Whatever Grenville’s actual intentions were, towards the end of March 1588, his fleet was ready, according to White, awaiting only favorable winds:
This fleet now being in readiness only staying but for a fair wind to put to sea, at the same time there was spread throughout all England such report of the wonderful preparation and invincible fleets made by the King of Spain joined with the power of the pope for the invading of England, that most of the ships of war then in a readiness in any haven in England were stayed for service at home: And Sir Richard Grenville was personally commanded not to depart….10
White’s passage is fairly accurate, although the general shipping prohibition had been enacted more than five months before Grenville’s fleet was recalled. On March 31 Grenville received orders from the Privy Council to bring his fleet to Plymouth to assist Sir Francis Drake in the defense of the kingdom against the now imminent Spanish attack. Grenville, by the way, would never see the Virginia coast again. He was mortally wounded in 1591 fighting aboard his single ship The Revenge against a superior Spanish fleet.
Although, as White wrote, “the voyage for Virginia by these means …[was] thus disappointed,” he “notwithstanding labored for the relief of the planters so earnestly,” that he managed to obtain the use of two small pinnaces of 30 and 25 tuns respectively, the Brave and the Roe. They set sail for Roanoke on April 22 with “15 planters and all their provision with certain relief for those that wintered in the Country.”11 According to the testimony of Pedro Diaz, the previously mentioned Spanish pilot who had been captured by Grenville in 1586 and then piloted the Brave in 1588, the colonists consisted of seven men and four women.12 This was not the first time that the numbers in the Diaz account were contradicted by those in Hakluyt. It will be recalled that, according to the account in Hakluyt, when Grenville arrived belatedly at Roanoke in 1586 only to find that Lane and the first colony had abandoned the island, he left fifteen men there to maintain Raleigh’s claim. Diaz, however, said that Grenville left eleven men at Roanoke. Author James Horn wrote that there were “seven men, four women, and four children aboard the Brave and the Roe,”13 but, since his source was not cited, the four children may have been an assumption based on the difference in the totals between the White and Diaz accounts. According to Quinn there were eleven men and four women,14 again an apparent compromise between the White and Diaz accounts. Whatever the actual number of colonists, it is interesting to note that, in spite of the fact that the original Chesapeake destination had been altered, White was still able to enlist any colonists at all for a transatlantic voyage aboard two small vessels to an unknown location in Virginia. Their willingness to participate in such a risky venture could suggest that most of these new colonists were spouses or relatives who had stayed behind in England until the colony was established.
Neither the Brave nor the Roe made it very far. The day after their departure the two English vessels began privateering raids, the Roe in particular chasing and overtaking several smaller vessels, during which the Brave lost contact with the Roe. The Brave, with White aboard, had several minor skirmishes between April 23 and the 26th, and on May 6 the Brave was attacked by a larger French ship. A battle ensued and “continued without ceasing one hour and a half,”15 culminating in the surrender of the Brave. The French looted the English vessel, and all the provisions and supplies intended for the colonists in Virginia were lost. The Brave was forced to limp back to Bideford and arrived there on May 22. Once again White demonstrated that he had no influence or control over the decisions made aboard ship and blamed the “mariners” for the failure to reach Roanoke. As White put it, “On this occasion, God justly punished our former thievery of our evil disposed mariners, we were of force constrained to break off our intended voyage for the relief of our colony left the year before in Virginia.”16 The Roe also aborted the mission shortly thereafter “without performing our intended voyage for the relief of the planters in Virginia, which thereby were not a little distressed.”17
In the meantime, whatever lingering disappointment may still have remained regarding their situation at Roanoke, the colonists probably greeted the new year of 1588 with renewed confidence. They had no reason to doubt that supply ships were being prepared in England, and they were hopeful that White and the supplies could arrive perhaps as early as June. They could look forward to a better settlement site on the mainland, and plans for their relocation by spring were undoubtedly being drawn up. If a few of the colonists were ready to give up on the entire venture, they could look forward to boarding the ships in August, as soon as they were ready to return to England.
As discussed previously, unlike the earlier Grenville-Lane colonization effort, White’s colony had a completely different composition and purpose. The English had learned first-hand in 1585–86 that dependence for food upon the native tribes was an invitation to disaster. Raleigh realized that for land in Virginia to be successfully settled and developed, agriculture was the key. The 1587 colony included women and children and had been organized for agricultural self-sufficiency. Although the colonists had originally intended to establish the “Cittie of Ralegh” at the Chesapeake, the unexpected turn of events would not have changed the make-up of the colony. The continuance of the colony would still have depended on agriculture, and therefore their departure from Roanoke would very likely have been timed to correspond with the local native agricultural cycles.
For the Carolina Algonquians, planting was done from April through June so that a corn harvest was available from early summer through October.18 Since the colonists would likely have followed this known traditional agricultural pattern, they needed to be at the new location in time to re-assemble the “houses taken downe” which they transported from Roanoke,19 and to prepare their fields in time for the first planting. The move from Roanoke to the mainland probably took place in stages utilizing the pinnace, perhaps commencing in early 1588, but it had to have been accomplished by the first day of spring in late March, and certainly prior to the first planting in April. The colonists, therefore, could not have waited for White’s expected return to Roanoke in June or July, and it is doubtful that they would have left a few colonists behind at Roanoke for fear they would meet the same fate at the hands of hostile Indians as the small contingent left by Grenville the previous year.
The colonists departed from Roanoke in an orderly manner and without duress, as was indicated by the absence of the prearranged cross symbol above the CRO and CROATOAN carved messages they left behind for White “if they should happen to be distressed.”20 Those two carved messages were intended to direct White about fifty miles south to friendly Croatoan, but, as noted, the colonists never intended to establish a permanent settlement on the Outer Banks. Instead they probably placed an outpost on Croatoan to await White’s expected arrival a few months later, when he would then have been escorted to the mainland settlement, the location of which may have been, as suggested, across Pamlico Sound somewhere on the mainland west of present-day Ocracoke Inlet.
An event occurred in June 1588, which provides us with two significant clues pertaining to the colonists’ departure from Roanoke and their resettlement location. These clues come not from an English source, but from the Spanish account of the voyage of Vincente Gonzalez. As discussed earlier, by 1586 the Spanish were well aware of Raleigh’s plans to establish a settlement specifically at the Chesapeake Bay, and King Philip II ordered the governor of La Florida to locate the English colony. Governor Pedro Menéndez Marques sailed for the Chesapeake with three vessels in May of 1587, at the same time White and his colony were en route to the same intended destination. Menéndez Marques stopped at Santa Elena and perhaps other ports along the way, and learned from the natives that they had no knowledge of an English settlement.21 This was accurate information at the time, because Drake had evacuated Lane’s colony from Roanoke the previous year, and White’s colonists had not yet arrived. Menéndez Marques made it as far as the Chesapeake, but was driven back
to Havana by a storm as he attempted to enter the bay.
In early June of 1588 the governor dispatched Vincente Gonzalez and a crew of thirty men in two ships to Bahia de Santa Maria (Chesapeake Bay) to locate the English colony and also to search for a strait within the bay which was rumored to be a possible water route to the Pacific, which the Spanish referred to as the South Sea. It was believed that the English settlement was located near the shore of this strait.22 Gonzalez was a logical choice for this expedition because he was quite familiar with the Chesapeake Bay. In 1570 he piloted the Jesuit missionaries and the Indian Paquiquineo to what would later be called the James River. In 1571 he returned to the Chesapeake in an attempt to resupply the Jesuits, and in 1572 he sailed to the Chesapeake again in a punitive raid to punish the Indians who had killed the Jesuits the previous year.23 Gonzalez sailed north from St. Augustine on June 7, stopping at Santa Elena and perhaps Cape Fear, and entered Chesapeake Bay during the third week in June. He spent a week exploring the western shore of the bay but found no trace of the English or the strait leading to the Pacific.
The day after Gonzalez left Chesapeake Bay on June 29, he made a remarkable, though accidental, discovery. A fierce storm rolled in and rather than risk being buffeted and blown off course, Gonzalez decided to seek shelter beyond the barrier islands and entered a shallow inlet which was almost certainly Port Ferdinando, or Hatorask as the English called it. Beyond the inlet to the north Gonzalez saw an area of thick woods, which he mistook for part of the mainland. He had, in fact, inadvertently stumbled upon Roanoke Island. Gonzalez found it uninhabited, but he did discover English well casings, an abandoned slipway for boats, and the remains of other items which indicated that a large settlement had been located there.24
The 1588 Gonzalez voyage is often overlooked, but there is very useful information about the Lost Colony to be concluded from the account, which was not published until about 1617 as part of a larger volume on Spanish colonial missions.25 In the first place the accidental discovery of Roanoke by Gonzalez provides verification that the colonists had departed from Roanoke prior to June of 1588. This is a helpful piece of evidence because it supports the aforementioned proposal that the colony could not wait for White’s arrival, which would have been expected perhaps by early summer, if all went well. As noted, agricultural cycles would have required that they be established at the new mainland location by late March in order to be ready for the first spring planting.
The second and perhaps more significant implication of the Gonzalez voyage was the failure to find any trace of an English presence during his week-long search of the Chesapeake. Since we know that he was also ordered to search for the strait which was thought to lead to the South Sea, and given his familiarity with the Chesapeake, it seems likely that his investigation of the bay and the various rivers that empty into it must have been fairly thorough. This provides convincing, first-hand evidence that White’s colonists did not relocate to the Chesapeake, their originally intended settlement location, when they vacated Roanoke, and of course it refutes Quinn’s theory that the Lost Colonists relocated there. It also supports the conclusion suggested previously, that by the spring and summer of 1587 the Chesapeake had become an impossible settlement option for White’s colonists and it remained so in 1588.
All of this lends credence to the larger thesis that the centuries-old institutionalized assumption of Fernandez-as-villain is mistaken, and it supports the earlier proposal that Simon Fernandez had good reason for aborting the original settlement location at the Chesapeake. If Fernandez were the despicable character he has been portrayed, and the colonists continued to view the Chesapeake as a safe and viable site in 1587–88, there is no reason why they would not have relocated there.
With the additional information provided by the Gonzalez voyage, an overall narrative can be reasonably reconstructed concerning the activities of the colonists during the first half of 1588: The colonists would have expected White to return to Roanoke with supplies and additional settlers perhaps by June of 1588. They knew full well that due to the long winter storm season Virginia-bound voyages traditionally left England in April and took nearly three months to make the circuitous trip via the West Indies to the present day Carolina coast. The 1587 colonists themselves departed Plymouth on April 26 and arrived at Roanoke on July 22. The previous England-Virginia voyages had followed the same calendar pattern. As indicated by the account of the Gonzalez voyage, the 1587 colony did not wait for White’s expected return and obviously had vacated Roanoke before Gonzalez arrived in the third week of June 1588.
We know from White’s 1590 account that the colonists had “taken down” their dwellings at Roanoke, presumably to be transported and reassembled at the new settlement location. Just prior to their departure from Roanoke, in March as suggested, the colonists left behind the prearranged carved messages instructing White to proceed southward to Croatoan, where Manteo’s mother and the friendly Croatoans dwelt. The absence of the telltale distress symbol cross accompanying the inscriptions indicated that the colony’s move from Roanoke was conducted in an orderly manner. Gonzalez’s search of the Chesapeake in June demonstrated that the colonists did not relocate to the Chesapeake after leaving Roanoke. Nor do the inscriptions or the evidence suggest, as examined earlier, that they relocated far to the west at Chowanoke or present-day Bertie County.
Three factors—the location of the only viable inlet at Wokokon; the territories occupied by hostile Secotan tribes; and the directions left at Roanoke by the colonists themselves—all argue for a mainland settlement site to the south of Roanoke. While Gonzalez was searching the Chesapeake in June, it is likely that the colonists were well established and perhaps harvesting their first corn crop at their settlement on the mainland. Just across Pamlico Sound a handful of colonists were at an outpost at Croatoan waiting expectantly for White’s return.
7
The Legend of the CORA Tree and the Outpost at Croatoan
July–September 1588
By July of 1588 the colonists had been settled in at their new mainland location for several months. If all had gone reasonably well, they would have been enjoying the fruits of their first harvest and making preparations for the arrival of White and the supply ships, which were expected any day. Across the sound at Croatoan the handful of colonists manning the outpost were expectantly scanning the ocean to the south for any sign of the English ships, while keeping a wary eye out for Spanish vessels that might be patrolling the coast. As mentioned, the two Gonzalez ships had passed that way in search of the English colony in mid–June on the way to the Chesapeake, and then again in early July on the return trip to St. Augustine. It is very likely that these ships were observed by the English colonists stationed at Croatoan, particularly in mid–June, since it is known that Gonzalez was instructed to take latitude readings and map the coast on his way to the Chesapeake.1
By September, when White still had not arrived, it would have been painfully clear to the colonists on the mainland that he was not likely to return that year. There would have been little chance of a transatlantic supply fleet arriving in the fall, and there would have been no reason to maintain an outpost at Croatoan during the winter. At some point, then, the English outpost would have been abandoned, at least temporarily. Although the colonists’ situation took a dramatic turn for the worse when White failed to return—and a discussion of their condition and options will follow in the next chapter—a detour will be taken here to examine an old legend involving the Lost Colonists that still circulates among the locals on Hatteras Island.
There is no shortage of wondrous tales and folklore on the Outer Banks, most of which tell of pirates, witches, and spirits of other notables who once frequented the barrier islands. Two of these legends involve the Lost Colony. The first of these is a whimsical tale about Virginia Dare, John White’s granddaughter, who, as the legend goes, was transformed into a white doe by a native Indian sorcerer. The second legend concerns an ancient li
ve oak on Hatteras Island. Still discernable is the very old four-letter inscription “CORA” carved into the trunk of what has come to be known as the “CORA tree.” In 2006 an article by author and Hatteras native, Scott Dawson, appeared in the Outer Banks Sentinel suggesting that the fabled live oak on Hatteras held a second message from White’s Lost Colony.2 Not surprisingly there is another, more fanciful, legend about the CORA tree, popularized by author Charles Harry Whedbee,3 telling of a witch named Cora who disappeared when a bolt of lightning struck the tree she was tied to, leaving the word CORA emblazoned in the trunk.
It will be recalled that, prior to John White’s departure from Roanoke in 1587, he and his colonists had agreed on a system of communications, “a secret token agreed vpon betweene them and me at my last departure from them, which was, that in any wayes they should not faile to write or carue on the trees or posts of the dores the name of the place where they should be seated.”4 As per that arrangement, the colonists left the inscription “CRO” carved into a tree and the full word “CROATOAN” carved into a post at the entry to the abandoned settlement.
Image of the still-discernible CORA inscription on the ancient live oak at Frisco (photograph by Roberta Estes, 2009).
White also instructed the colonists to use the messaging system and distress symbol “in any of those places,”5 seemingly indicating that it was not intended to be used exclusively at Roanoke, but anywhere the colonists might be. Moreover, as White explained, the secret agreement was compulsory, as indicated by the instruction “that in any wayes they should not faile” to use this method of communication. When White did not arrive by September, and the outpost was abandoned, could they have left behind a similar message at Croatoan—another link to their whereabouts—just as they had previously done when they left Roanoke?
The Lost Colony of Roanoke Page 10
