by Angela Hunt
John White nodded. “You have a point, John,” he said, rubbing his beard. “And I thought Christopher Cooper had agreed to go. But now that Cooper has changed his opinion . . .”
The governor paused, and the colonists respectfully fell silent to give him time to think. White knew they were right to be concerned. Food supplies were short, and would grow shorter in the months ahead. Thanks to Fernandes, they had arrived too late to put in a decent crop, and winter loomed ahead. Even the friendly Croatoans had stated flatly that they would not feed the English at Roanoke as they had fed the Lane colony.
White took a deep breath and sighed. He knew the colonists wanted him to return to England. Of all the men, he could most easily gain the ear of Raleigh, mayhap even the Queen. These men and women needed him to be their voice in England, but how could he leave his daughter and days-old granddaughter?
“You, Governor, know what we face here,” Edward Powell spoke up. “The assistants in England have no idea.”
“But ‘twould appear I have deserted you,” White argued, beating the air with his fist. “And I, who have convinced you to stake your lives and fortunes upon this journey, cannot desert the expedition. I cannot go.”
“You can make Sir Walter Raleigh understand our precarious position,” Arnold Archard argued. “The others are concerned with their own affairs.”
“Raleigh understands already; he is a man of action.”
“I hate to say it, sir, but Eleanor and I would feel more secure if you were filling a ship to meet our needs,” Ananias said, his eyes lifting to meet those of his father-in-law. The young father’s mouth curved in a proud smile. “And for the sake of your granddaughter, will you not consider going?”
White felt his resolve slipping. “What about my papers?” he stammered. “My books. All my earthly belongings are here, on Roanoke—”
“We’ll guard your belongings and your trunks.” Thomas Colman stepped forward and nodded resolutely. “You have my word as a man of God that no harm shall come to anything that belongs to John White.”
John felt his heart stir with respect for the man who stood before him. The somber minister had proved to be a man of loyalty and courage. If any man could be trusted to help oversee the colony in White’s absence, surely Thomas Colman could.
“All right,” John said, waving his hands in surrender. “I am not certain, but I will consider your request. But your request must be in writing, lest any in England say I have deserted you. The document must make it fully clear that I leave to meet your needs, and that I leave only because of your great insistence that I go.”
“We will write whatever you like,” John Sampson said, “if you will only go and return with the supplies we need. After all, Governor, we know you will return.” The man turned to smile at the assembly. “After all, we have your daughter and granddaughter.”
Nodding mutely, John White turned on his heel and went home to consider his options.
On the twenty-first of August, John White set a single sea trunk in front of his house to be loaded upon the flyboat. His other trunks, filled with his sketches, books, manuscripts, maps, and armor, were locked and placed in a separate room off the large governor’s house.
Jocelyn and Thomas waited in the lower room of the house while her uncle said his goodbyes to Ananias, Eleanor, and the baby. When John White finally came out of their chamber, Jocelyn embraced him gently. “Must you go today?” she said, pulling away. “The wind is strong outside.”
“Fernandes gives the orders at sea, have you forgotten?” White answered wryly, raising a bushy brow. He extended a hand to the minister. “God sent you to us, my friend, of that I am more certain each day. Take good care of my niece. I think of her as a daughter.”
“You have no need to worry,” Thomas answered, grasping White’s hand. “God himself holds me responsible for her.” After an awkward farewell, Thomas excused himself and left the house. Jocelyn took pains to smooth her face so that her uncle would not see her unhappiness at her husband’s departure. She had returned to their house a week ago, and Thomas had gallantly offered to let her and Audrey have the downstairs room while he slept on a cot in the attic above. His behavior with her was polite, ever aloof, and held the affection he might have shown a distant cousin. Worst of all, he refused to be alone with her, so she had not had a single opportunity to ask why he kept her at arms’ length.
Wild wind hooted outside the house, and lightning cracked the skies apart as a sudden rain fell. Caught in the storm, surprised men and women called to each other outside, and Jocelyn heard the pounding of footsteps as colonists scurried for shelter.
“Perchance ‘tis God’s will that I remain here,” her uncle said, peering out a wooden shutter as the wind came sliding through cracks in the house. He frowned. “‘Tis a storm from the north east. I hope Fernandes has enough sense to keep the ships from being battered onto the lee shore.”
He turned from the window and smiled at Jocelyn’s strained face. “There is nothing to worry about, my dear. Why don’t you settle in here until the storm stops blowing? These storms spring up and pass in a matter of hours.”
He walked again toward Eleanor’s chamber to steal a few more moments with his grandchild, and Jocelyn sank onto a low stool at the table. There was nothing to do but wait.
For nearly a week the storm battered the barrier islands. During one lull John White ventured down to the beach to discover that Simon Fernandes had cut his cables to protect the ships from the wind. The Lion and the flyboat had run for the open sea without even a full complement of seamen aboard, and White secretly suspected that Fernandes would have happily sailed for England and left the colonists forever had he not been missing most of his crew. Finally, six days after the storm’s onslaught, the Lion and the flyboat were spotted off the coast. Word came from Captain Fernandes shortly after midday on August twenty-seventh: if John White still planned to go to England, he had half a day to get himself and his supplies on board. Simon Fernandes was sailing at midnight, and he would wait no longer.
After supper that evening, Ananias Dare and Thomas Colman presented John White with a single document:
May it please you, her Majesty’s subjects of England, we your friends and countrymen, the planters in Virginia, do by these presents let you and every of you to understand that, for the present and speedy supply of our known and apparent lacks and needs, most requisite and necessary, for the good and happy planting of us or any other in this land of Virginia, we all, of one mind and consent, have most earnestly entreated and incessantly requested John White, Governor of the Planters in Virginia, to pass into England for the better and most assured help and setting forward of the foresaid supplies. And knowing, assuredly, that he both can best and will labor and take pains in that behalf for us all, and he not once, but often, refusing it, for our sakes and for the honor and maintenance of the action, has at last, though much against his will, through our importunacy, yielded to leave his government and all his goods among us and, himself, pass into England, of whose knowledge and fidelity in handling this matter, as all others, we do assure ourselves by these presents and will you to give all credit thereunto.
All adult men and women in the colony signed the document.
Standing on the storm-littered beach in the darkness of early evening, Jocelyn tried to swallow the lump that rose in her throat each time she looked at her weary uncle. In his worn doublet and patched leggings, he looked less like an important governor than a beggar, but he carried himself with the dignity of a prince.
Lit only by the glow of torchlight, Thomas led the gathering in a benedictory prayer. The entire colony watched as John White kissed his daughter, embraced his son-in-law, and then paused with his aged hand on the dewy head of nine-day-old Virginia. “I’ll be back before she knows I’ve gone,” he said, smiling at Eleanor. “I promise you, my daughter, I’ll be back very soon.”
He turned, waved his hat at the crowd, and splashed through the dark w
aters where the shallop waited to convey him to the fleet that rode at anchor offshore. Eleanor sobbed openly, her head buried in Ananias’ shoulder, and Jocelyn felt suddenly chilled in the warm evening wind.
TWENTY-ONE
The dark waters chopped against the flyboat in the darkness and John White paced the deck uneasily, his hands clasped behind his back. Was he wrong to leave the colony? A thousand voices called him back: his daughter, her baby, his niece, his belongings, the role of leadership that could not be freely abdicated. He had planned to give a lifetime to the colony, and his own people had sent him away after only a month and two days. A dark inner voice nagged at him: had they sent him away because he was no leader?
He turned swiftly and regarded the darkened shores of the barrier islands. If he had not been continually thrust against Simon Fernandes, or if the swarthy Portuguese had not been so intent on capturing cursed Spanish treasure, the colony would have fared better. At least for this return voyage he would sail on Edward Spicer’s flyboat, not on Fernandes’ Lion. He could eat, sleep, and drink without seeing the face of that loathsome sea captain.
A bell rang across the black waters; the Lion was raising her anchor. On the flyboat, Captain Spicer gave the same order, and a crew of seamen sprang to turn the capstan, the large revolving drum around which the anchor cable was wound. Fifteen men, eight on the upper deck and seven on the lower, each grabbed one of the wooden bars protruding from the capstan. As the bosun chimed on the ship’s bell they rhythmically pushed the circular drum, slowly raising the anchor as the ship stirred on the murky waters.
“And so begins the next chapter,” White told the darkness, bitterness in his voice. The journey home. The revelation of his failure to all who waited in England. Fernandes would tell horror stories about George Howe’s murder, the primitive conditions, the attack on the fifteen caretakers, and the ill-fated assault at Dasemunkepeuc. Edward Stafford, also on board the Lion, might be counted upon to give a more truthful retelling of events, but White knew it would not be easy to convince Raleigh to continue what he might be persuaded to consider a hopeless venture.
A sudden crack ripped through the silence of the night and men screamed as a hollow, thudding sound echoed along the deck. White turned in horror toward the capstan—one of the rods had broken, and the cylinder spun like a whirling dervish on the deck, its wooden bars thudding against the ribs of sailors who scrambled to move out of the way. The anchor cable hissed and thrummed as it ran back out to sea, and White watched in stunned amazement until the cable finally lay still.
Spicer thrust his head over the bridge and shouted orders. The dazed and wounded men rose, placed their hands on the remaining bars of the capstan, and tried again to raise the anchor. Several cried out in pain, one stumbled and fell, and White grimaced when another bar broke and the capstan again spun free and battered seamen as it sent the anchor back to its watery bed.
Spicer looked over the deck and caught White’s eye. The torchlit Lion had already made her way into the east. With his shoulders drooping in resignation, Spicer gave the order to cut the cable and leave the anchor behind.
White knew the dangers of traveling without an anchor. If a storm should arise, the flyboat would be at the mercy of the winds, possibly to be wrecked on rocky northern shores. But with such a treacherous capstan, there seemed little else they could do.
The boatswain appeared below the captain’s bridge. “If it please you, sir, twelve of the crew are badly injured,” he called to Spicer, squinting in his reluctance to speak. “Something’s broken inside ‘em, captain, and I don’t know what to do with ‘em.”
“Twelve?” Spicer spoke with a voice of iron, but White heard a thread of uncertainty in it. The flyboat was a ship of one hundred tons, but her crew numbered only fifteen seamen, the captain, and the boatswain. Could such a skeleton crew bring the ship safely back to England?
“Aye, sir. Twelve,” the boatswain called, folding his arms.
Spicer gripped the rail and stared out over the bow. “Then the remaining five of us will sail her home, won’t we?”
The boatswain’s graveled face broke into an admiring grin. “Aye, sir, by God’s grace we will try.”
Spicer nodded his dismissal, and as the boatswain hurried to move the injured men below deck, the captain turned to White. “How handy are you with a sail and cable?” he asked, raising one eyebrow quizzically.
White took a deep breath. “If it will get us back to England, I’ll do anything I can to aid you.”
“Good. We will need you,” Spicer replied, moving confidently away.
TWENTY-TWO
The Sunday after John White’s departure, Jocelyn sat outdoors with the other colonists and listened to her husband congratulate Dennis and Margery Harvie on the birth of their new daughter, Sylvie, the second child to be born in her Majesty’s Virginia.
After the murmurs of approval had faded, Thomas proceeded to detail a long list of rules recently approved by the council: thievery, bearing false witness, and slothfulness would be punished by public whipping. No Indian woman would be allowed to enter the village without proper and modest clothing. And, given the great number of unmarried men in the colony, all English women were to journey in pairs, for modesty and safety’s sake. No lady should ever walk abroad without her maidservant, and no maid should ever talk to a man after dark unless her mistress were also present.
Thomas stretched his long arm toward Ananias Dare, who stood and nodded solemnly toward the assembly. “This man will act as governor until John White’s return,” he said. “The council—Roger Prat, Roger Bailie, Christopher Cooper, and Thomas Stevens—will assist him when necessary. Civil affairs will be tried by Ananias and the council. Spiritual affairs are to be brought to me.”
The assembly nodded in agreement, then Thomas stepped aside while Ananias listed the council’s specific rules about English-Indian relations. He spoke bluntly: “Any Englishman who forces labor from an unwilling savage will be imprisoned for three months. Any Englishman who strikes an Indian will receive twenty blows with a cudgel in the Indian’s presence. Any Englishman who enters an Indian’s house without permission will be punished with six months imprisonment. And any Englishman who forces his attention upon an Indian woman will be put to death.”
The colonists received the list of rules without complaint, and Jocelyn lifted her chin proudly when she thought of the work done by Thomas and Ananias. In theory, the leaders of the colony had adhered to Raleigh’s policies of equality for all and gentleness for the Indian savages. But as she stood with the others to sing a closing hymn, Jocelyn found herself thinking of little William Wythers. She had not found the time nor the courage to confront Thomas about the harshness of his judgment, but she was sure the whipping had done more than punish the child—it had changed him from a happy, bubbly boy into a shy, withdrawn shadow of what he once had been. And though no one spoke any more of the colony’s attack on Dasemunkepeuc, that forgotten episode had been anything but gentle.
Could Raleigh’s benevolent theories and ideals be put into practice?
The merciless sun of early September smote the green fields where the colonists had planted corn and beans, and Jocelyn felt her stomach churn as she moved slowly among the tall plants. She had not breakfasted, for Thomas had proclaimed a day of fasting and prayer for John White’s safe return to England, and she felt weak and dizzy in the blinding sunlight.
Speaking for the righteous good of the colony, Thomas had proclaimed many things since John White’s departure. In an ever-lengthening series of pronouncements from his pulpit, he declared that women ought to always have their heads covered out of doors, since bonnets were necessary to shield a lady’s fair skin from the harsh Virginia sun. “Furthermore,” he admitted, “the sight of free-flying hair distracts men from their labors.” Thomas later declared that Sunday morning sermon attendance would be compulsory, so that all colonists would have a weekly reminder that God’s eye hovered over the colony
and sin would not be tolerated. Recreation must be reserved for the Sabbath, he went on, swimming on the beach was strictly prohibited, and dancing should not be practiced in the colony lest the Indians see it and think the colonists bewitched.
“Hurry, Miss Jocelyn, the sun will be wantin’ to fry us soon.” Audrey’s sharp voice brought Jocelyn back from her musings, and she shifted the nearly empty basket on her hip and moved toward shade in the planted field.
The other women moved easily among the small planted hills, pulling ears of corn from the tall stalks as they gossiped about their men and their duties. Governor White had directed the colonists to plant corn as soon as possible in July, and that meager crop was now ready for harvesting and likely to produce their major store of food for the winter. Jocelyn tried not to think about the reality of possible starvation. She knew the Indians planted three different corn crops, one in May, one in June, and one in July, and even their villages found it difficult to feed themselves through the winter. How then were the English to survive?
The thought of starvation seemed not to have occurred anyone else. Every day she joined the women harvesting the ripening food, but the other women seemed more interested in small talk and gossip than the crop. The governor had told them to assign one of the children to guard the corn from marauding animals, and this they had done, but only until John White left on the flyboat. He had also told them to water the plants daily and to plant beans in the shadow of the corn until the first frost, but lately those directives had been ignored as well. The corn withered in the heat; the straggly bean plants sprouted and died without ever bearing fruit.
