hope of rescue from across the sea, and give their fate over to the land and its people?

  More questions I could never answer. As the weather turned worse, I abandoned the beach, retreated to the shelter of my car, and pointed it north, toward the Chesapeake.

  CHAPTER 12

  JAMESTOWN

  THE CAPTAIN AND THE NATURALS

  VIRGINIA—

  Earth’s only paradise!

  —Michael Drayton,

  “Ode to the Virginian Voyage” (1606)

  JOHN SMITH WAS the pivotal figure in the founding of English America, and the most vivid: a short bushy braggart, a con man, an escape artist, an accomplished killer. Smith saved Jamestown and set the Pilgrims on course for Plymouth. He demonstrated, in both word and deed, that the New World demanded a new type of man—one like him. Self-made, scornful of rank, and ceaseless in his salesmanship, Smith was apostle and exemplar of the American Dream.

  If this sounds hyperbolic, it should: everything about Smith was overstated, usually by himself. He penned one of England’s first autobiographies, in the third person, starring Captain Smith as an early modern superhero, battling evildoers and impossible odds. England’s advances in America were all due to him: the discoveries of others, he wrote, “are but Pigs of my owne Sow.”

  And there’s the rub, as a contemporary of Smith’s might have put it. The story of America’s English birth depends on a blowhard who is easy to dislike, and even easier to doubt.

  Smith’s alleged rescue by Pocahontas is the most famous of his exploits, but it was far from his first or most incredible. The son of a yeoman farmer, he fled his apprenticeship to a merchant at the age of sixteen, “to get beyond the Sea.” He became a soldier of fortune, expert at artillery, and joined Christian forces fighting the Ottoman Turks. In Hungary, Smith was promoted to captain and awarded a coat of arms, adorned with the heads of three Turks he had decapitated in consecutive duels.

  Later, wounded and captured in Transylvania, he was sold into slavery and taken in chains to Constantinople, where he charmed his “faire Mistresse”—the first of several high-born women who “tooke much compassion on him.” But when she sent Smith to serve her brother in Tartary, the captain became a degraded field hand. One day, after too much abuse, Smith beat out his master’s brains with a threshing bat, stole his clothes and horse, and rode off “into the desart.”

  He wandered north to Muscovy, west to the Baltic, and south through the Holy Roman Empire, traversing an atlas of bygone principalities. “Being thus satisfied with Europe and Asia,” Smith wrote, he sailed for Africa and ended up on a pirate ship off the Barbary Coast. He experienced all this and many more adventures by his mid-twenties, when he returned to England and soon after sailed for his fourth continent: North America.

  In December 1606, as Smith departed for Virginia, England was still playing catch-up on the continent. Spain had consolidated its hold on Florida and the Southwest. The French were establishing trade posts along the St. Lawrence River and probing Maine, Massachusetts, and upstate New York. England held only its vague claim to Virginia, and to a stretch of Pacific shore that Sir Francis Drake had coasted in 1579, during his round-the-world voyage in the Golden Hind. Beset by “vile, thicke and stinking fogges,” Drake landed in northern California, tacked a brass plate to a post, and named the coast Nova Albion. No English would return there for two centuries. In 1606, not a single English settler occupied the future United States, unless some of the Roanoke colonists remained alive after twenty years in the wild.

  At home, however, much had changed since Raleigh’s failed venture in the 1580s. The defeat of the Spanish Armada boosted England’s confidence and sea power, and in 1604, King James concluded an uneasy peace with Spain. England’s colonial philosophy had also matured. In place of the Raleigh model, reliant on piracy and the purse of a rich knight, merchants formed joint-stock companies to raise capital and to pool the risk and profit. The Virginia Company, chartered in 1606, had branches in London and Plymouth, the former focused on the Chesapeake and the latter on “North Virginia”—roughly, the coast from New York to Maine.

  Despite this corporate footing, and support from the Crown, the company’s Chesapeake venture went badly from the start. Three ships carrying 105 colonists left London in 1606 and instantly hit foul weather, delaying the fleet and fraying tempers. John Smith, accused of plotting against the ships’ captains, was put in chains for the rest of the voyage and he came close to being hanged.

  In the West Indies, where the fleet stopped to reprovision, the English suffered the first of many gruesome casualties to come. A “gentleman” died in “great extremity” when his “fat melted within him by the great heate and drought of the Countrey.” Upon finally reaching the Chesapeake, in late April 1607, the English had no sooner landed than Indians crept up on them in the night, badly wounding two men.

  Colonists confronted another surprise when they opened sealed orders from the Virginia Company, naming the seven men who would rule them ashore. Six were prominent, well-connected figures, mostly in their forties and fifties. The seventh was John Smith: a commoner, only twenty-seven, and still under arrest for mutiny.

  For their “seating place,” the English selected a point of land thirty-five miles upriver from the bay, where deep water ran so close to shore that ships could moor to trees. Uninhabited by Indians, and linked to the mainland by a tidal isthmus, the peninsula appeared easy to defend. And in spring, the surrounds seemed a “paradise,” one colonist wrote, blanketed in “faire flowers,” strawberries, and “the pleasantest Suckles.”

  Colonists erected a fort and sent a party upriver to scout for riches and the dreamed-of Northwest Passage. In late June, they loaded two ships with a sample of what they thought was gold, a supply of clapboard, and letters extolling the Virginia settlement, which they called James Fort, Villa James, and eventually, James Towne. “You yet maye lyve,” William Brewster wrote a friend, “to see Ingland more renowned then any kingdome in all Ewroopa.”

  Six weeks later, Brewster was dead. Scores of his fellow colonists soon trailed him to shallow graves. “There were never Englishmen left in a forreigne Countrey,” a survivor wrote, “in such miserie as wee were in this new discovered Virginia.”

  Jamestown’s rapid descent from heaven to hell has traditionally been blamed on the colonists themselves. Their first mistake was a poor choice of real estate. The swampy Jamestown peninsula lacked springs or brooks, leaving the men to drink from the river, which was not only brackish but “at a low tide full of slime and filth.” This caused ills such as dysentery, typhoid fever, and salt poisoning.

  “Our men were destroyed with cruell diseases, as Swellings, Fluxes, Burning Fevers,” wrote the colonist George Percy. “In the morning their bodies trailed out of their Cabines like Dogges to be buried.” Other ills recorded at Jamestown included heatstroke and calenture, a tropical delirium that made men jump into the sea, thinking it a broad green pasture.

  Virginia’s assault on newcomers’ health, not just that first summer but for years to come, was so remorseless that the English referred to a process of “seasoning.” Colonists landed, fell ill, and either died or became “seasoned” to their environment. Most failed this grim initiation. Of the more than twenty thousand English sent to Virginia during the colony’s first decades, roughly three-quarters perished. This death rate, notes t
he historian Edmund Morgan, was “comparable only to that found in Europe during the peak years of the plague.”

  Indian attacks contributed to the toll. Natives knew better than to build villages on Jamestown’s swampy peninsula, but they hunted there and regarded it as their territory. During the colony’s first summer, Indians used high marsh grass as cover to creep up and snipe at settlers. One man was shot by arrows while “going out to do natural necessity,” another while “straggling without the fort.” In one “furious assault” on the fort, Indians killed two and wounded ten.

  The settlers also fought among themselves. Almost from the moment of its founding, Jamestown became an all-male divorce court, rife with deceit, betrayal, and petty accusations. The council’s first president was overthrown amid charges that he denied another man “a spoonful of beer” and “a penny-whittle” (a cheap knife). He was also accused of hoarding scarce food, to which he replied: “I never had but one squirrel roasted.” His replacement as president fared no better; he was exposed as hiding behind an alias. His unmasker was a man he had sentenced to death for treason, the first of many who would be hanged, shot, burned, or tortured at Jamestown.

  One reason for this strife was the makeup of the colony. At the top stood gentlemen who expected deference and creature comforts even as others starved. George Percy, one of the colony’s revolving-door leaders, wrote to his brother, the Earl of Northumberland, pleading for a loan so he could afford more than the common ration of oatmeal. “It standing upon my reputation,” Percy explained, “to keepe a continual and dayle table for Gentlemen of fashion about me.”

  Percy and his ilk regarded their social inferiors at Jamestown as rabble, and some evidently were: debtors, drunken sailors and soldiers, convicts released from prison, and laborers press-ganged at ports or on London streets. This mob would have been hard for anyone to motivate and control, and the gentry appointed to do so were spectacularly ill suited to the task.