The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  The newcomers, however, saw this way of life as not just wasteful but depraved. In Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia, which Gilbert was said to be reading when he drowned, the author argued that dispossessing indigenous people of their territory was a moral imperative. The recent discovery of the New World inspired More’s book, in which the Utopians drove out any who didn’t till the soil properly to claim the land for themselves, “for they count this the most just cause of war.” Raleigh enthusiastically backed More’s ruthless philosophy. “If the title of occupiers be good in land unpeopled, why should it be bad accounted in a country peopled over thinly?” he argued.

  A sixteenth-century Portuguese scholar wasn’t fooled. He dismissed More’s ideal society as “a modern fable” designed “to teach the English how to rule.” Well into the seventeenth century, many English landowners lacked documentation; settling the land was often enough to make it yours. (“Possession is nine-tenths of the law” is a particularly English concept.) Territory considered vacant was, in effect, theirs for the taking. This was the genesis of the argument used to deny Indian land rights and justify westward expansion for the next four centuries.

  Wingina might have let Lane and his men use Roanoke as their base, but he almost certainly did not intend to transfer the island permanently to the newcomers. Native Americans would often accept payment for land, but they typically did so with the assumption that it was a temporary lease rather than a final purchase. “For a copper kettle and a few toys as beads and hatchets, they will sell you a whole country,” marveled John Smith at Jamestown, misreading the Algonquian approach to land use.

  Yet Lane did not advocate removing the indigenous people; he recognized that trade with them was essential. “The people naturally are most courteous and very desirous to have clothes, but especially of coarse cloth rather than silk.” This news no doubt was music to Hakluyt’s ears. To Elizabethans, proper clothes, like tilled land and grazing sheep, were the very essence of civilized life. Ever since Amadas and Barlowe bestowed a shirt and a hat on the lone Indian, the Algonquians held wool and cotton in high regard, as Europeans of the day viewed rare Chinese silk. Here was a vast and untapped market for English textiles.

  At first, relations with Wingina and his people seemed cordial. We don’t know if Lane applied a strict code—suggested in an undated and anonymous set of notes, apparently made prior to sailing, with regard to the 1585 colony—that called for three months’ imprisonment for any Englishman forcing an Indian to labor unwillingly and twenty blows with a cudgel for striking one, “in the presence of the Indian stricken.” Even entering a Native American’s house without leave entailed six months’ imprisonment or enslavement. The author, who might have been the elder Hakluyt from Middle Temple, had read enough history of European colonization to know that alienating those most familiar with the country would prove calamitous. Elsewhere he warned with prescience that “seeking revenge on every injury of the savages” would result in the English being “rooted out with sword and hunger.” Lane ultimately failed to heed this advice, with dire consequences for his colony and the one that followed.

  White seems to have returned with the fleet to England, where he worked on his portfolio of watercolors. But Gans and Harriot stayed behind to embark on an ambitious effort to explore and meticulously catalog Virginia’s resources. They tested metals and botanical samples and set out to search for ores and medicinal plants, all the while visiting Native Americans to draw on their knowledge. Harriot marveled at plants most Europeans had never seen and that would become important staples of the Old World, from the sunflower to the potato. He encountered his first caffeinated drink in a cup infused with yaupon leaves (coffee and tea had yet to reach England). Evening primrose and nasturtium promised important health benefits, while sassafras—native only to eastern North America—was well on its way to becoming the wonder drug of the sixteenth century. The New World offered not just gold and silver but “a botanical philosopher’s stone with which to transmute disease to health,” historian Ralph Bauer writes.

  Along the way, traveling in a small open boat crammed with cartographic equipment, Harriot and his assistants made maps. On torturously humid and hot days, batting away the swarms of mosquitoes and huddling under canvas in fierce squalls, the young scientist and his team performed complex calculations, using the new method of triangulation to produce charts better than almost anything that existed in England in that day. The maps that resulted, which John White later drew based on Harriot’s data, remained the most accurate of the region for almost two centuries.

  What makes Harriot so unusual, aside from his insatiable curiosity and scientific gifts, was his easy rapport with the indigenous peoples. No Englishman at Jamestown or Plymouth would garner so much trust or gain such privileged access, and few Westerners in the century that followed reported indigenous life with so little judgment. He was still a product of his time, proselytizing for “the true and only God” and hoping the people he met “may be in a short time brought to civility, and the embracing of true religion.” He was not above showing off the technological marvels of the day, such as sea compasses and “spring-clocks that seem to go of themselves” in order to impress his audience, who wondered if they were more “the works of God than of men.”

  Manteo, no doubt, provided crucial introductions that gave him insight into crops and pharmaceuticals that could benefit Raleigh and his investors. But Harriot was fluent enough in the Secotan dialect of Algonquian to speak directly with the women who farmed and gathered wild plants as well as the men who fished and hunted. He established “special familiarity with some of their priests” as well as with“conjurers” who could predict the future. While collecting practical information on potential exports, he studied the preservation of the corpses of leaders in special mortuary temples and recorded local belief in the immortal soul and heaven and hell. Mindful of Amadas’s harsh treatment of the Indians, Harriot insisted that his team avoid conflict, “because we sought by all means possible to win them by gentleness.”

  Yet, in a tragic irony, he and his party unwittingly wreaked far more damage on their hosts than the ill-advised July raid over a missing cup. They spread deadly disease that decimated the very culture Harriot sought to understand. Native Americans lacked the immunities to pathogens that Old World people developed over long time spans. Even today, this lethal aspect of the Columbian exchange remains a crisis. A simple cold or flu inadvertently spread by oil workers or television crews seeking isolated tribes can quickly devastate peoples in the Amazon jungles.

  Ever the scientist, Harriot noted the disturbing trend, though he lacked a germ theory to grasp its origin. “Within a few days after our departure from every such town, the people began to die very fast, and many in a short space; in some towns about twenty, in some forty, in some sixty, and in one six score, which in truth was very many in respect to their numbers. This happened in no place that we could learn but where we had been.”

  The epidemic began less than a month after the last of the English fleet departed; we know this because Harriot mentions that the illness spread within days of a comet’s appearance in the sky that can be dated to mid-September to early October 1585. Such a celestial event foretold disaster among both Europeans and Native Americans. The sickness was likely influenza, then raging in the Caribbean, and it was unlike any illness the Carolina Algonquian healers had encountered. None of their herbal remedies could halt its spread or cure its symptoms. They presumed—correctly—that the English could kill “by shooting invisible bullets into them.”

  Wingina himself twice fell sick. When his practitioners failed to find a cure, he called on English prayers. The leader’s recovery reinforced Indian perceptions that the newcomers’ powerful tools extended into the spiritual realm. He asked the English to unleash this powerful weapon against his enemies. With every visit to a neighboring tribe, they did. The raging epidemic that spread from vill
age to village likely hindered the fall harvest, reducing the surplus available for trade with the English as winter approached.

  Before the New Year, Harriot joined an expedition to the southern shore of Chesapeake Bay, about one hundred miles north of Roanoke Island. A glance at any modern chart shows that the Chesapeake and the Carolina sounds are isolated from each other. That was not obvious in the 1580s, even among the Spanish who had settled a Jesuit mission briefly on Chesapeake shores in the previous decade. The sketch map sent by Lane noted that the colonists’ landfall on Ocracoke was at “St. Mary’s Bay,” or Bahía de Santa María in Spanish. Historians long assumed that Bahía de Santa María was synonymous with Chesapeake Bay, but other maps of the era suggest that Europeans saw the bay and the sounds as one large system. Harriot’s data established that the Chesapeake region was in fact a separate body of water, with more fertile soil and deeper waters, as well as large concentrations of Indians amenable to trade. This discovery, immortalized in John White’s map of eastern North Carolina and southern Virginia, later turned English attention north, leading two decades later to the settlement at Jamestown that gave the English their first firm foothold in the New World.

  Lane, meanwhile, remained cooped up on Roanoke, in part because of food shortages and unrest among what he called with exasperation the “wild men of mine own nation.” One ringleader might have been the nineteen-year-old Oxford graduate Marmaduke Constable; on his return to England he was accused of leading an armed gang of Elizabethan punks who tore down hedges and attacked livestock.

  The worried governor issued strict rations, but it proved increasingly difficult to secure corn to tide the men over until spring. The English were now almost wholly dependent on the Secotan for their survival. The Indians stored surplus crops, but they were not prepared or able to feed a hungry English multitude for six months or more, particularly given the impact of the devastating illnesses ravaging their villages. The apparent listlessness of Lane’s men during the winter suggests that they, like Ayllón’s settlers sixty years earlier, might have suffered from carbohydrate deficiency.

  Relations between Wingina and Lane worsened as the food shortage grew more acute. The English governor set out in early March to explore the interior that lay beyond the chief’s control, in order to gather provisions and possibly forge fresh alliances. He dreamed of finding the Pacific and valuable ore deposits. Thirty men sailed west from Roanoke to the head of the Albemarle Sound and up the Chowan River. Their goal was the capital of the Chowanoke people, the region’s most numerous and populous tribe.

  Manteo accompanied the expedition, but Wingina supplied his own guides—a sign of his growing distrust of the Croatoan—while warning Lane that the Chowanoke chief, Menatonon, planned to ambush the English. Wingina was no doubt reluctant to let the English create an alliance with a more powerful neighbor, and the guides doubled as spies. Upon their arrival, Lane, battle hardened from the Irish wars and not given to diplomacy, stormed the beach at Menatonon’s main village and seized the chief; no difficult feat given that he was an apparent paralytic. The commander then declared him, “for a savage, a very grave and wise man.” Menatonon claimed no intent to harm the English and blamed Wingina for attempting to create ill will between the newcomers and the Chowanoke. He filled Lane’s eager ears with tales of pearl fisheries to the north, in an apparent reference to the Chesapeake, as well as copper mines to the west controlled by a fierce Iroquoian-speaking people. Beyond the setting sun, he assured the eager English commander, was a rock on the shore of a great sea. Excited by the prospect of metals and a passage to the Pacific, Lane released Menatonon but as a precaution sent his son, Skiko, to Roanoke Island as a hostage.

  A few days later, the English conquistadors donned armor and began their journey up a nearby river called the Moratuc—today’s Roanoke River—that snaked west to the alleged copper sources and the great sea. Finally they had a chance to find glory or wealth or both in this land that seemed rich only in mosquitoes and marsh. The men made a gallant pact that “whilst there was left one half pint of corn for a man that we should not leave the search.”

  The expedition proved an unnerving trip into an American heart of darkness. The villages they encountered as they rowed upstream were strangely deserted. Food ran low. The current grew stronger, forcing the anxious soldiers to pull harder at their oars, and the banks lined with tall trees narrowed with each twisting mile. The men soon realized with unease that they were being watched. Finally, a human sound broke the silence. “We heard certain savages call,” reported Lane. Heartened, he urged Manteo to propose a meeting. At that moment, male voices began to sing. Manteo warned it was a war chant and grabbed his English gun. Before he could fire, a volley of arrows whooshed out of the trees but “did no hurt.” The English landed and pursued their attackers, who utterly vanished in the thick brush. The eerie silence returned.

  Shaken and hungry, the expedition members agreed it was time to turn back. They killed and roasted two mastiffs they had brought along to terrify the locals. It was the last of their food. By the time they emerged back into the broad Albemarle Sound, they were reduced to picking sassafras leaves to stave off the gnawing in their stomachs. It was the Saturday before Easter Sunday, “which was fasted very truly,” says Lane, in one of his only wry remarks.

  The next day, the famished men raided an Indian fish trap and by Monday were back on Roanoke. “We be dead men returned into the world again,” Lane wrote, referring to Wingina’s shock that the English had survived their ordeal.

  But the situation had deteriorated in their absence. There was still no sign of a resupply ship. Two of the key elders sympathetic to the English, Granganimeo and a respected council member named Ensinore, were dead, “the only friend to our nation that we had amongst them,” lamented Lane. Harriot notes that some of the Indians “seem to prophesy that there were more of our generations yet to come, to kill theirs and take their places”—a chillingly accurate prediction.

  A faction among the Carolina Algonquians advocating removal of the English was gaining ground; Wanchese, hostile to the English after his experience in London, was now a senior adviser to Wingina. The chief changed his own name to Pemisapan, or “one who watches,” though Lane doesn’t seem to have picked up on this ominous detail. The newcomers were wearing out their welcome. Their trade goods had lost their appeal, and the Europeans were building alliances with his rivals that threatened to cut Wingina and his tribe out of the equation.

  At Lane’s surprise return, the Secotan leader evacuated Roanoke and halted all food distribution to the English; Indians also broke the fish weirs they had made for the settlers, who were unable to repair them. The newcomers’ lack of skill is remarkable, given that the Thames, from London Bridge to Windsor, was at the time said to be nearly unnavigable due to the salmon and shad nets. Harriot later blamed ill-prepared urban dwellers for their desperate plight. While some of the colonists were common soldiers, many were small London businessmen—basket makers, carpenters, and merchants. “Because there were not to be found any English cities, nor such fair houses, nor at their own wish any of their old accustomed dainty food, nor any soft beds of down or feathers, the country was to them miserable,” he wrote scornfully. Of course, the young Oxford don and his scientific team spent much of their time traveling from Native American village to village, no doubt enjoying elaborate meals like the one Barlowe experienced on Roanoke Island in 1584. His men likely felt far fewer hunger pangs than those forced to do time on Roanoke.

  Desperate for food, Lane broke up his company so that his men could forage, trade, or beg in smaller groups. A dozen crossed the Pamlico to Port Ferdinando “to live upon shellfish,” while twenty men led by Captain Edward Stafford sailed south to Manteo’s home island of Croatoan. With only a skeleton crew manning the Roanoke settlement, the English were vulnerable to attack. Lane learned from his prisoner Skiko, Menatonon’s son, that Wingina
was organizing an alliance that included the tribes to the south, intending to wipe out the weakened settlers. Not surprisingly, warriors from the village that Amadas had burned a year prior signed up. The captive also told the commander that Wingina intended to meet with Lane under the guise of friendship, while his men lit bonfires to alert allies on the mainland. That was the signal for the warriors to canoe over to Roanoke and set fire to the thatched huts belonging to Lane, Harriot, and other senior members of the colony, who apparently lived in cottages outside the fort—a sign that the English had until then felt little threat from their neighbors and hosts. As they fled their homes, the Indians would pick them off. Once the leaders were neutralized, the warriors would attack the protected enclosure.

  Lane again planned a preemptive attack. As darkness fell on May 31, 1586, a squad of Englishmen seized Algonquian canoes to use in a surprise amphibious operation against the Indians. A struggle broke out with the boat’s outraged owners. The English beheaded some of the Native Americans in view of others, who raised the alarm.

  Though he had lost his element of surprise, Lane landed quietly on the mainland with his men early the next morning, sending word that he wanted to complain to Wingina about the previous night’s incident, which he claimed was the fault of the chief’s warriors. He also said, falsely, that English reinforcements had arrived at Croatoan.

  Once ushered into the village center, Lane cried out, “Christ our Victory,” the signal for his soldiers to attack. They drew their pistols and took aim at the Native Americans. Amadas fired at the chief, who fell on the spot. Lane claimed that during the skirmish he was busy protecting Croatoan Indians, who happened to be visiting the mainland village, as well as those tribe members friendly to the English. His men, meanwhile, ensured that “none of the rest should escape.”