The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  Wingina, only wounded and waiting for the right moment, suddenly sprang up and ran for the woods, but not before he was shot “thwart his buttocks” by an Irish mercenary. The leader vanished in the trees. Another Irishman named Edward Nugent, who had served with Lane in the Irish wars, ran after him. Lane and a party of soldiers anxiously followed. On the path they spotted Nugent marching back with Wingina’s bloody head in his hand.

  As was the English practice in dealing with the Irish, Lane had the head thrust on a pole outside the fort. The same people who two years earlier welcomed the new arrivals “with all love and kindness,” sharing their land and food, were now implacable foes.

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  Exactly one week after Wingina’s assassination, Stafford strained his eyes on top of a Croatoan Island dune facing the Atlantic. What he saw spelled either rescue or death. Nearly two dozen sails crowded the southern horizon. In the early summer haze—the telescope’s invention was still two decades away—he couldn’t be sure if the enormous fleet was a Spanish expedition sent to snuff out the nascent colony or the English resupply mission. It turned out to be neither.

  He sent word to Lane of the fast-approaching ships. Finally, after spying English pennants, Stafford torched the dry grass and tinder piled on the beach. The smoke caught the attention of the fleet’s flagship, which sent a small boat to investigate. The next day, Stafford raced up the coast to Port Ferdinando and then across the sound to Roanoke with a letter from the renowned English sea captain Sir Francis Drake, promising “not only victuals, munitions, and clothing, but also barks, pinnaces, and boats.”

  On June 10, Lane rowed out to meet the famous admiral of the fleet assembled off Port Ferdinando. Not until the American Civil War, nearly three centuries later, would such a large number of warships cluster on this perilous coast. Drake was returning to England after devastating raids in the Spanish Caribbean that marked the start of official armed conflict with the Spanish Empire. A friend of Raleigh’s, he decided to check in on the courtier’s settlers at Roanoke.

  The forty-five-year-old Drake, short and bearded, came from a Devon clan that fell on hard times; he grew up on an abandoned hulk near the mouth of the Thames. As a young pirate, Drake cruised the Caribbean for loot. Later he attacked Spain’s rich and largely undefended ports on the Pacific coast of South America while making the second circumnavigation of the world. He came home to fame and fortune, and the man who grew up in an abandoned boat bought Sir Richard Grenville’s grand Devon mansion.

  Pirates traded in all commodities, including slaves. Along with his cousin John Hawkins, Drake raided West African ports and the ships of Portuguese merchants who dominated the business to sell the human cargo to Spanish plantations in the Caribbean. Yet he allied himself with escaped slaves in Panama in the 1570s to steal several tons of Spanish gold and silver. That one raid put more money into the queen’s treasury than all the taxes collected in England that year, and one of the African men subsequently served with the privateer for many years.

  As Lane’s colony slowly starved during the long winter at Roanoke, Drake was attacking Cartagena. This was one of Spain’s most important Caribbean ports, on what is now the coast of Colombia, protected by armed galleys rowed by enslaved Ottoman Turks and North African Muslims, or Moors. A stone fort bristling with cannon overlooked the harbor. Along with gun-toting Spanish soldiers were Native American troops carrying poisoned arrows. Stakes dipped in poison lined the land approaches.

  The overwhelming English force quickly routed the untested defenders. The invaders looted the wealthy homes and churches and methodically burned portions of the city until the Spanish citizens agreed to a ransom to make them stop. According to an English report, Drake ordered his men to treat French, Turks, and Africans in the city—most of whom were slaves or captives—with respect.

  A Spaniard later blamed the disaster on God’s wrath for the “unrighteous intercourse” between the Moors and the West Africans as well as Christian Indians in Cartagena—“and even other women of every sort, moved to desire which overmasters every other consideration.” The comment gives us a fleeting glimpse into the dizzyingly diverse nature of a port where people from the Americas, Europe, and Africa mixed, if not freely, then frequently.

  Drake’s fleet stayed two months. As Lane and his men searched in vain for copper deep in the Carolina interior, the admiral departed Cartagena, carrying with him the cathedral’s massive bronze church bells. An Englishman who took part in the raid wrote that “we had many Turks, Frenchmen, Negroes, Moors, Greeks, and Spanish with us from this town” when the fleet departed. How many remains unclear. “Most of the slaves and many of the convicts from the galleys went off with the English as did some of the Negroes belonging to private owners,” one Spanish report states. Another Spanish document confirms that Moors deserted to Drake, “as did the black slaves of the city, whom they find very useful.”

  Estimates of the number of refugees on board range from 80 to a staggering 1,200. The most reliable reports suggest that Drake transported 200 Moors as well as 150 male and female West Africans. Whatever the precise numbers, the English fleet was filled with people from three continents.

  The ships sailed east but failed to find Havana, missing a chance to lay waste to Spain’s most important Caribbean city. But they did land on Cuba. The crew suffered from scurvy and dysentery, and legend has it that South American indigenous women on board went ashore to obtain rum and limes, along with mint, to make a soothing medicinal concoction dubbed El Draque—the dragon—the Spanish nickname for the feared admiral and privateer. (Today it is Britain’s favorite cocktail, recast as the mojito.)

  By late May, with the crew on the mend, the fleet cruised north to St. Augustine on Florida’s Atlantic coast. A landing party arrived at the town and fort, only to find both abandoned; the residents had been warned of an impending attack and fled into the swamps to the west. The men torched each of the town’s 250 houses (no English town in North America would grow that large for well over a century). St. Augustine’s destruction rid the English of the primary threat to Roanoke. But first Drake’s crew stripped the buildings of their locks and other valuable hardware. “The Spanish Caribbean was his Ikea,” said historian Adrian Masters at the University of Texas at Austin. “You go there to pick up your raw materials.”

  The hardware, Drake reasoned, would be useful at the new Virginia colony that his friend Raleigh had founded. So would the slaves. Three Africans left behind at St. Augustine told Spanish authorities that Drake “meant to leave all the negroes he had in a settlement [established] by the English who went there a year ago. He hinted to leave the 250 blacks and all his small craft there, and cross to England with only the larger vessels.” Another report circulated in Havana corroborates the numbers and notes that the refugees on board “who do menial service” were not apparently destined for England, because “they are not useful to [Drake’s] country.” There were black servants in England, but few slaves.

  The fleet glided five hundred miles north on the Gulf Stream before sentries spotted Stafford’s smoke signal. When Lane and Drake met in the luxurious stern cabin of the forty-seven-gun flagship the Elizabeth Bonaventure, one of England’s most impressive ships, the privateer could afford to be generous. Drake also knew that Raleigh, an ally at court and a fellow privateer, would repay his efforts. The admiral invited Lane’s treasurer and quartermaster on board to make an inventory of their needs, including desperately needed gunpowder and clothes. The settlers by then were reduced to rags. Drake was willing to part with enough supplies to feed the hundred-plus colonists for four additional months, by which time resupply vessels would surely have arrived. He also agreed to leave behind a medium-sized ship along with six smaller boats. These would help Harriot expand his range of exploration and Lane to continue his search for the Pacific and copper.

  But as they spoke, clouds thickened i
n the south. Soon “a great storm…extraordinary and very strange” blew up, according to one sailor’s journal. Several of the larger ships hastily weighed anchor to escape being driven onto the shore at Port Ferdinando amid “thunder and rain, with hailstones as big as hens’ eggs.” Cables tethering other vessels to the sandy bottom snapped in the fierce wind and strong currents. Waterspouts—tornadoes whipped up on the sea—traveled across the ocean’s surface until it seemed “heaven and earth would have met.”

  For three days and nights the storm raged, and several of the smaller boats were smashed into splinters on the beaches. Lane lamented that the weather did more damage to the little colony than all the efforts of Spain. It was the first record of a hurricane hitting the Outer Banks. When the tempest passed, the ship that was to remain behind with supplies and a crew had vanished; its captain sailed for England rather than do more time in the awful place that offered precious little shelter for men and ships alike.

  The colony’s governor and his men held a hurried meeting. With no sign of Grenville’s resupply ships and surrounded by hostile Native Americans, Lane suggested that the only option was to abandon the colony. “Considering the case we stood in, the weakness of our company, the small number of the same, the carrying away of our first appointed bark”—the designated ship to be left behind—“with those two special masters, with our principal provisions in the same,” wrote Lane, “by the very hand of God, as it seemed, stretched out to take us from thence.”

  The young Hakluyt later obtained an account that instead saw divine retribution for Lane’s violent behavior. The unknown author said the English “left all things so confusedly, as if they had been chased from thence by a mighty army, and no doubt so they were, for the hand of God came up on them for the cruelty, and outrages committed by some of them against the native inhabitants of the country.” Harriot came to a similar, though more muted, conclusion, apparently unwilling to criticize Lane directly. He wrote delicately that several colonists “showed themselves too fierce in slaying some of the people, in some towns, upon causes that on our part, might easily have been borne with all.” The enemy, he said, were not the Native Americans but “carelessness of our selves.”

  Drake agreed to take the bedraggled settlers home; he and his crew were eager to be away from “their long and dangerous abode in that miserable road.” Boats were sent from Port Ferdinando to evacuate the fort and settlement. In the chaotic scramble, sailors heaved into the still-choppy waters heavy chests that threatened to swamp the small vessels. “The weather was so boisterous, and the pinnaces so often on ground,” Lane lamented, “that the most of all we had, with our charts, books, and writings, were by the sailors cast overboard.” Even today, scholars rue the sailors’ actions. The lost items likely included invaluable data gathered by Harriot during nearly a year of travels, interviews, and experiments. The young polymath had compiled an English-Carolina Algonquian dictionary and transliteration that recorded English words using a modified thirty-six-letter English alphabet that one linguist calls “an astonishing feat for his time.” This method, now commonly used, became an essential tool as the British Empire expanded. All that remains of this innovative and herculean effort is a single yellowed sheet of paper rediscovered four centuries later at a London prep school.

  Manteo spontaneously decided to join the fleet, and another Indian named Towaye, possibly his servant, accompanied him. The fleet left in such haste that three of Lane’s men either were abandoned or refused to go; they might have decided to join the locals. They were never heard from again.

  Were it not for the hurricane, American history might have unfolded along a different course. When a hundred-ton ship sent by Raleigh and filled with provisions anchored off Port Ferdinando a few days later, the crew searched in vain for the colonists. The vessel soon departed for England. Two weeks later, Grenville arrived with half a dozen ships and four hundred men and supplies for a year. These reinforcements, combined with Drake’s contributions and Raleigh’s relief ship, would have given the English a secure base. The baffled admiral likewise sought some sign of the settlers, who seemed to have vanished into thin air. A Spanish prisoner on board one of the vessels later told authorities in Havana that Grenville’s men found the putrefying bodies of a Native American and an Englishman hanged in the Roanoke settlement. Neither Lane nor the admiral mentioned the grisly executions.

  Grenville’s men eventually kidnapped three Indians, hoping to extract intelligence. Two escaped, but the third, later baptized “Rawley,” was brought back to England to live in the admiral’s new mansion in Bideford. We don’t know what he told the English, and the Algonquian died in April 1589, the only known Native American from the Roanoke voyages buried in England. His grave in the local churchyard, as with so much else associated with the venture, is lost.

  Unwilling to abandon the island completely, Grenville left fifteen unlucky men and sailed back to England. The next expedition would learn something of what happened to them.

  But the most fascinating and unresolved question about the Lane colony is the fate of the hundreds of refugees on Drake’s fleet when it arrived at Roanoke. Most of those from the Ottoman Empire, Spain’s mortal enemy, returned to England and were repatriated. Less than a week after the ships arrived in England, the queen’s Privy Council noted “100 Turks brought by Sir Francis Drake out of the West Indies (where they served as slaves in the Spanish galleys).” But only one black African is recorded as arriving with the fleet, and he apparently did not see the English as saviors; he immediately fled for France and sought sanctuary with the Spanish ambassador. An English diplomat in Paris wrote Walsingham that the man had a cut on his face and claimed to have returned from the New World. He added that “he would be glad to hear whether any such hath escaped away from Sir Francis Drake or not.” Nothing more has been found in British archives to answer his query.

  As to what happened to the remaining Africans and South Americans, “the saddest part of the story and perhaps the most revealing is that no one bothered to say,” notes historian Edmund Morgan. It is unlikely Drake brought hundreds of slaves to London in the 1580s, given the limited market there for humans in bondage. There are also no records of a large sale after his return. Some might have drowned in the hurricane off the Outer Banks, though there is no mention of casualties. And while a crew might dump slaves into the ocean if supplies dwindled, there is no evidence that Drake committed or countenanced such acts. Though quick to kill mutineers, Spanish soldiers, and Irish rebels, the admiral did not have a reputation for indiscriminate slaughter for no obvious gain. “The only reasonable explanation is that a considerable number of Indians and Negroes were put ashore on the Carolina Outer Banks and equipped with the pots and pans, locks and bolts, boats and launches of Saint Augustine,” concludes David Beers Quinn, the late University of Liverpool historian and dean of Roanoke researchers.

  Grenville doesn’t mention seeing anyone during his brief stopover save for the three Indians he kidnapped. If the refugees were left on Roanoke, however, they would surely have scattered with the appearance of European sails, to avoid detection and a potential return to slavery. Native Americans may have absorbed them. Whether they would have made their presence known to the Lost Colonists who arrived a year later—or even made common cause with them—is unknown. But these scores, perhaps hundreds, of West Africans, Native South Americans, and North African Moors form a mysterious other lost colony, one that left an even thinner paper trail than their English counterparts. Their presence on Roanoke would mean that the bulk of the first permanent settlers of England’s initial New World colony were neither Christian nor European but North African Muslims as well as followers of West African and South American traditions.

  To this day, rumors persist from eastern North Carolina to the Appalachians of an influx of southern Mediterranean people predating the English settlements. They might have been remnants of Ayllón’s co
lony or other Spanish and French expeditions, or castaways from shipwrecks. Yet Quinn notes the strong possibility that the refugees from Drake’s fleet were “left to form an isolated colony in what is now North Carolina.” If they did, then they were soon joined by a fresh batch of Europeans intent on making Virginia their home.

  | CHAPTER FOUR

  Small Things Flourish by Concord

  The raucous celebration must have felt like a public humiliation. The elaborate dinner on August 4, 1586, came just one week after Drake’s fleet arrived back in England to national rejoicing. Having burned and looted his way across Philip’s Caribbean, the admiral was London’s most highly sought-after guest. Ralph Lane sat at a long oaken table in the candlelit twilight of Middle Temple Hall, in the heart of his own club, as toast after toast congratulated El Draque on his triumph.

  The governor and his men had returned from the New World looking like refugees themselves, ragged and thin, bearing no crates of Spanish silver or bronze church bells. Already, word of the Virginia debacle was spreading in the pubs along the docks near the Tower of London on the other side of town. Rather than finding Eden, the men had been plunged into hell.

  Thomas Harvey, a merchant who had made the trip in hope of profiting in trade with the Indians, publicly complained about “one whole year and more in very miserable case” that drove him to bankruptcy. Others told hair-raising tales of starvation and Indian attacks. Harriot later railed in print against “slanderous and shameful speeches bruited about abroad by many that returned from thence.”