The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  The ships, navigated by Fernandes, made their way south past the French coast to pick up the trade winds off Portugal to carry them to the Caribbean. Off Portugal, a dreadful storm lashed White’s ships, separating the fly boat from the flagship and pinnace. The rough seas likely produced nightmarish bouts of nausea for passengers (no less for the heavily pregnant Eleanor Dare and Margery Harvye) in their dark and filthy hold as their vessel careened over the surging waves.

  They likely passed Drake’s fleet as it returned to England after the admiral’s assault on Cádiz. The war had now come to Spain, but Philip remained concerned about reports of an English pirate haven on the North American east coast. His formidable intelligence network had informed him of Lane’s expedition two years prior, though not the exact location of the settlement or that it had been abandoned the previous year. Spanish intelligence suggested the second colony was to be placed in a different spot. “It is to be feared that, if [Grenville] has established a settlement on the coast, the fact that he has changed its site is no indication of a decision to abandon it, but rather of his intention to improve his position,” Philip wrote in a memo. And so, the day before White and his colonists set sail, Florida’s governor departed St. Augustine with orders from the king to find these English trespassers. If the Spanish had their way, they could eliminate this menace to their treasure ships before the invasion of England was under way. He and White’s settlers made their way toward the Outer Banks at the same time, unaware of each other.

  As the settlers endured the rolling deck and bad food, White and Fernandes bickered their way across the Atlantic. In his account of the voyage—the only one we have—the governor hints darkly that the Portuguese pilot sabotaged the mission at every turn.

  Tension came to a head on July 22, 1587, two months after their departure, when the flagship and the pinnace at last anchored in the Outer Banks off Port Ferdinando (White pointedly insisted on calling it Hatteras rather than pay tribute to his pilot). According to the governor, he intended only a brief halt at the former Lane colony in order to check on the fifteen men Grenville left behind and to gather intelligence on “the state of the country and savages.” After that, the ships would continue north “to the Bay of the Chesapeake, where we intended to make our seat and our fort, according to the charge given among other directions in writing, under the hand of Sir Walter Raleigh.”

  What took place next is one of the most mystifying moments in early American history. As a party of settlers led by White boarded the pinnace for the short trip across the Pamlico Sound to Roanoke, “a gentleman by the means of Fernandes”—sent, it would seem, as a messenger to do the pilot’s dirty work—“called to the sailors in the pinnace.” This unnamed person “who was appointed to return to England” leaned over the flagship’s rail and ordered the pinnace crew “not to bring any of the settlers back again, but leave them in the island, except the governor and two or three such as he approved, saying that the summer was far spent, wherefore he would land all the planters in no other place.”

  White does not identify the mystery man, but adds that Fernandes then “persuaded” the sailors to follow these orders. The shocking news that the settlers were to be dumped on an island surrounded by vengeful Indians, in direct opposition to Raleigh’s orders and White’s well-laid plans, is as astonishing as the governor’s response to the sudden crisis. “Wherefore it booted not the governor to contend with them,” White writes haughtily in the third person, “but passed to Roanoke.”

  By meekly accepting the decision, he helped undermine the entire venture. Wingina’s assassination the previous year by Lane and his men made Roanoke Island a dangerous place for the English, as the new governor would have heard firsthand from Harriot. The Europeans had been welcomed warmly during the first two voyages but could now expect quite different treatment. Ever since, historians have chastised White for weak leadership and lambasted Fernandes for his betrayal of Raleigh and the innocent colonists—a view that lay unchallenged for centuries.

  After conceding the fight to Fernandes, White and his ill-fated party arrived on Roanoke at sunset and made camp. The next morning, they walked warily to the island’s north end, “where Master Ralph Lane had his fort.” The settlement was strangely quiet. None of the fifteen men Grenville had left behind were to be found, alive at least. There was a set of bleached bones of a person “which the savages had slain long before.” The fort was “raised down,” or dismantled, while the houses stood intact but vacant. Deer grazed on melons that had grown up in the ruins. Making the best of a bad situation, White ordered the settlers to repair the existing homes and build new cottages.

  Two days later, the third ship arrived at Port Ferdinando, and all the colonists disembarked after the long sea voyage. Three days after that, White’s assistant George Howe, who might have been the colony’s designated artist, foolishly took a solo walk. After strolling along the shore for a couple of miles, he removed his clothes and waded into the warm water to spear crabs. A party of Indians riddled him with sixteen arrows and crushed his skull with their wooden swords. His son, also named George, became the first English child orphaned in America.

  The murder was clearly revenge for Wingina’s death and a message that the English were no longer welcome by his people or their allies. A shaken White sent a delegation of twenty-one men led by Stafford, the man who had spotted Drake’s fleet, to Manteo’s people on Croatoan to find out what happened to the rest of Grenville’s men “and the disposition of the people toward us.” When the English beached their vessel, the inhabitants aimed their bows and arrows at the party “as though they would fight with us,” but fled when the English raised their guns.

  Manteo, dressed as a European, intervened, calling out in his native tongue. They rushed forward to embrace the visitors and begged the English not to “gather or spill any of their corn, for that they had but little.” This was either a sign of famine, brought on by a drought that researchers suspect began that year, or a response to Lane’s demands that they feed his settlers the previous year.

  The Croatoan took the English to a nearby village, where, despite their worries about the corn supply, they “feasted us after their manner.” They also pointedly showed their guests a paralyzed man whom the English shot during the attack on Wingina. The Indians used tattoos to mark their clan and tribe, markings that White had carefully drawn the previous year. Knowing that the English couldn’t read these markings, they asked for a “token or badge” they could wear to avoid mistaken identities in the future and prevent bloodshed. Unfortunately, no one acted on the practical idea.

  The next morning, the Croatoan elders explained that after Grenville departed, a coalition of mainland tribes sent thirty men to ambush the remaining English. As the others hid, two Indians stepped forward to greet the Europeans. While embracing, one of the Native Americans pulled out a wooden sword hidden under his cloak and killed the colonist on the spot. His English colleague managed to escape and warn his companions.

  The surprise attack turned into an extended Wild West shoot-out. The English rushed into their building containing food supplies and ammunition. For an hour they held off the enemy, shooting through its windows and doors. Then the Indians set the structure on fire, forcing them to flee. For another hour the two groups battled it out within the thick forest. One of Grenville’s men was shot in the mouth and died, while a “fire arrow”—evidently from an English bow—killed an Indian. Though we associate bows and arrows with Native Americans, every Englishman of the day between ages seven and sixty-two was required to know how to use the weapons.

  Eventually, the nine remaining English were able to scramble into a nearby boat and make for Port Ferdinando. On the way they picked up the four others, who had been oystering in a nearby creek. Rowing hard, they reached a sandbar close to the port and stopped to rest. Then they left, “whither, as yet we know not,” reported the Croatoan. This group of
thirteen men was never heard from again.

  The attackers were Wingina supporters led by Wanchese, the same Indian who had spent much of a year in London and who vanished as soon as he returned to America in 1585. His allies included members of other villages on the mainland. The English naively wanted bygones to be bygones and proposed a peace conference. Croatoan leaders agreed to let them know within a week if their enemies would be willing to negotiate.

  White waited impatiently at Roanoke for a response to his proposal, worried that not responding to Howe’s murder invited more retaliation. When the week passed without word, White, borrowing from Lane’s playbook, prepared a preemptive attack on Wingina’s people at Dasemunkepeuc. At midnight on August 9, he and a party of two dozen men, including Manteo, crossed the same water separating Roanoke from the mainland that Lane had a year before. Before dawn, they crept toward a low fire burning in the village center where a few figures squatted around the flames.

  When the English charged, the surprised Indians quickly scattered into the thick reeds nearby. Following close behind, the settlers managed to shoot one man before an Indian recognized Stafford and called out. These were not their rivals after all, but Croatoan, subjected yet again to friendly fire. White offered the weak excuse that the mistake was inevitable, “it being so dark…and the men and woman appareled all so like others.”

  In fact, Wanchese and his people had fled their village after Howe’s death, fearing just such an English reprisal. The Croatoan were busy looting what was left behind. Manteo had inadvertently guided an attack against his own people, including a Croatoan leader and his wife, who was carrying an infant on her back. While Manteo was “somewhat grieved,” he “imputed their harm to their own folly.” If the tribal leaders had kept their promise and reported to White within a week, he scolded, they would have avoided harm.

  A series of joyous celebrations the next week took the colonists’ minds off their tenuous situation. At Raleigh’s request, White had Manteo baptized and named Lord of Roanoke and Dasemunkepeuc “in reward of his faithful service.” This move gave him ostensible control over what had been the core of Wingina’s territory.

  Five days later, on August 18, Eleanor Dare gave birth. “Because this child was the first Christian born in Virginia, she was named Virginia,” her grandfather wrote. It is the only mention we have of the girl. The baptism, presumably by White because no pastor is known to have come with the company, took place less than a week later. Soon after, Harvye gave birth to a child as well, although the gender and name went unrecorded.

  With the settlers now situated, Fernandes prepared the ships to depart for England, his work complete. But “some controversies rose between the governor and the assistants,” wrote White, again using the third person. The colonists felt they needed additional provisions and colonists to improve their long-term prospects. White at first persuaded Christopher Cooper, possibly a relation, to depart with Fernandes and act on the colony’s behalf, but his friends persuaded him that evening not to leave. Instead, the next day, the entire community went to White and “with one voice requested him to return himself into England.”

  White refused, saying his enemies would “slander falsely both him and the action.” The governor feared he would be accused of leading “so many into a country in which he never meant to stay himself, and there to leave them behind him.” This is to say nothing of what surely, on a personal level, must have been an agonizing thought: the prospect of abandoning his daughter and infant granddaughter on a remote island amid Indians intent on driving them out.

  White had trunks containing his armor, framed drawings, and maps, and he argued that his “stuff and goods might be spoiled and most of it pilfered away” were he to leave. The governor noted that the settlers “intended to remove 50 miles further up into the main presently.” This is the first mention of a plan to abandon Roanoke Island and move into the interior, a Plan B evidently hammered out when it became clear they would not be going to the Chesapeake after all. Whether this was to be a temporary move to inland winter quarters with Native American allies or a permanent resettlement is unclear.

  The colonists promised to safeguard White’s trunks and signed a formal document addressed to the queen’s subjects explaining the governor’s departure as “most requisite and necessary for the good and happy planting of us.” He reluctantly yielded. White never mentions who was to take charge in his absence. Nor does he record his farewell to Eleanor and baby Virginia two days later. He would never see any of them again.

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  The governor refused to travel back to England on the flagship with the detested Fernandes, choosing instead the smaller fly boat. A voyage normally lasting six weeks or so proved a three-month nightmare of sickness and starvation, and when the ship miraculously drifted into an Irish harbor, many of the crew were dead or dying. The delay proved devastating. By the time he reached London in November, word that the Spanish Armada was nearing completion had arrived before him. The queen had just issued an order prohibiting all vessels from leaving England until the threat of Spanish invasion passed.

  White doubtless pleaded with Raleigh to obtain an exemption for an immediate resupply mission. The courtier was in a position to do so; as the new captain of the Queen’s Guard, he filled a prestigious post that kept him by her side. He was, however, busy with court politics and his ambitious new Irish colonization scheme. White and his settlers would have to wait.

  That winter, Sir Richard Grenville secured a waiver to attack the Spanish in the Caribbean, and the governor won a green light to tag along with the convoy. He rapidly pulled together a ship, supplies, and additional colonists to travel in the safety of the fleet and then peel off north to Virginia. In March 1588, the ships bobbed in the harbor just below Bideford in Devon, but contrary winds kept the ships in port.

  Orders arrived from London on March 31 commanding Grenville’s fleet to join a defensive force being assembled by the navy in Plymouth. Yet again, White was delayed. When the Royal Navy deemed two of the smaller ships unworthy of military action, the desperate governor cut a deal with the captains to take him to Virginia, along with seven male colonists and four women and provisions. Carrying letters of encouragement from Raleigh, he set off in late April aboard the little Brave, accompanied by a second ship. Traveling without a convoy during a war, on vessels run by privateers, was an enormous risk. As soon as the ships were offshore, the crews began to hunt for merchant prey. On May 6, off the Moroccan coast, they crossed a larger and better-armed French ship that chased and caught the Brave. A bloody deck fight ensued.

  “I myself was wounded twice in the head, once with a sword and another time with a pike, and hurt also in the side of the buttock with a shot,” White reports. One of the would-be settlers fared worse, receiving a dozen wounds. In all, nearly two dozen of the crew were killed or grievously injured. The victors stripped the ship of all its weapons and the colonists’ supplies, and the crew and passengers limped back to Bideford. All England was preparing for a Spanish invasion, and a further mission was out of the question until the danger passed. A disconsolate White remained in England, imagining the Virginia planters “were not a little distressed” at his absence.

  A day after the governor’s pirate battle off Morocco, the Spanish launched a second attempt, from Florida, to locate the English trespassers on the eastern coast. The effort the previous year by St. Augustine’s governor had failed to reach Chesapeake Bay. Now, with rumors in the Madrid court that the English had found a mountain made of diamonds, as well as a passage to the Pacific, their search took on an added urgency. A Spanish sailor taken prisoner by Grenville in 1586 and later released reported “the reason why the English have settled there is…because on the mainland there is much gold and so that they may pass from the North to the South Sea, which they say and understand is nearby; thus making themselves strong through the discove
ry of great wealth.” Philip ordered an experienced forty-five-year-old commander named Vicente González to conduct another reconnaissance mission. González and his crew of thirty left St. Augustine and reached the Chesapeake, possibly traveling as far as today’s Washington, D.C., but they found no sign of the English.

  A powerful west wind caught the ship as it sailed back into the Atlantic for the long journey home. Fearful that they would be pushed far out to sea, González ordered his crew to furl the sails and take down the two masts to reduce wind resistance. Then they began the arduous task of rowing for land, in the middle of the night and into the teeth of the sharp gusts whipping over the dark waves. All the while they had to keep a lookout for the treacherous shoals lining the coast south of the Chesapeake. As dawn broke on July 1, 1588, the exhausted men sighted land. They made for a cove that promised refuge from the wind and waves.

  On a nearby barrier island, the crew spotted a wooden slipway used for repairing small vessels and several wells sunk into the sand with English-style barrels. Along with these telltale signs of a colony were “other debris indicating that a considerable number of people had been there,” according to a later Spanish account of the voyage. Through sheer luck, González had rowed blind through a stormy night and stumbled on Port Ferdinando.

  The once-bustling staging point for the Roanoke settlement now lay deserted; nearly a year had passed since White and Fernandes had weighed anchor there. Yet González did not pursue his serendipitous discovery by seeking out the main settlement, though he describes seeing a wooded arm of land that almost certainly was Roanoke. He reports no cooking fires that would signal the island was then occupied. Had the settlers abandoned their town? Were they dead? In hiding? Or were they waiting in ambush for the Spanish to investigate? Rather than find out, González and his men spent the midsummer’s day on the beach before eventually departing.