Lane quietly returned to Ireland, where he attempted, again without success, to create a colony while continuing his penchant for displaying the heads of enemies on pikes (eventually winning a knighthood and the castle of Belfast). He never again ventured across the ocean. Before departing London, he submitted a report to Raleigh at odds with his glowing accounts sent the previous summer from the new fort in Virginia. “The discovery of a good mine, by the goodness of God, or a passage to the South Sea, or some way to it, and nothing else can bring this country in request to be inhabited by our nation,” he bluntly concluded. Productive fields would require hard work clearing and manuring land, while the governor only grudgingly admitted that some of Harriot’s potions, such as sassafras, might “make good merchandise.” He knew that Raleigh wanted gold, or at least copper; all he could offer were roots. The only hope that he saw was in the area north of the Outer Banks, along the shores of the Chesapeake, “for pleasantness of seat, for temperature of climate, for fertility of soil, and for the commodity of the sea, besides multitudes of bears, being an excellent good victual, with great woods of sassafras and walnut trees, is not to be excelled by any other whatsoever.” Pinned down at Roanoke, he had not seen the region for himself; this was based solely on reports from Harriot’s expedition. But laying out the prospect of another Eden just a hundred miles to the north must have been easier than admitting simple failure.
We don’t know how Raleigh reacted to Lane’s surprise return, but the governor’s abrupt abandonment of Roanoke after only nine months must have been a bitter blow. Profits from the Spanish ship captured by Grenville the previous fall cushioned the impact. Yet after pouring a fortune of his money and that of his investors into the venture, the courtier had nothing to show.
In any case, the time for colonizing the New World was passing. Drake’s raids all but ensured open war with Spain. With pirating not only legal but patriotic, speculators saw fat returns for a small investment. Fitting out a privateer cost only a fraction of what was needed to organize and support a colony. As summer turned to fall, Raleigh waffled on whether to pursue a new Virginia venture.
“This brilliant, ruthless, and sardonic creature,” as one biographer describes him, was at the height of his influence. Like his passion for flashy jewels, the knight’s attention drifted to the next shiny object. Even as Lane and his men were climbing aboard Drake’s ships in retreat, the queen granted Raleigh thousands of acres in southern Ireland. With enemy ships prowling the ocean, the short trip to Ireland was both safer and cheaper. By the time Lane arrived in London, the courtier was already deeply immersed in organizing thousands of English farmers and artisans to settle his new lands. As with Virginia, the queen granted Raleigh the territory without reference to the indigenous people. Audrey Horning concludes that the first Roanoke settlement served as an important model for the way Raleigh, Lane, and others sought to colonize Ireland—and with similar disastrous results that echo down to this day. Within a few years, a rebellion by the displaced Irish upended Raleigh’s new venture, and he would set out instead for South America to find El Dorado.
But Sir Walter’s Virginia brain trust that included Hakluyt, Harriot, and White pestered him to not give up the New World effort so quickly. Hakluyt dedicated a volume of exploration reports to Raleigh, reminding him that “you freely swore that no terrors, no personal losses, or misfortunes could or would ever tear you from the sweet embraces of your own Virginia,” and predicted that “if you persevere only a little longer in your constancy, your bride will shortly bring forth new and most abundant offspring.” Along with applying public pressure, he urged a second colony in private correspondence. “If you proceed, which I long much to know, in your enterprise of Virginia, your best planting will be about the bay of the Chesapians,” Hakluyt wrote to Raleigh from Paris on December 30, 1586.
His extraordinary reasoning was that Chesapeake Bay offered an easy route to the rich silver mines in the American Southwest that the Spanish were rumored—falsely—to have recently discovered. He still clung to the notion of a narrow-waisted North America. “I am fully persuaded that the land on the back part of Virginia extends nothing so far westward as is put down in the maps of those parts,” he insisted, although by then he had surely been briefed by Harriot and White on the geographic realities. He could not or would not give up an illusion that would persist for another full century.
A week later, January 7, 1587, Raleigh approved an ingenious plan to continue the Virginia colony under his name and royal charter while limiting his financial exposure. He immodestly called it “the Cittie of Raleigh.” This first American corporation mixed a medieval mind-set with modern capitalistic innovation. It also freed Raleigh from investing huge sums of money, or that of his friends, while retaining his position as absentee landlord. The incorporation papers have not survived, but from scraps of information it appears that the new settlers could purchase a share in exchange for five hundred acres of land—a staggering amount in an era when a thirty-acre farm was considered large in land-hungry England. As far as we know, there was no stipulation that the corporation was required to buy or trade the land from the Algonquians, who had lived there since the days Anglo-Saxon speakers arrived in Britain.
The financial burden as well as the physical risk fell primarily on those willing to invest in building a new home across the ocean. Those who could not afford a share, such as small farmers and the urban poor, might have had the option to sign up as indentured servants. They would labor in Virginia to pay back their expenses. This novel approach ultimately proved the model for later English colonies. A second inspiration, which proved just as vital in later successes, was to include women and children to ensure long-term stability and survival.
This time the queen didn’t meddle in the choice of a governor, and Raleigh made a surprising selection of a chief operating officer. The man who would lead the second colony would be John White, an artist with no known managerial or military experience—the polar opposite of Lane.
White lived down the street from St. Paul’s Cathedral and went to church at St. Martin Within Ludgate, dedicated, appropriately, to the patron saint of travelers. He might have come from Cornwall in western England—his common surname makes it hard to be sure—but he was clearly of modest origins. What seems certain is that he trained as a painter of miniatures, a fashionable style in that day, and was a member of the painters’ guild. We don’t, however, have an image of the man who painted so many sensitive portraits.
Long before sailing to Roanoke Island as the expedition artist in 1585, White was fascinated with the New World. A copy of his earliest known watercolors is a striking action scene of Elizabethan soldiers firing muskets on Eskimos floating in kayaks amid ice floes as they deftly aim their arrows at the intruders. The image is so realistic that White might have witnessed the battle that took place during Frobisher’s voyage to the Canadian Arctic in 1577.
By then, he had been married to Thomasine Cooper for more than a decade. Their son, Tom, died in infancy, and a daughter named Eleanor was the only surviving child. Eleanor had just turned fifteen when she wed Ananias Dare, a member of the bricklayer and tilers’ guild, in June 1583, in a church a few blocks from Middle Temple. White quickly became a grandfather when the couple had a son named John and a daughter named Thomasine.
The family lived the comfortable life of middle-class guild members in an upscale neighborhood in the bustling Tudor capital, yet White seemed fatally drawn to North America. An expat French painter who escaped the slaughter at Fort Caroline lived nearby and might have served as his mentor. We know little about White’s travels; in addition to the possible Frobisher trip and the 1585 voyage, he might have been on the reconnaissance mission with Amadas and Barlowe a year earlier. He worked closely with Harriot, on the scientist’s return in 1586, to convert the surveyor’s cartographic data into maps that are both accurate and beautiful.
Wh
ite had a deep and abiding interest in the strange forms of life he encountered in the New World, from swallowtail butterflies to “a fly, which in the night seemeth a flame of fire,” one of the earliest descriptions of the firefly. His portraits of Carolina Algonquians betray an unusual willingness to present the Indians as they were rather than as devilish brutes or idealized Renaissance figures. The watercolors reveal a man who, like the younger Harriot, saw Native Americans as comfortable and competent in their world rather than the barbarous savages imagined by many Europeans of their day.
White oversaw planning for the venture, recruiting colonists and organizing logistics in a frenzy of activity in the winter and spring of 1587. Unusually for that time, the new colony’s leadership team included no gentry, so Raleigh placed a rush order with the College of Arms, which quickly granted each a coat of arms. Despite the widespread rumors of Virginia’s horrors and the impending threat of war with Spain, White seemed to have had little trouble in quickly assembling 150 people willing to make the voyage. A few dozen got cold feet, but about 115 prepared to sail that spring.
Who would leave the safety of Elizabethan England for the uncertainty of the Atlantic and the strange lands beyond? Until recently, we had few clues because most of the settlers were simply names on a list. Given Raleigh’s and White’s ties to the western English counties of Devon and Cornwall, coupled with the plight of dispossessed farmers, most historians guessed that the colonists were country villagers eager for land, with a few London orphans in the mix. That reflects the assumption that you would have had to be desperate to climb aboard a ship bound for the New World in the spring of 1587. After all, a full third of the first Jamestown settlers were gentry, mostly younger sons with no hope of inheritance, and another third were common soldiers who needed employment when the Spanish war finally subsided. The bulk of the passengers on the Mayflower, bound together by a strict set of fundamentalist beliefs, sought refuge as the French Huguenots had done two decades earlier.
But painstaking research of wills and parish records, pioneered by the late historian William Powell, proved otherwise. The 1587 venture was an Elizabethan back-to-the-land movement powered by middle-class Londoners much like White. Many were small-business men, including tailors, lawyers, goldsmiths, and college professors. Some were neighbors near the docks close to the Tower of London, while others worshipped in the same parish on the western end of town near Middle Temple.
The colonists as a whole were remarkable in their sheer ordinariness. They were overwhelmingly middle-class people who owned a house, rental property, or bit of land they could sell to gain a berth on the Virginia voyage. Their goal seems to have been neither to find easy gold nor to worship in peace. They appear driven by an aspiration to climb the social ladder, which in that day meant to become landed gentry. In this practical desire for a better material life, they resembled the Europeans who would follow in their wake in later centuries more than their immediate successors, the Jamestown and Plymouth colonists.
There were four sets of fathers and sons and seven single women. Nine were children, three of whom appear to have been orphans. Six married couples are recorded. The seventeen women included Jane Pierce, who might have been the same person as a Jane Pierce listed as a Londoner who was daughter of a Portuguese merchant named Balthasar Pierce and sister of “Fornando Simon,” suggesting an intriguing link to the pilot Fernandes. At least one nursing mother and two who were pregnant were among these women, including White’s only surviving child, Eleanor Dare. She was in her first trimester and would make the journey with her husband, Ananias, who was also one of White’s assistants. They would leave their young son and daughter behind in London.
They would also be leaving behind one of Europe’s biggest cities, with more than 200,000 people packed into a strip of land three miles long bordering the Thames River. It was famous for its entertainments. Baiting chained bears with ferocious dogs was a “sweet and comfortable recreation” that thrilled Londoners, including Queen Elizabeth. Cockfights provided constant gambling opportunities, while foreign visitors were shocked not just by the plethora of pubs but also by the presence of respectable women eating and drinking within. William Shakespeare was poised to make his entrance into the thriving theater scene; the year the colonists departed, the Rose theater opened on the south bank of the river as one of the country’s first dedicated playhouses. “This city of London is not only brimful of curiosities,” a contemporary Swiss visitor noted, “but so populous also that one simply cannot walk along the streets for the crowd.”
Those crowds, however, made the capital both expensive and deadly. Upper-crust Elizabethans obsessed over the rising numbers that increased rents and spawned regular epidemics of malaria and typhus. Tuberculosis was rampant. In 1593, plague swept the city and killed more than ten thousand people. Less than half the babies born reached their fifth birthday. The queen, scarred from smallpox while still young, complained in 1580 of the “great multitude of people…heaped up together.” These circumstances no doubt made it easier for White to recruit candidates for the Virginia adventure.
The absence of an organized military force and the addition of women and children, along with a civilian leader and the promise of land, gave the White colony a wholly different flavor from the Lane effort. Though he could not have known it, the governor had hit upon a formula that would prove the winning model for the later successes at Jamestown and Plymouth. “Military outposts always failed,” writes Karen Ordahl Kupperman, a New York University historian. “Settlers must come expecting to devote themselves to providing food, shelter, and supplies for the colony.” And that, she adds, was possible only by offering acreage and encouraging families to ensure long-term commitment.
We have only the haziest notion what White hoped to accomplish, but he seems to have envisioned creating an English village on the shores of the Chesapeake, where Harriot had been welcomed the previous winter. They would presumably set to work growing their own food while trading cloth and copper to the Indians in exchange for deerskins, sassafras, and other exports. They clearly intended to stay. White even brought along framed pictures to hang on the walls of his new Virginia home.
Like any back-to-the-land movement dominated by city people, this effort was no doubt powered by a shared vision of a better society. More’s Utopia, long a best seller and itself inspired by New World settlement, might have been a model. The regular practice of slavery and the harsh bias against the indigenous people that More touted might have given the new settlers pause. But his imagined society of prosperous farmers and small-business people who are religiously tolerant and hold no private property likely held strong appeal for White and his colonists.
The new governor was both knowledgeable about and sympathetic to the indigenous people; he also must have known that without their help no English settlement could possibly survive. White might have seen the new colony as a chance to side with Elizabethan England’s better angels after the disastrous death of Wingina. “The whole 1587 project,” asserts Quinn, “paid tribute to his belief that not only were Native Americans and white Europeans compatible, but also that in the future they could look forward to living side by side.”
If he is correct, then the venture was envisioned as an attempt to exist in harmony with rather than in opposition to the indigenous peoples of North America. Instead of focusing on striking it rich or creating a feudal plantation economy, the second Roanoke colony seems the first English experiment in realizing the Eden promised by Chicora. The corporation’s humble motto emblazoned on its coat of arms was “small things flourish by concord.” Of course, “utopia” translated as “no place.”
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A month and a day after Raleigh’s corporation was created, Mary, Queen of Scots, lost her head. While under house arrest by her cousin Elizabeth, Mary had sought to overthrow the Protestant ruler so that she, a pro-Spanish Catholic, cou
ld take the throne. Walsingham orchestrated a plot in which secret missives from her confederates were hidden in beer barrels and delivered to the castle where Mary was confined. Then they were carried out, her treasonous responses hidden within. The revelation forced the queen’s hand. Elizabeth’s decision to execute a person of royal blood under her protection—and Philip’s ally—ensured a massive Spanish reprisal. It also doomed White’s settlers before they even left home.
Rumors quickly spread that a multinational fleet would invade England. Two months after Mary’s death, Drake set sail to plunder the Spanish coast, making a preemptive strike on its armada. He called it “singeing the King of Spain’s beard.” In April, he created havoc in the strategic Spanish port of Cádiz, setting back Spain’s planned invasion by a full year.
Meanwhile, London stevedores were loading three ships just below the Tower of London with the provisions and gear that White’s colonists would need to make it through the following winter. The flagship, the Lion, was a sturdy vessel of 160 tons accompanied by a fly boat, a cargo carrier that could accommodate bulk supplies. A smaller pinnace completed the little fleet. Though dwarfed by the Lane expedition, this single mission still exceeded in tons and personnel the Jamestown expedition that would sail two decades later as well as the Mayflower voyage a dozen years after that.
Departing, the ships worked their way down the river and around the underside of England to the southern harbors of Portsmouth and Plymouth. On May 8, after the final passengers were aboard and the water casks topped off, the vessels began their two-month journey across the Atlantic. Along with the settlers and crew were Manteo and Towaye, returning home after more than half a year in England.
Most of White’s settlers had never been to sea, and the conditions could be stomach churning even when the ocean was calm. Only officers had bunks; the rest made do with a bit of floor space and a wool blanket. The useful Carib innovation of the hammock had yet to catch on. Blankets hung from a line provided the only privacy. Hot food was possible only when the water was not rough, because of the danger of fire. Passengers subsisted mainly on dried biscuits called hardtack along with cheese and beer. Urine and feces collected in the bilge, and storms stirred up the rats that inevitably stowed away.
The Secret Token Page 10
