The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  What do we make of this man who left us with too many riddles, this innovative artist, curious explorer, and bold idealist who persuaded more than one hundred people to leave their conventional lives for an unknown shore? The governor showed tremendous tenacity and bravery, yet he was also a poor manager and incompetent military commander with a marked tendency to blame others, and even given to flashes of paranoia.

  His greatest legacy was not in taking the Lost Colonists to North America but in bringing the New World to the Old. While White was still at sea in 1590, Flemish publisher Theodor de Bry released A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, which combined copper engravings based on White’s 1585 drawings with extended captions by Harriot. An immediate best seller in English, French, German, and Latin, the volume was the first and most popular in a series introducing the New World to a broad European public. Though the Spanish and Portuguese sent accomplished artists on many of their New World missions, both before and after the Roanoke voyages, most of the results remained the equivalent of classified material, stored at secure sites like Philip II’s sumptuous royal library at El Escorial outside Madrid.

  Because of this relative dearth of publicly available images from the Americas, and because de Bry published the White engravings as the first in his series (thanks to the urgings of his friend the pastor Hakluyt), the Carolina Algonquians and their way of life came to represent Native American life for centuries to come, long after disease and violence all but wiped out the people of Ossomocomuck. “If you saw those books in 1590, it was like seeing television for the first time would be for us,” explained Larry Tise, a historian at East Carolina University at Greenville, as we leafed through a first edition at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. “These are action scenes.” The leather-tooled volume indeed was as large as a desktop computer screen. Though the engravings gave White’s portraits a Renaissance makeover, the images still illustrate an entire way of life foreign to Europeans and yet familiar in their everyday activities of hunting, eating, and celebrating that struck a universal chord.

  “They were the best portrayals of American Indians available for centuries, and they were reproduced many times to illustrate studies for Indians far removed from Roanoke,” writes Kupperman, the New York University historian. One later Dutch engraving of an Indonesian village looks suspiciously like Pomeiooc, while an Italian portrayed a dancing West African in 1690 in a pose identical to White’s Algonquian shaman. Some scholars believe the engravings played a role in European concepts about the “noble savage,” a phrase that first appeared not quite a century after Roanoke in a poem by John Dryden, who was almost certainly familiar with the men and women the governor depicted who smiled, danced, and prayed in a kind of Edenic innocence. Not until the great nineteenth-century painters like Frederic Remington and George Catlin did the Plains Indians assume the role of the iconic North American indigenous people.

  White, however, had to live with the knowledge that he was the sole European to lose an entire colony in the New World; even some of Ayllón’s settlers survived their ordeal, as did a few of the French in their misbegotten efforts in the 1570s. Still, the governor ultimately did more than any other single person to shape the way Europeans and European Americans viewed the continent’s Native inhabitants. And as researchers would come to find four hundred years later, his maps still had secrets to reveal.

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  No sooner did White return than theories about the fate of the Lost Colonists began to accumulate like blowing sand, settling around White’s single statement: “I greatly joyed that I had safely found a certain token of their safe being at Croatoan.” His acquaintance the botanist John Gerard argued in 1597 that the settlers survived, but only if “untimely death by murdering, or pestilence, corrupt air, bloody fluxes, or some other mortal sickness hath not destroyed them.” In subsequent centuries, the spectrum of alternatives grew to include peaceful assimilation with the Indians and a fatal attempt to flee to Newfoundland or England aboard small boats. More recently, intricate conspiracy theories to rival those of the Kennedy assassination have emerged, including a plot at Elizabeth’s court to destroy the colony and thereby damage Raleigh’s standing. One investigator is convinced that Raleigh himself conspired to hide the colonists so that they could harvest sassafras for his personal gain without attracting potential competitors. Then there are the perennial pop culture suggestions that typically involve blood and gore and a heady dose of the supernatural, including, of course, vampires. With no accepted academic wisdom, any theory seems as credible as another. This is one of those chapters in American history that invites democratic speculation. “It’s the Area 51 of colonial history,” said Adrian Masters, the University of Texas historian.

  In White’s day, there was one person who expressed surprisingly little interest in the fate of the Lost Colonists: their feudal lord Sir Walter Raleigh. When the governor was searching Roanoke, the knight’s power was at its zenith. But shortly after, he impregnated and secretly married one of the queen’s attendants. The furious Elizabeth, who clearly still had personal feelings for the handsome if haughty knight, threw them both for a time into separate cells in the Tower of London. Raleigh’s star went into a long eclipse.

  Unwelcome at court, he crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 1595. His goal was not to locate his abandoned settlers but to gain gold and glory by finding the realm of El Dorado in the Amazon. During a visit to the Caribbean island of Trinidad before plunging into the Venezuelan jungle, Raleigh plied Spanish traders with bottles of good wine to pump them for intelligence. Not wanting them to know his real destination, he told the men he was “bound only for the relief of those English which I had planted in Virginia.”

  This was, he admitted, merely a convenient way to cover his tracks. After his futile search for treasure, he sailed up the Gulf Stream and right past the Outer Banks. He claimed that “extremity of weather” kept him from landing. Critics of Raleigh, who were legion, sniped at his indifference. Two years after he returned from the Americas, his nemesis Sir Francis Bacon acidly noted, “It is the sinfulest thing in the world to forsake or destitute a plantation once in forwardness, for besides dishonor, it is the guiltiness of blood.” Everyone knew whom he was alluding to.

  Raleigh, by then restored to the queen’s favor, ignored the flack. None of his correspondence after White’s 1590 return mentions the vanished settlers. There was more than callousness in the knight’s lack of interest in searching for the abandoned colonists. His charter from Elizabeth required that he settle Virginia by 1591 to keep his monopoly. If the English there could not be proved dead, then they could be presumed to be alive, and Raleigh’s charter would remain intact. If Raleigh’s attitude is seen in that light, even White’s upbeat statement about the settlers’ certain home on Croatoan might conceivably have been dictated by a powerful patron intent on keeping a hand in the North American game.

  Shortly before Raleigh left for South America, a London court declared White’s son-in-law, Ananias Dare, legally dead so that the settler’s son, John (who was apparently estranged from his presumed grandfather and namesake), could inherit his father’s property. As far as England’s courts were concerned, the settlers were no more. In this era, however, the patronage of a monarch trumped a lowly magistrate’s ruling.

  Raleigh’s charter suddenly seemed potentially lucrative again when the price of sassafras rose to dizzying heights on the European market in the late 1590s. The smooth and slender tree noted by Harriot grows naturally from northern Florida to Maine and prefers the sandy coastal soil. Native Americans made an orange-colored tea with its root to cure everything from acne to urinary-tract infections. The Choctaw of Louisiana later showed French settlers how to use it to thicken their gumbo (filé powder is still made from dried and crushed sassafras leaves). Today we know that in excess sassafras can cause cancer, but in sixteenth-ce
ntury Europe it was considered a miracle drug. A Seville physician publicized its wonders in the 1570s. Harriot touted its “rare virtues in medicine for the cure of many diseases.” It was rumored the root could even remedy the dreaded French pox, the syphilis then ravaging Europe. Soon desperate patients would pay whatever the price to obtain this magical substance. The primary alternative was a heavy dose of mercury, feared for its horrific side effects, which included loss of speech and hearing and, frequently, a slow and painful death.

  At the time of the Roanoke voyages, a pound of sassafras sold for eighteen English pounds a ton. A decade later, the same amount was worth more than three hundred English pounds, or nearly a hundred thousand dollars in today’s currency. With his charter covering much of the North American east coast, Raleigh held a monopoly over other English competitors. He even impounded the stock of one merchant who obtained more than a ton of sassafras in New England. He sued the interloper, citing his legal claim to the shipment. “All ships and goods are confiscate that shall trade there without my leave,” he wrote to a member of Elizabeth’s Privy Council, adding that his competitor’s attempt to dump a huge cargo on the market would depress prices and ruin his own profits.

  Raleigh’s interest in Virginia, dormant for well over a decade, swiftly revived. “I shall yet live to see it an English nation,” he valiantly wrote in 1602. This patriotic sentiment coincided with the collapse of his ambitious Irish colony, which he sold the same year. Raleigh was desperate for cash. Under the guise of seeking the vanished settlers, he sent a ship that same year to the Outer Banks. What was stuffed into its hold reveals the mission’s real purpose: thirty-two pounds of copper to trade with Native Americans, along with knives, hatchets, shovels, and saws useful for harvesting sassafras roots.

  The vessel’s itinerary offers further proof of Raleigh’s priorities; the crew arrived at a cape far to the south of Croatoan and spent a leisurely month trading for and collecting the pharmaceutical. Only when the hold was filled did the captain turn north. In a replay of White’s misadventure, bad weather snapped at least one of the anchor cables, which “forced and feared them from searching the port of Hatarask, to which they were sent,” according to a contemporary account. The cargo, some of which was shipped to Germany, would have earned Raleigh a handsome return. But before he could collect the proceeds, Elizabeth died. Her successor, King James I—son of the beheaded Mary, Queen of Scots—revoked his Virginia charter and locked him in the Tower. The new ruler despised Raleigh’s arrogance and aggressive stance toward Spain. Before the year was out, the courtier had been charged, tried, and found guilty of treason. He kept his head—for now—but spent the next dozen years inside the Bloody Tower, albeit in relative luxury, composing his History of the World in a high-backed chair in front of a comfortable fire and with frequent visits from his family and friends, including the loyal Harriot. He never directly mentioned the Roanoke settlers again in writing.

  Londoners, however, did not wholly forget their deserted countrymen. Memory enough remained for the famous playwright Ben Jonson to co-author a 1605 smash comedy referencing the Lost Colonists. Eastward Hoe relates a botched effort by two naive shysters with the telling names of Spendall and Scapethrift to sail for the New World and make their fortune. (Curiously, one of White’s vanished settlers was a man called Spendlove.)

  Captain Seagull assures them that in Virginia “gold is more plentiful there than copper is with us.” Even the chamber pots, he maintains, are pure gold. This skewered not just Virginia’s notorious lack of gold but Thomas More’s Utopia, in which prisoners are bound with golden chains and citizens do their nightly business in golden chamber pots. What for Elizabethans had begun as the promise of a New World Eden was now an illusion to be mocked.

  “Why, is she inhabited already with any English?” asks Spendall, playing the straight man.

  “A whole country of English is there, man, bred of those that were left there in ’79,” replies Seagull, misstating the correct date but revealing that the colony’s loss was still common knowledge in London’s pubs. “They have married with the Indians, and make ’em bring forth as beautiful faces as any we have in England; and therefore the Indians are so in love with ’em that all the treasure they have they lay at their feet.” The racist assumption that the English added welcome beauty to the Native American gene pool posited that the settlers not only survived but prospered by joining the indigenous people. This was the first recorded suggestion that the colonists didn’t die, but assimilated with the indigenous people. During the play’s extended run, Virginia Dare, if she still lived, would have turned eighteen.

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  Precisely twenty years passed from the time the Lost Colonists arrived on Roanoke until the English launched a new venture in the Americas. The next generation of leaders ended the long and costly Anglo-Spanish war. Pirating was again illegal and no longer as profitable. Investors once more cast an eye toward the North American shore. By then, the elder Hakluyt at Middle Temple was dead, while Grenville had perished in a Spanish attack and Fernandes vanished off the Azores. White faded into Irish obscurity; no one knows where or when he died and was buried. Lane died a few months after his queen, though his tomb in Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral has since been lost.

  Despite the long interval, the revived effort was in many ways a continuation of Raleigh’s vision. Pastor Hakluyt, now a middle-aged cleric, was deeply involved. “You must have great care not to offend the naturals,” he warned the newly formed London Company, which also called in Harriot for consultation. Many of the organizers were again Middle Temple members, and the place they chose to settle was the one originally intended for the 1587 mission: Chesapeake Bay.

  Ironically, instead of the Cittie of Raleigh, the name for the first permanent English settlement in the New World would be the City of James, named for the old knight’s jailer. Odder still, it was a family friend of Raleigh’s who found the first fresh evidence of the lost settlers since White noted the carving on the tree at Roanoke.

  Tall and sickly, the twenty-seven-year-old George Percy had a long pale face on which he wore a short dark mustache. Percy’s older brother, the Earl of Northumberland, shared the Tower with Raleigh for his suspected ties to Catholic terrorists. Known as the “wizard earl” for his interest in chemistry and math, Northumberland became his close friend and Harriot’s new patron. The loyal scientist paid frequent visits to his jailed benefactors while living on Northumberland’s grand estate on London’s outskirts. A “blackamore” lived there with the earl for a time, before his incarceration; this may be a reference to a stay by Manteo during his second trip to England in 1586 and 1587.

  If so, then George Percy might have met the Indian as a young child. He certainly knew all about the Roanoke voyages from Raleigh and his father, as well as from listening to his elders tell stories in Middle Temple Hall, when he too became a member of this inn of court. Like many younger sons with little hope for an inheritance, and perhaps fired by the talk of the New World that dominated his childhood, Percy joined an expedition bound for Virginia to seek his fortune.

  In 1606, James granted the London Company the right to settle the area between the southern tip of the Outer Banks and present-day Long Island. Wary of irritating Spain, which still claimed most of North America, the king declined to support the venture, which was funded solely by private investors. But he did issue a charter granting territory that was not his to give. “They shall have all the lands, woods, soil, grounds, havens, ports, rivers, mines, minerals, marshes, water, fishing, commodities…whatsoever…and shall and may inhabit and remain there.” As with Raleigh’s charter, this blanket gift ensured conflict with the Algonquians they would encounter. The following April, three ships loaded with 143 men and boys anchored off a swampy peninsula upriver from Chesapeake Bay, one hundred miles northwest of Roanoke Island.

  The territory controlled by a
small tribe called the Paspahegh was part of a larger confederation that dominated much of the coastal plain of today’s Virginia and led by the king the English called Powhatan. A week after landing along the Powhatan River, which the English renamed the James, the newcomers organized a party to explore upriver with the hope that the Pacific lay within easy reach. (Hakluyt was still beating that dead horse.)

  As the expedition made its way inland, Percy spotted “a savage boy about the age of ten years, which had a head of hair of a perfect yellow and a reasonable white skin, which is a miracle amongst all savages.” Many historians have long taken his sighting as confirmation that some of the Roanoke colonists migrated to the Chesapeake, spreading their genes in the process.

  As with so many Lost Colony myths, this one came to be accepted through centuries of repetition. What was not understood until recently is that albinism is far more prevalent among Native Americans than other groups. Among today’s Hopi in the Southwest of the United States, for example, the rate is one in two hundred compared with one in thirty-six thousand for European Americans. Yellow hair and white skin are the hallmarks of the genetic trait. Percy is much more likely to have seen an albino child than the progeny of Raleigh’s settlers.