The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  A fierce storm off the Portugal coast scattered the ships and sank one of the two pinnaces. The Tiger later halted at a remote beach on Puerto Rico to construct a new one; the punctilious Lane insisted on building and fortifying earthworks around their temporary settlement. Grenville also stopped at the first European town built in the New World, La Isabela (in present-day Dominican Republic), and hosted a sumptuous feast for the local Spanish authorities, who in turn held a bull hunt in honor of their unwelcome but heavily armed guests.

  White, meanwhile, busied himself on the deck of the Tiger, capturing the brilliant colors of a dolphin and a Portuguese man-of-war in the bright subtropical sun so shockingly different from that of England. As they cruised the Caribbean, the armed marauders bought and stole island livestock as well as sugar, salt, and spices, dodging Spanish patrols. Once their holds were filled, the Tiger and two other vessels caught the Gulf Stream north.

  At the end of June, nearly three months after leaving Plymouth, the ships anchored off Ocracoke, an uninhabited barrier island sixty miles south of Roanoke and adjacent to Croatoan Island. Even before setting foot in Virginia, however, the newcomers faced a crisis that ominously echoed Ayllón’s doomed expedition.

  | CHAPTER THREE

  Firing Invisible Bullets

  The barrier islands called the Outer Banks are like a child’s beach dam that holds back a shallow pond of water from the ocean. The ponds are brackish lagoons or sounds, fed from the swift and clear streams that run out of the distant Appalachian Mountains. The waters converge in broad and sluggish rivers that flow through the marsh-fringed coastal plain and into these vast inland seas. You could drop Delaware and Rhode Island into Pamlico Sound, the largest lagoon along the North American east coast, and still have room to spare. Verrazano was not completely deluded in mistaking the Pamlico for the Pacific. Yet it is also shallow enough in parts that you could stand on the sandy bottom in the middle of this vast body of water, out of sight of any land, and still feel the breeze in your hair.

  Though they are called inlets, the narrow breaks in the barrier islands siphon more water into the Atlantic than comes in. Storms play them like organ stops, opening and closing them abruptly. A single hurricane in 1846 opened today’s Oregon and Hatteras inlets. Even in calm weather, the sand is constantly in motion, altering depths and turning today’s safe channel into tomorrow’s hazardous shoal. Despite electronic depth finders, GPS, and the Coast Guard standing by, navigating the inlets of the Outer Banks makes for white-knuckle skippering. Verrazano, though tempted by his belief that China lay just on the other side, had not dared to pass through one of these treacherous openings.

  On the morning of June 26, 1585, the Tiger tried to slip through Ocracoke Inlet to gain a safe anchorage. With Fernandes at the helm, the ship containing most of the expedition’s supplies hit a submerged sandbar. “We were all in extreme hazard of being cast away,” Lane wrote later. He anxiously counted as eighty-nine ocean swells slammed against the hull, “which all the mariners aboard thought could not possibly but have been broken in sunder.”

  Disaster was averted only in a daring two-hour effort by the other ships to tow the Tiger to safety. No one was injured, but “the ship was so bruised that the salt water came so abundantly into her that the most part of his corn, salt, meal, rice, biscuit, and other provisions” were spoiled, one contemporary chronicler noted. Opinions differed on whether the pilot was to blame. An anonymous account accused Fernandes of “unskillfulness,” though Lane later insisted that he “has truly carried himself with great skill and great government all that voyage.”

  Early July was spent on a nearby beach assessing and repairing the damage. With less than three weeks’ worth of food remaining, Lane had to scale back dramatically the number of settlers. Even then, those who remained would have to rely heavily on Native Americans to survive.

  The English did not immediately recognize a second crisis. Wanchese vanished from camp and subsequently refused all contact with the Europeans, much as Don Francisco had upon reaching Chicora. There is no record of any European seeing him again, though his presence would be keenly felt. He emerged as a determined and knowledgeable opponent of the invaders. His disappearance coupled with the loss of provisions put the colonists in a precarious position even before they had established a firm beachhead.

  Manteo, meanwhile, traveled north to meet with the Indian leader Wingina or his representatives to discuss a permanent home for the newcomers and returned to the flagship soon after.

  Strangely, the party did not then head north to meet with the paramount chief and negotiate a place to build their town. Instead, on the morning of July 11, sixty men—including White and Harriot—pushed off from the west shore of Ocracoke in three open boats to cross the Pamlico and explore the mainland to the west, on the southern fringe of the leader’s territory. Grenville sailed in comfort aboard a broad-beamed wherry designed for use as a Thames taxi, complete with a canvas canopy for shade. The vessel navigated the shallow waters well, but the heavier pinnace built in Puerto Rico that carried Lane kept scraping the sandy bottom.

  Manteo served as their guide. His people on nearby Croatoan seem to have been nominally under Wingina’s jurisdiction, but their home on a barrier island gave them some measure of independence. Days earlier, the Croatoan had conducted a quick reconnaissance trip across the Pamlico with an Englishman, presumably to prepare the locals for guests. Grenville and Lane might have wanted to seek alternative settlement sites and allies before meeting with Wingina, an idea that Manteo could have suggested or at least encouraged. He must have had close ties, or even relatives, at their destination. The young man was now a vital player in the English effort, which he might have calculated could benefit his small and vulnerable tribe immeasurably. Like Wanchese, he had seen the enormous numbers of the newcomers on their own turf, but he had come to a radically different conclusion on how best to deal with the English.

  After a full day’s sail, the men arrived the following morning on the low-lying shore near the village of Pomeiooc. Thanks to White, we know in startling and intimate detail how the Native Americans they encountered in the summer of 1585 dressed, fixed their hair, and went about their lives. In fact, we have more likenesses of individual Carolina Algonquians than we have of the English who met them; only Harriot and Grenville left behind their own portraits. White’s images provide us with a rare glimpse into a Native American society at first contact, the very moment when its tragic unraveling began.

  The newcomers entered a circular palisade of regularly spaced poles protecting eighteen rectangular houses with arched roofs, built with a framework of small poles and enclosed with mats and furnished with wide benches. The mats shed rain and could be rolled down to block the sun yet still admit a breeze during the hot Carolina summers, just like the roll-up reed blinds still popular in the coastal South. At the center of the village was a fire pit for communal cooking and rituals, and a mortuary temple to one side held the skeletal remains of the town’s elite dead. White drew a dog—the first American canine depicted in English art—as well as what may be a stone ax. The artist also sketched the chief’s wife, who wore black beads or pearls and a fringed deerskin skirt and carried a gourd. Her full lips seem about to form a smile, and elaborate tattoos decorate her biceps. Behind her stands her nearly naked daughter—“of the age of 8 to 10 years”—proudly showing her mother a black-clothed Elizabethan doll that was perhaps a gift from White to encourage her to stay still as he rapidly drew. The doll and the gold coin on a red necklace around her neck are the only hints of a European presence in all of his images of Carolina Algonquians.

  John White drew the town of Pomeiooc on the western shore of the Pamlico Sound during a summer 1585 visit; in the upper left is the first known image of the native Carolina dog that was the Indians’ sole domesticated animal. British Museum

  The English spent the night and then v
isited the village of Aquascococke, which lay to the southwest, before arriving that afternoon in the town of Secotan, which lay to the west up the Pamlico River. Unlike Pomeiooc, this settlement was built along a central street without an encompassing fence, and surrounded by corn and tobacco fields and game-filled forest. That evening, the hosts put on a feast, and one Englishman records the men “were well entertained there of the savages.” Their arrival coincided with a festival, because White paints nine male Indians waving gourd rattles and dancing around a circular row of wooden posts carved with faces—what Harriot called “a ceremony in their prayers with strange gestures and songs.”

  The cordial relations between guests and hosts came to an abrupt halt the next morning, when one of Lane’s party found a drinking vessel missing. While the party continued to explore the coast, Grenville sent Amadas—the same captain who had visited the previous summer—to Aquascococke “to demand a silver cup which one of the savages had stolen from us.” Sending the young man who was barely twenty and known for his flashes of temper—he was once charged with battery after a fight on a Thames ferry—proved a terrible mistake.

  The villagers might have thought the cup was a gift or just payment for hosting the guests and likely did not grasp the strict European concept of private ownership. They promised to return the item. But when Amadas’s deadline was not met, “we burnt, and spoiled their corn, and town, all the people being fled.” The reckless act, which marked the first record of violence between the two peoples, would have disastrous repercussions.

  Soon after, the expedition recrossed the Pamlico to board the Tiger and sail north. Passing along the forested dunes of Croatoan, where Manteo was raised, the vessel came to anchor at the north end of the next barrier island, the narrower and uninhabited Hatteras, where the two ships that had been lost in a storm off Portugal months earlier were now waiting. The inlet here seemed the one best suited for shuttling in and out of the Pamlico Sound, so the English established a small base here, called Port Ferdinando after their pilot, to serve as the primary gateway to the interior.

  This woman was the wife of the Pomeiooc chief; her daughter, aged eight to ten, carries a heavily clothed Elizabethan doll and wears a gold coin on a red necklace, contrasting sharply with her spare summer wear. British Museum

  This White painting of a Carolina Algonquian chief may be a portrait of Wingina; copper, such as the large plate he wears, was reserved for royalty. British Museum

  Wingina’s brother Granganimeo and Manteo boarded the Tiger to meet Grenville and Lane and offer the English land on Roanoke. In addition to its benefit for Wingina and his tribe, this easily defensible location, with quick access to the ocean but invisible to Spanish patrols, made strategic sense for the English. Lane agreed. The newcomers unloaded equipment on the beach as teams of soldiers built wells and slipways and possibly a small redoubt. Material was then shipped in small boats to their new home that lay a dozen miles to the northwest.

  Meanwhile, Amadas led a party to explore the Albemarle Sound to the north, which supported denser populations, its wide rivers lined with villages and maize fields. At one settlement the visitors claimed to witness seven hundred revelers at a green-corn festival marking the start of the harvest, an Algonquian tradition still celebrated in August in New England and Canada.

  An expedition member named Richard Butler later wrote that the English at one point encountered “enemies of those of Port Fernando”—an apparent reference to rivals of Wingina’s people—and killed twenty men in a battle. The soldiers captured some women, whom they presented to their allies. The official reports are silent on the incident, but the claim suggests that the English quickly became embroiled in local conflicts.

  Lane orchestrated construction of the English settlement on the island’s north end, presumably close to Granganimeo’s village. “You can do nothing til you have a strong town, as a magazine of victuals, a retreat in time of danger, and a safe place for the merchants,” wrote London trader Sir Thomas Smith the Elder in 1572. The governor likely heeded this advice. He was an accomplished military engineer familiar with the latest in Italian defensive techniques. One of his first actions was undoubtedly to build a fort, which he had done twice during brief halts in the Caribbean. This was territory claimed by Spain, and the entire expedition would have been aware of the massacre of the French colony two decades earlier. They had to be ready for an enemy attack at any time.

  In mid-August, Lane was writing letters to investors in London from “Porte FerdyNando in Virginia.” By early September, work on Roanoke was sufficiently complete for him to address his missives from “the new fort in Virginia.” The structure likely became the center of the English settlement. White, meanwhile, painted “one of the wives of Wingina” in her deerskin fringed skirt and wearing an elaborate blue necklace, tattoos on her wrists, biceps, and calves, and her face stippled with dye. His watercolor of a werowance, or a Carolina Algonquian leader, may be of Wingina; the lean older man has a Mohawk and wears a copper plate the size of a salad plate on his chest and large blue earrings. His expression is placid and his arms folded; he looks serene but a little weary.

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  The lack of provisions meant that only one hundred or so men would remain in Virginia. Having discharged their duties, Grenville and Fernandes set sail for England on the Tiger; the admiral intended to return with supplies in the spring. A few miles off the coast they captured a Spanish ship filled with tens of millions of today’s dollars in gold, silver, sugar, ginger, and hides as it lumbered offshore. This bonanza allowed Raleigh to pay off all his investors while demonstrating the usefulness of a New World colony as a handy base to harass the Spanish. One of the queen’s spies, William Herle, advised her in December 1585 that a Virginia port would make it possible “to possess Philip’s purse.”

  The loss alarmed the Madrid court and confirmed Spanish fears that the English were building a pirate hideout that threatened the empire’s economic lifeline, though they didn’t yet know its location. Historian Kenneth Andrews describes English operations in the Atlantic as a “predatory drive of armed traders and marauders” intent on getting their share of New World wealth. War loomed as Philip imposed an embargo on English shipping and Elizabeth turned her pirates into legal privateers. In an effort to chase the Spanish away from the fishing grounds of Newfoundland, the queen diverted a ship with supplies and additional settlers bound for Roanoke. That move would deny Lane and his men critically needed provisions for the winter.

  Unaware of the political crisis rapidly unfolding across the ocean, Governor Lane remained optimistic. When the last ship of the fleet eased out of Port Ferdinando on September 8, 1585, he sent along with it a rough sketch of the area, the first known map made by the English in North America. The unpolished drawing, clearly dashed off in a hurry, marks Roanoke as “the King’s Isle”—clearly a reference to Wingina—but fails to note the location of the Roanoke settlement or Port Ferdinando. This omission was likely done to keep sensitive information from Spanish spies, but it has since frustrated generations of historians and archaeologists.

  The drawing identifies the location of silk grass, grapevines, and good fishing spots, evidence that the English were already searching for possible exports with the help of Manteo and other locals. The artist cites the presence of oak galls, tree deformations that secrete a substance that formed a major constituent of Elizabethan ink. In letters, Lane assured London investors that the colony was based in “the goodliest and most pleasing territory of the world, for the soil is of a huge unknown greatness and very well peopled and towned, though savagely.” The governor predicted that Virginia products would replace the Mediterranean goods that conflict with Spain was already making increasingly difficult to obtain.

  It was a common misconception of the time. The English thought that because Virginia’s latitude matched that of Gibraltar,
its climate would be similar. Lemons and limes would flourish, as would olive trees and even sugar. Lane envisioned a bright future. “If Virginia had but horses and kine”—cows—“in some reasonable proportion, I dare assure myself being inhabited with English, no realm in Christendom were comparable to it.”

  Another misconception was that the Native Americans were not true landowners. Lane noted that “being savages that possess the land, they know no use of the same.” For the English, used to neat wheat and barley fields bordered by stone walls, the sophisticated Native American approach to growing corn, beans, and squash together seemed chaotic, and their habit of collecting roots, nuts, and berries from the woods, though carefully timed with the seasons, appeared haphazard. The absence of domesticated animals, other than the dog, seemed uncivilized, as did the indigenous practice of moving around. “The savage people rule over many lands without title or property; for they enclose no ground, neither have they cattle to maintain it, but remove their dwellings as they have occasion,” wrote John Winthrop four decades later in Massachusetts. In fact, the indigenous people prepared for lean seasons by storing food, and their knowledge of game and prowess at hunting typically provided them with ample animal protein and clothing material.