by Lee Miller
For Glory
Oars creak as the wherry boats navigate back down the Chowan. Lane’s record of abuse is mounting. Like his father, Skiko is subjected to interrogation concerning the Mandoag and copper. Of this metal the Mangoaks have so great store, by report of all the savages adjoining, that they beautify their houses with great plates of the same: and this to be true, Lane affirms, / received by report of all the country, and particularly by young Skiko, the King of Choanoke’s son my prisoner, who also himself had been prisoner with the Mangoaks, and set down all the particularities to me before mentioned: but he had not been at Chaunis Temoatan himself
I took a resolution with myself, Lane boasts, to reach Chaunis Temoatan. The boats crawl into the sound and swing west into the mouth of the Roanoke River, a waterway most notable. … and in all those parts most famous. Yet the route upriver is strangely quiet. Ominously so. As they pull near the town of Moratoc, Lane scans the shore for signs of life and finds none. The town, inexplicably empty. Houses gape open, desolate, ghostly. Every village will be the same: abandoned, the inhabitants fled.
The boats glide on and silently pass into the land of the Mandoag. Lane’s need for guides to Chaunis Temoatan made me most desirous to have some doings with the Mangoaks either in friendship, or otherwise to have had one or two of them prisoners. How little he knows them.
No Turning Back
Lane’s intended meeting with more either of the Moratiks, or of the Mangoaks never takes place. For Pemisapan in like sort having sent word to the Mangoaks of mine intention to pass up into their river and to kill them (as he said), both they and the Moratiks … abandoned their towns along the river and retired themselves with their families and food stores within the main.
The Roanoke River begins to constrict. The banks, close and confining. Wisps of Spanish moss cling to trees choking the water, dark and oppressive. For days, the boats pass slowly upriver, meeting no one. Food stores dwindle away. The soldiers cannot locate so much as a grain of corn in any their towns. They are now 150 miles into the interior.12
I advertised the whole company of the case we stood in for victual, Lane complained, and of mine opinion that we were betrayed of our own savages, and of purpose drawn forth by them, upon vain hope to be in the end starved, seeing all the country fled before us. But the men are unanimous. As long as there is one half pint of corn for a man, we should not leave the search of that river, and that there were in the company two mastiffs, upon the pottage of which with sassafras leaves (if the worst fell out), the company would make shift to live two days. Gold fever: the men would rather starve than be drawn back afoot till they had seen the Mangoaks, either as friends or foes.
The two days pass and we could never see man, only fires we might perceive made alongst the shore. The Mandoag are watching.
The Mandoag
Day six. The wherries ride alone in the river. The soldiers’ rations are now utterly spent. As evening shadows stretch across the water, suddenly we heard certain savages call, as we thought, Manteo. And then a profound silence. Not a rustle along the bank. Not a stirring. At Lane’s insistence Manteo shouts back, as a song eerily floats out of the forest. The men confidently conclude it was in token of our welcome to them.
Manteo knows otherwise. He swiftly seizes a gun, yelling that they meant to fight with us: which word was not so soon spoken by him… but there lighted a volley of their arrows. Lane, in blind fury, rams the boat into shore in order to mount the guns, although the banks are high and steep. Weapons tumble onto the ground and are hastily readied, but the Mandoag remain concealed. The soldiers scramble up the bank and rush through the woods, clawing through a forest of branches, and come up empty-handed. The enemy, unnervingly invisible. The men pass an unsettling night ashore under heavy guard.
The next morning, before dawn, the soldiers withdraw, which at my first motion, said Lane, I found my whole company ready to assent unto. They hungrily kill the dogs and eat them as porridge. / could allege the difference in taste, Hariot noted dryly, recalling the dogs taken and eaten from Pemisapan’s village, of those kinds from ours, which by some of our company have been experimented in both.
Riding with the current, the men retreat, regaining the mouth of the river in half the time it took to ascend. In the Weapemeoc country along the northern edge of the sound, fish weirs are raided but afford meager relief. The inhabitants of these villages, too, were fled. Easter Sunday, April 2. The soldiers reach Roanoke Island, having as narrowly to escape starving in that discovery before our return, as ever men did.
Homecoming
The Secotan, Lane alleges, believed him dead. In his absence, they had raised a bruit among themselves that I and my company were part slain, and part starved by the Chaonists and Mangoaks. Ensinore thought differently, warning that they amongst them that sought our destruction, should find their own. As confirmation, while the soldiers were still a hundred miles away, were some that by sickness had died among them: and many of them hold opinion, that we be dead men returned into the world again…. This opinion is strengthened when Lane materializes out of the territory of the dreaded Mandoag, whose very names were terrible unto them.
Menatonon, meanwhile, sends pearls for a present — Lane claims, his thinking increasingly distorted — or rather as Pemisapan told me, for the ransom of his son, and therefore I refused them. Skiko is too important to release. In the summer, Lane will search for the pearl fishery with the guides that Menatonon would have given me, which I would have been assured should have been of his best men, (for I had his best beloved son prisoner with me) who also should have kept me company in an handlock with the rest foot by foot all the voyage overland.
Pemisapan’s Conspiracy
Great politics are afoot. The Weapemeoc, allied and subordinate to the powerful Chowanoc, send twenty-four delegates to Pemisapan. All his savages met in council then with him. The subject of the meeting is unrecorded, but clearly Menatonon is struggling to save his son. Pemisapan agrees to help, ordering his men to build fish weirs for the fort and to sow enough corn to sustain the troops for a year.
April 20. Ensinore dies … and everything changes. He was no sooner dead, Lane charges, but certain of our great enemies about Pemisapan, as Osacan, a weroance; Tanaquiny and Wanchese most principally, were in hand again to put their old practices in use against us.
In the midst of this crisis, Skiko escapes. The young boy flees from the fort, scaling the earthen ramparts, and is spotted. An alarm sounds. There is yelling and running, and Skiko is dragged by rough hands back inside the jail. There he lies, huddled on the floor, his thin legs bound in heavy iron manacles. He is allowed movement by shackles that slide along an iron bar screwed into the floor boards. Skyco, the king Menatonon his son my prisoner, Lane cries, who having once attempted to run away, I laid him in the bilboes, threatening to cut off his head. Pemisapan furiously intervenes, being persuaded that he was our enemy to the death. He did not only feed Skiko himself, daily coming to the fort, but also made him acquainted with all his practices.
Pemisapan s conspiracy, wholly provoked by Lane’s aggression, unfolds in earnest. Skiko will be freed; by force. Pemisapan, joined by Okisko of the Weapemeoc, musters eight hundred bowmen. With great quantity of copper, Lane reports, Pemisapan buys Mandoag mercenaries. The rescue is scheduled for June 10, 1586, during a ceremony to solemnize any great person dead. In this case, Ensinore. The Weapemeoc will attend. The Mandoag, who were a great people, will combine with the “Chesepians” to the number of seven hundred at the town of Dasamonquepeuc opposite Roanoke Island.13 They will wait until darkness. The attack will begin when a signal fire is lit.
Strategy
Details of the plot are available from Lane only. The first stage of the plan, he claims, is put into effect. The Secotan did immediately put it in practice that they should not, for any copper, sell us any victuals whatsoever. Lane is forced to disband my company into sundry places to live upon shellfish, for so the savages themse
lves do, going to Ottorasko [Hatorask], and other places fishing and hunting while their grounds be in sowing and their corn growing.
Was there ever a conspiracy? Could Lane have been so delusional that he mistook the normal Secotan pattern of gathering as a sign of hostility? The villages had few, if any, resources upon which to draw — the drought had seen to that. Unlike the soldiers, the Secotan did what was necessary to survive.
Lane’s men refuse to disperse. The famine grew… extreme among us. The Secotan, meanwhile, collect crabs and oysters, mussels, scallops, and lobster. The rivers yield sturgeon most plentiful. In desperation, Captain Stafford is dispatched with twenty men to Croatoan to feed himself, and also to keep watch if any shipping came upon the coast. They likely ate Croatoan food stores. This alone would account for restrictions imposed upon John White by a desperate Croatoan the following year.
Soldiers, in companies of twenty, are sent to Dasamonquepeuc to live off oysters and roots. Pemisapan, who relocated there specifically to avoid Lane, to withdraw himself from my daily sending to him for supply of victual for my company, is pursued. Lane’s assessment of the situation is nothing short of fantastic: he was afraid to deny me anything, he raves, neither durst he in my presence but by colour, and with excuses, which I was content to accept for the time, meaning in the end as I had reason, to give him the jump once for all: but in the meanwhiles, as I had ever done before, I and mine bare all wrongs, and accepted of all excuses.
Lane is clearly operating under a gross distortion of reality, unable to make a connection between his aggression and his victims’ actions. He has driven them to conflict, then reacts with paranoia at their response. This puts Lane’s complaints against Grenville in better perspective. His madness is becoming increasingly evident. Menatonon, despairing over his son, had given us many tokens of earnest desire… to join in perfect league with us, and therefore were greatly offended with Pemisapan and Weopomiok for telling such tales of us.
June lo is fast approaching. Lane knows of the rescue plan. His informant, he claims, is Skiko. Who has volunteered the information. The boy in leg irons. The boy whose head Lane threatened to cut off. Lane is lying! Skiko has not been brainwashed by his captors. It could not happen, for he is visited daily by Pemisapan, who continually encourages him with promise of deliverance. Skiko is aware of his father’s capitulation and his nation’s efforts to save him. He himself has bravely tried to escape.
In fact, Skiko was forced to talk. Isn’t this the real reason Lane threatened him with torture? Pretending to cut off his head? To force him to betray Pemisapan? Lane’s own explanation is bogus: the young man finding himself as well used at my hand as I had means to show and that all my company made much of him — the boy was held in leg irons in a jail! — he flatly discovered all unto me. Not credible. The same was revealed unto me, Lane continued, by one of Pemisapan's own men the night before he was slain.u Our disbelief needs no further confirmation.
Treachery
Events move rapidly. May 31. Lane notifies Pemisapan, to put all suspicion out of his head, that an English supply fleet is fast approaching (though I in truth had neither heard nor hoped for so good adventure) and that he wishes to borrow of his men to fish for my company and to hunt for me at Croatoan. That night, he said, / meant by the way to give them in the island a canvisado — an ambush — ordering his men to seize all the canoes to prevent news of the attack reaching Dasamonquepeuc.
The sun swings low and curls up into the sound, trailing a cloak of orange across the sky. Tethered dugouts rock together as the tide washes in, bringing an English boat ever closer. Soldiers leap from it into the cold brine and lash the canoes to the back of the vessel. A guard is posted on shore on the darkening sand: anyone leaving the island for Dasamonquepeuc is to be captured.
Two Secotan swiftly take to their boats, but the commanding officer overthrew them. He met with a canoe, Lane said, and cut off 2 savage’s heads: this was not done so secretly but he was discovered from the shore, whereupon the cry arose. The soldiers pepper the beach with gunfire. Secotan rush for cover; some three or four of them at the first were slain with our shot, the rest fled into the woods. In the mélée, one of Pemisapan’s chief men, Osocon, smashes the manacles binding Skiko and rushes him away from the fort. They are caught. In the night, Lane reported, he was found conveying away my prisoner, whom I had there present tied in a hand-lock. The second attempt to rescue Skiko has failed.
Massacre
Lane’s boats steal across the sound as dawn breaks. Beaching on the sand near Dasamonquepeuc, Lane sent Pemisapan word that he was come to complain unto him of Osocon. The inhabitants gather around Pemisapan, tense and wary: the king did abide my coming to him, and finding myself amidst y or 8 of his principal weroances & followers (not regarding any of the common sort), I gave the watchword agreed upon.
Lane raises his hand and emits a single bloodcurdling scream: Christ our victory! Shots explode. Weapons belch flame and smoke, spraying bullets. Shrieks of terror fill the air; women and children fleeing in all directions, overwhelmed. Bodies crumple into the dust and immediately those of Pemisapan’s chief men and himself, had by the mercy of God for our deliverance, that which they had purposed for us.
The king is shot through with a pistol and left lying on the ground for dead. The soldiers, busy that none of the rest should escape, fail to notice that he is only wounded. Suddenly he leaps up and races through the carnage, bolting past Lane’s men. An aide-de-camp jerks his gun around. As Pemisapan plunges into the trees, he is struck thwart the buttocks by mine Irish boy with my petronel. Edward Nugent, an Irish man serving me, and Lane’s deputy provost take off after him. Moments later, Nugent emerges from the woods with Pemisapan s head in his hand.15
This fell out the first of June, 1586.
Drake’s Arrival
June 8. Lane’s headquarters. Notice arrives via Captain Stafford at Croatoan that a fleet of twenty-three sails is sighted. Drake’s squadron. Three days later, a meeting between the commanders takes place. In answer to Drake’s offer of assistance, Lane requests food and ammunition: calievers, handweapons, match and lead, clothing, boats and their crews. In return, he extends Drake such thanks unto him and his captains for his care both of us and of our action, though not as the matter deserved. Lane also asks to be relieved of a number of weak and unfit men for my good action.
June 13. The transfer of supplies and equipment is only half completed when suddenly there arose such an unwanted storm and continued four days that had like to have driven all on shore. Tremendous thunderclaps rock the coast and hailstones as big as hens eggs lance into whirling sea spouts as though heaven and earth should have met.16 Lane’s men rush to the ships and left things so confusedly, Hakluyt reports, as if they had been chased from thence by a mighty army and, no doubt, so they were, for the hand of God came upon them for the cruelty and outrages committed by some of them against the native inhabitants of the country.17 A vessel that Drake is preparing, having aboard two of Lane’s officers and many of his men, is carried away with the tempest and foul weather. Significantly, they desert.18 Clear of the storm, they set a course across the Atlantic, back to England.
The loss of the ship strikes a tremendous blow. Lane’s desire to locate the Chesapeake Bay to the northward, if any there be, which was mine intention to have spent this summer in the search of, and of the mine of Chawnis Temoatan, is dashed.19 Meeting with his officers, their whole request was to me to return home with Drake.
Roanoke is abandoned. The weather continued so boisterous that the boats foundered and most of all we had, including maps, books and writings, were by the sailors cast overboard, the greater number of the fleet being much aggrieved with their long and dangerous abode in that miserable road. Divine retribution does at last come into play. The string of Menatonon’s pearls / lost, said Lane, with other things of mine, which were cast in the sea.
A World of Terror
June 19. The exodus is complete. T
he troops board Drake’s fleet and sail away.
Lane has inflicted deep wounds on Roanoke that will never heal. During his brief tenure on the island, he has destroyed food stores and forced the Secotan, under starvation conditions, into maintaining troops who never should have been there. He has crippled them with debilitating epidemics; decimated populations; cut down their government and religion. He has savagely attacked towns without provocation; captured a king and held his son hostage. He has brutalized them with intimidation, threats, deceit, and murder. His obsession with the copper mines of Chaunis Temoatan will wreak untold misery and eventually topple the balance of power within the region. He has reduced their world to a shambles. He has beheaded Wingina.
Ten months after his arrival, Lane leaves this world behind.
PART THREE
A CASE OF CONSPIRACY
13 THE LOST COLONISTS (1587)
For among my people are found wicked men: they watch, as fowlers lie in wait; they set a trap, they catch men.
Jeremiah1
Resupply
With sickening clarity, we now see that White’s colonists cannot hope to survive on Roanoke Island. Too much has happened; too much is lost.
After Lane’s hurried departure, Raleigh’s long-awaited supply ship put in to the Outer Banks immediately after the soldiers’ removal out of this paradise of the world.1 Finding no one, it returned with all provisions. Two weeks later further shipping arrived under Grenville’s command. The complement included four hundred soldiers and sailors and a large store of supplies.3 Unwilling to leave the fort unmanned, Grenville deposited fifteen soldiers on the island under the care, appropriately, of a Master Coffin and a certain Chapman. He, too, returned to England.4
