The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  A more solid lead appeared a few months later, in December 1607. This time it was Percy’s hated rival, Captain John Smith, who stumbled on exciting intelligence that pointed to surviving colonists.

  Smith was Percy’s age, but that is where the similarities ended. The stocky redhead with a full red beard was a hardy mercenary who’d left his family’s small farm in eastern England to battle Ottomans in central Europe. He served as a cavalry captain and won a knighthood from the grateful Christian king of Transylvania. Later captured by Turkish soldiers and enslaved, he escaped and walked to Russia before returning to England. Bored with life in London, he joined the Jamestown expedition and became the practical and experienced leader the colony needed.

  While mapping the area, Smith and two English companions, with their Indian guide, were attacked by an Indian hunting party. The others were killed in a brief but fierce fight, and Opechancanough, the brother of the confederation leader, Powhatan, captured Smith. Later described as “a man of large stature, noble presence, and extraordinary parts…perfectly skilled in the art of governing,” the elderly warrior was impressed by Smith’s courage. He not only spared the Englishman’s life but told him of “certain men clothed at a place called Ocanahonan, clothed like me.” By clothed, the Indian meant they wore European-style dress.

  When Smith was brought to Powhatan’s capital, ten miles north of Jamestown, the king confirmed his brother’s report and added that they wore “short coats, and sleeves to the elbows, [and] passed that way in ships like ours.” They lived “to the south part of the back sea,” six days from Roanoke.

  Powhatan also told Smith of an intriguing country to the south called Anone, “where they have abundance of brass, and houses walled as ours.” Whether this referred to Lost Colonists or Spanish towns in South Carolina and Florida wasn’t clear. But the news fired Smith’s resolve to look for the vanished settlers.

  After he was inducted as an honorary tribal leader—a scene that Smith later rewrote as an execution halted in a dramatic intercession by Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas—the captain returned to Jamestown the day after New Year’s 1608. Nearly two out of three men were dead from sickness and starvation, and a fire soon broke out that damaged their dwindling supplies. Despite the dire situation, Smith pursued his Roanoke leads. This enthusiasm might have been more tactical than humanitarian; linking up with Raleigh’s settlers might have strengthened the rapidly weakening position of the English.

  What happened next depends on which John Smith you are reading. He wrote several versions of his time in Virginia, culminating in his 1624 tract with the Pocahontas scene that reads like a romance novel, in which Smith is the indomitable hero. His earlier accounts of Jamestown are terse but seem more reliable. “We had agreed with the king of Paspahegh to conduct two of our men to a place called Panawicke beyond Roonok,” he wrote in a 1608 report, “where he reported many men to be apparelled”—dressed in the European style.

  Panawicke was apparently a place southwest of Roanoke Island on the mainland, west of Croatoan Island, and more than a hundred miles due south of Jamestown. They barely made it across the James River. After crossing, their guide, “playing the villain, and deluding us for rewards,” went off on his own. He returned three or four days later with no news. Taking strangers into the territory to the south, outside Powhatan’s confederation, might have proved too dangerous.

  A slightly later account by Smith mentions that “southward we went to some parts of Chawonock and the Mangoags to search for them left by Sir Walter Raleigh.” The Chawonock, or Chowanoke, were the same tribe Lane encountered in 1585 along the Chowan River. The Mangoags, or Mangoaks, were Iroquoian speakers who lived to the west and went by the name Tuscarora (“Mangoak” was a Carolina Algonquian epithet meaning “rattlesnake”). Smith apparently didn’t feel whatever information he gleaned was solid enough to warrant a further search. When he set off in June 1608 to explore the region, he headed north instead, up Chesapeake Bay, rather than south to Albemarle Sound and Roanoke Island, to locate the presumed Lost Colonists.

  But before Smith left on this mapping expedition, he mailed a letter to England that included a large rough-drawn sketch of eastern Virginia and North Carolina. The original has long since vanished, but in a major intelligence coup Spain’s ambassador in London, Don Pedro Zúñiga, copied the classified document and sent it to King Philip III. It includes the only known image of the triangular Jamestown fort.

  The table-sized chart, rediscovered in a Spanish archive in 1890, offers a marriage of Smith’s clues with his cartography. The Chesapeake Bay region of Virginia is drawn with surprising accuracy. On the south bank of the James River is the notation “Here Pasaphege and 2 of our own men landed to go to Pananiock.” This is a reference to the expedition mentioned by Smith that stalled on the south shore of the James River. But the rivers and sounds in North Carolina are pictured with imprecision. A tiny circle off the coast marked as “Roonock” marks Roanoke Island. But the long stretch of the Outer Banks, including Hatteras and Croatoan, is entirely missing. The broad Albemarle Sound—more than ten miles in width—is drawn as narrow as the James River. No European who actually crossed this body of water could make that mistake. This is mapmaking by hearsay, based on secondhand Native American information rather than on-site exploration.

  A river flowing into the Albemarle has the word “Ocanahonan” scribbled alongside it, the name mentioned by Powhatan and his brother as a place where men in European-style dress were said to be. To the south is another stream called the Morattic. This is no doubt the Moratuc River that Lane and his men explored in their search for copper and a path to the Pacific. Between these two rivers is another notation. “Here the King of Pasapahegh reported our men to be, and want to go.” Finally, in an area on the mainland south of Roanoke, along a river called the Pakrahwick, is this last and strangely specific note: “Here remaineth four men clothed that came from Roonock to Ocanahonan.”

  By the fall of 1608, after he was elected colony president, Smith wrote to London that he was skeptical the Jamestown settlers would find “the south sea, a mine of gold, or any of them sent by Sir Walter Raleigh.” Instead, he focused on securing food and building a fragile peace with Powhatan. He taught his men the Virginia Algonquian phrase for “I am very hungry. What shall I eat?” Injured the following year in a gunpowder explosion, Smith left Virginia in August 1609 and reluctantly turned over leadership to the incompetent Percy. The young gentleman ordered the Paspahegh queen killed and her children executed “by throwing them overboard and shooting out their brains in the water,” he noted without regret. The settlers, meanwhile, descended into “the starving time” and “a world of miseries.” Despite his personal ties to Raleigh and Harriot, there was no time for the new commander to continue the search for survivors. He and his men would be lucky enough to survive the winter.

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  Jamestown was poised to go the way of Roanoke, another expensive private venture that failed. Spain’s military and intelligence leaders urged Philip III to strike while the settlement was weakened, but the cautious monarch bet that the latest English effort would collapse of its own accord, like its predecessor. He didn’t want to risk war over this remote edge of empire. Instead, he sent a reconnaissance mission to gather intelligence on the English.

  Shortly before Smith left Virginia, in July 1609, the Spanish ship encountered an English vessel guarding Chesapeake Bay and turned back to St. Augustine as a deadly hurricane moved up the coast. The same storm pummeled a fleet of large London Company ships on their way to reinforce Jamestown with new settlers and supplies. The three-hundred-ton flagship Sea Venture wrecked on Bermuda, seven hundred miles east of the Chesapeake.

  The castaways included Sir Thomas Gates, the new acting governor for the colony, as well as Machumps, who was returning from England as a representative of his brother-in-law Powhatan. Smith lat
er reported that while on Bermuda, Machumps murdered another Native American, a young favorite of the chief’s, and “made a hole to bury him, because it was too short he cut off his legs and laid them by him.” He had little good to say about this “villainous” youth, whom he must have known during his Jamestown days. Some scholars believe that Machumps is Shakespeare’s model for the wild man of The Tempest, Caliban, enslaved by the magician Prospero.

  The bard’s inspiration for the story itself, which takes place on a distant island after a shipwreck, can be traced to a letter written by another castaway, William Strachey. A literary man down on his luck, the thirty-seven-year-old Londoner had matched wits with Jonson, poet John Donne, and possibly Shakespeare himself at the famed Mermaid Tavern. He surely knew the story of Roanoke and would have seen Jonson’s play Eastward Hoe. But debts led him to board the ship to Virginia to start fresh; one can imagine Jonson and his friends teasing Strachey before his departure for chasing after golden chamber pots.

  The stranded men built two boats on the Bermuda beach and limped into Jamestown in May 1610, horrified to find only sixty of the colony’s three hundred inhabitants alive. An extended drought likely exacerbated the suffering, along with Percy’s poor leadership. Gates ordered Jamestown immediately abandoned, as Lane had done on Roanoke in 1586. But while Lane missed the long-awaited supply vessel by days, Gates spotted an English fleet arriving in the Chesapeake just as he and his men were departing. With three hundred new colonists and plenty of provisions, he ordered his ship to return to Jamestown. Of such near hits and misses is history often made.

  Gates’s instructions from London contained startling news. The document provided detail on the whereabouts of the Lost Colonists and called for him to move Virginia’s capital to their territory in the south. He was to engage Indian guides and travel south to “a town called Ohonahorn” or “Oconahoen,” located upstream from the Albemarle Sound. This seems to be the same English settlement mentioned to Smith by Powhatan and his brother. One oddity is that the latitude mentioned is that of Croatoan Island and the western mainland rather than that of the Albemarle Sound. “You shall find a brave and fruitful seat every way inaccessible by a stronger enemy” and abundant in silk grass and other commodities, the company men wrote. “Here we suppose, if you make your principal and chief seat, you shall do most safely and richly.”

  A capital here had two advantages. First, it lay near “the rich copper mines of Ritanoc,” and, second, it lay near “Peccareamicke, where you shall find four of the English alive, left by Sir Walter Raleigh who escaped the slaughter of Powhatan of Roanoke, upon the first arrival of our colony, and live under the protection of a werowance,” or tribal leader. This chief, said to be an enemy of Powhatan’s, would never give up his English captives. “If you find them not, yet search into the country,” apparently meaning more to the south. Not only were some of White’s settlers alive, the London document suggested, but Powhatan murdered many just before the English arrived in 1607. The instructions blithely move on to discuss the proper manner of manuring the settlers’ fields.

  A second and just as curious piece of intelligence emerged in England while the castaways were still on Bermuda. Worried about the negative publicity around Jamestown, the London Company drafted a “true and sincere declaration” including the dramatic news that “some of our nation planted by Sir Walter Raleigh, yet alive, within fifty miles of our [Jamestown] fort, who can open the womb and bowels of this country.”

  That would have placed the surviving Lost Colonists near the upper Chowan River in the vicinity of today’s state line separating Virginia from North Carolina. The bombshell allegedly came from two Jamestown men sent to find the Roanoke settlers. Though “denied by the savages speech with them,” the expedition found “crosses and letters the characters and assured testimonies of Christians newly cut into the barks of trees.” This astonishing announcement, with its mention of carvings on trees like the ones White observed, implied that Raleigh’s survivors could help the struggling Jamestown colony locate copper, iron, and silk grass that would prove profitable exports.

  Despite these dramatic revelations, interest in searching for the Lost Colonists cooled after Smith left Virginia in the summer of 1609 and the dreadful starving time commenced. Captain Samuel Argall apparently led an expedition to the Chowan River the following year, but the outcome is unknown. Jamestown remained the capital, and the area to the south remained largely unexplored by the English. Despite rumors of their survival, the Roanoke colonists remained elusive.

  By the time Strachey left Virginia in 1611, the search for the Raleigh settlers was effectively over. In 1612, Strachey wrote his Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia (dedicated to Percy’s older brother, who was still incarcerated in the Tower with Raleigh), echoing the claims in Gates’s instructions and the London Company declaration and including a few more choice details.

  Strachey blames Powhatan’s priests for persuading Powhatan to murder “men, women, and children of the first plantation at Roanoke.” This was done, he adds, “without any offense” to Raleigh’s settlers, who for “twenty and odd years had peaceably lived intermixed with those savages, and were out of his territory.” (The secretary also takes John White to task for abandoning his search for “these unfortunate and betrayed people” in order to go pirating.) He reports that James I was apprised of the gruesome massacre. The king agreed to spare Powhatan but demanded the death of his priests who led him to “that bloody cruelty.” Strachey goes on to say that four men, two boys, “and one young maid” escaped the Virginia Algonquian leader’s wrath and lived under a chief’s protection at Ritanoe—apparently the same as Ritanoc—where they “beat his copper.”

  London Company officials, however, refused to publish Strachey’s account; the work did not go public for nearly two centuries. There is no evidence that his shocking charges led to any immediate reprisals against Powhatan’s people. In fact, the leader’s beloved daughter Pocahontas, kidnapped by the English in 1613, married Jamestown settler John Rolfe —an odd match if the father of the bride was suspected of having the blood of English innocents on his hands. She was treated with respect on her later visit to London, where she had a tearful reunion with Smith and died of a European sickness.

  Smith, who knew Powhatan better than any European, never publicly accused the Native American leader of any such massacre, even after the leader’s death in 1618. Nor did Smith give much credence to surviving Raleigh colonists.

  Who, then, was the source of the intelligence? All signs point to Machumps as the one who fed both London Company officials and Strachey with the details of the massacre and the enslaved survivors. He was in London prior to the sailing of the Sea Venture on a diplomatic mission. Whether the intelligence is reliable, however, is another matter.

  We know almost nothing of the young man, aside from his alleged role in murdering a compatriot. Smith clearly felt that Machumps was, at best, a person with his own hidden agenda. The language barrier might have led to misunderstandings. This ambitious member of the royal family might also have been playing a strategic game to knock Powhatan off his throne and benefit from English support. Encouraging the English to shift south would take the pressure off the confederation that was struggling to cope with the unpredictable invaders. Likely less monster than Machiavelli, Machumps remained close to the English even after his return from England—and, tellingly, kept his distance from Powhatan.

  In the four years following Powhatan’s death, the English population surged from a few hundred to nearly fifteen hundred people. With tobacco as a kind of “vegetable gold” driving an economic boom, commerce with Native Americans grew less important than clearing forest and appropriating Indian fields. Virginia Algonquians were increasingly unwelcome strangers in their own land, debilitated by Old World disease while drawn to the exotic material goods, including alcohol, offered by the Europeans in exchange for pelts an
d much-needed corn. As late as 1621, a directive from London warned the settlers to cease their dependence on the locals, a dependence that made the English vulnerable. The next year, Opechancanough—the same man who first captured Smith—executed a bold and carefully coordinated attack on the English settlements up and down the James River. Nearly one in four of the settlers died. The massacre ended all English pretensions to living peacefully with the indigenous people.

  Meanwhile, an Anglican cleric named Samuel Purchas took up Hakluyt’s colonization cause when the latter died, but he ignored his predecessor’s admonition that the settlers should “have great care not to offend the naturals.” In a popular 1625 book, he blamed the Indians for “devilish treachery” in decimating not one but three colonies—the fifteen men left by Grenville, the Lost Colony, and the nearly vanquished later Virginia settlers. All this spilled blood proved, wrote Purchas, “this our earth is truly English, and therefore this land is justly yours O English.” These massacres, in other words, justified English extermination of the Indians. Purchas asserted, “Powhatan confessed to Cap. Smith, that he had been at their [the Raleigh colonists’] slaughter, and had divers utensils of theirs to show,” referring to the barrel of a musket, a bronze mortar, and a piece of iron said to belong to them.

  Yet Smith himself remained silent. Never a man to resist embellishing a dramatic tale, his 1624 book on Virginia included the fanciful story of Pocahontas saving his life when he was still a young man. When he does mention the Lost Colonists, it is only a passing reference to his effort to secure a guide to take one of his men “to search of the lost company of Sir Walter Raleigh, and silk grass.” The soldier returned from the Chowan region with “little hope and less certainty of them who were left by Sir Walter Raleigh…[T]he river was not great, and the people but few, the country mostly overgrown with pines.” European sickness and strife among tribes had decimated the bustling and populous towns described by Lane. Smith also notes a trip south made by three Jamestown colonists who questioned a tribe of Iroquoian speakers. “But nothing could they learn save that they were all dead.”