The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  While Smith seems sincere in his conclusion that the Jamestown settlers found no hard evidence of Roanoke survivors, rumors of a bloody massacre masterminded by Powhatan persisted. Not for the last time, the desire to solve the mystery of the Lost Colony masked other, darker motives.

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  Raleigh died six months after Powhatan. James let him out of the Tower for a second trip to Venezuela on a last-ditch attempt to find El Dorado. Instead, the still-impetuous knight tangled with the Spanish and his son died in battle. Once again he passed by the Outer Banks on his return to England but made no recorded landfall. Once he was in London, James ordered him beheaded. Standing on the scaffold on a chilly late October morning, he called himself “a man full of all vanity, and having lived a sinful life, in all sinful callings, having been a soldier, a captain, a sea captain, and a courtier.” Few at the time would have disagreed. One of his myriad enemies at court damned him as “the greatest Lucifer that have lived in our age,” a man who would “lose a friend to coin a jest.” But Raleigh and the steadfast Harriot remained close until the very end; the scientist appears to have written out the notes for his first patron’s final speech.

  The bachelor scientist tried to keep a low profile, no easy task in a world where one’s fate was inextricably linked with that of one’s sponsor. “Our situation is such that I still may not philosophize freely; we are still stuck in the mud,” Harriot explained to Kepler while Smith was exploring Chesapeake Bay. “I was never ambitious for preferments,” he wrote during a brief stint in jail while himself under suspicion for treason. “But contented with a private life for the love of learning that I might study freely.”

  What finally rooted England to North America was neither the Pacific passage that so obsessed Hakluyt nor the gold sought so maniacally by Raleigh. It was the common New World herb Harriot helped publicize, praising it because it “preserves the body.” One of his contemporaries called it “the sovereign remedy to all diseases” but also “the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.” It proved Harriot’s triumph and his undoing. An inveterate smoker, he found a small ulcer on his lip that morphed into a painful tumor. The red hair of his youth long gone, the sixty-one-year-old died in 1621, the first recorded victim of tobacco-related cancer. He passed away in the London house of one of his colleagues from the Lane expedition that so shaped his life. The man who unwittingly brought so much death to the people he studied eventually succumbed to the New World plant that his victims had taught him to use.

  By then, the Puritans had celebrated their first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, five hundred miles northeast of Jamestown. Three decades later, there were more than fifty thousand northern Europeans settled up and down the North American coast, with English in Virginia and Massachusetts and Dutch, Swedes, and Germans scattered in between. Enslaved Africans trickled in; there were three hundred in Virginia. Meanwhile, the Native American population in the region plummeted dramatically amid disease and societal disruption, though exact numbers are hard to ascertain.

  Geography colluded with the final passing of the Roanoke generation to consign the fate of the vanished settlers to oblivion—at least among Europeans. Sailors steered clear of the treacherous shoals of the Outer Banks, considered the most dangerous waters south of Nova Scotia. Several of the inlets that provided access between inland waters and the ocean began to close up; in any case, the marshy interior offered few deepwater ports along long stretches of fertile land. Virginia settlers and their tobacco culture spread north up the lung-shaped Chesapeake in the first half of the seventeenth century rather than into the boggy lands and shallow sounds to the south.

  It was Native Americans rather than Europeans who kept alive the memory of the first English settlement. When a beaver trader arrived on the island in 1653, the “emperor of Roanoke” showed him “the ruins of Sir Walter Raleigh’s fort.” Shortly after, the leader sent his son to Virginia for an English education, and his people retreated south and west to the more inaccessible mainland. Roanoke Island became a backwater of cattle ranchers and fishermen for the next two centuries.

  Not until an English explorer named John Lawson traveled through the area in 1701 is there another reference to the Lost Colonists. He reported on members of an Indian tribe called the Hatteras who lived on the Outer Banks. “These tell us, that several of their ancestors were white people, and could talk in a book, as we do; the truth of which is confirmed by gray eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians, and no others.”

  He relates “a pleasant story that passes for an uncontested truth amongst the inhabitants of this place.” A ghost ship under sail often appeared off their shore “which they call Sir Walter Raleigh’s ship.” Lawson speculated that the Roanoke settlement “miscarried for want of timely supplies from England” and “we may reasonably suppose that the English were forced to cohabit with them, for relief and conversation.” Roanoke’s first supernatural spirits date from this distant time.

  A deadly epidemic had swept the Native American communities in eastern North Carolina in 1695, and alcohol took a terrible toll on the dwindling community. “The smallpox and rum have made such a destruction amongst them that…there is not the sixth savage living within two hundred miles,” Lawson reported. “These poor creatures have so many enemies to destroy them, that it’s a wonder one of them is left alive near us.” White settlers from Virginia and colonists from Switzerland moved into the region to snap up available land. War followed, ending with Indians forced to leave the region or confine themselves to reservations.

  As Europeans crept west and the American colonies broke with what was now Britain, the new nation eagerly heralded its founders but left its early colonial past in the shadows. Typical is William Robertson’s 1796 History of America. He passes quickly over the Roanoke venture, briskly noting they “perished miserably by famine, or by the unrelenting cruelty of those barbarians by whom they were surrounded,” and concludes that “there was not a single Englishman settled there at the demise of Queen Elizabeth in 1603.” As late as 1830, John Howard Hinton repeats this conclusion almost verbatim in The History and Topography of the United States, noting that because “no trace was ever found of this unfortunate colony, there is every reason to apprehend that the whole must have miserably perished.” Raleigh’s failed effort was a fiasco best forgotten, rather than a mystery to be solved. Roanoke was relegated to a historical footnote.

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  That changed dramatically in 1834, when a young Harvard-trained historian named George Bancroft published his magisterial work A History of the United States. It is difficult to overstate his impact on the way that we see Raleigh’s colony today. A New Englander steeped in German Romanticism, Bancroft was the first person to study American history in a comprehensive way. As a young man traveling in Europe, he met thinkers like Goethe, Hegel, and von Humboldt, absorbing new ideas about progress and the evolution of societies.

  Bancroft was the first writer to dwell at length on the early settlement attempts on the North American east coast. They contained “the germ of our institutions,” he writes in his preface. “The maturity of the nation is but a continuation of its youth,” he adds. From this novel perspective, the gestation of the country was just as important as its revolutionary coming of age. And Roanoke was the germinating seed.

  He studied Hakluyt’s documents and rewrote the Roanoke story as a compelling gothic drama, led by a splendid Tudor knight and betrayed by a greedy Portuguese pilot and cruel Indians. In this influential telling, “disasters thickened” and “a tribe of savages displayed implacable jealousy.” After the armada’s defeat, the honorable Raleigh desperately tries but fails in his repeated efforts to resupply and rescue the brave settlers.

  Unlike those before him, Bancroft cast a lurid glamour over the venture’s finale. The colonists, as they “awaited death in the land of their adoption,” might
have “become amalgamated with the sons of the forest” or encountered some other unknown fate. “The further history of this neglected plantation is involved in gloomy uncertainty,” he writes in a style worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, who was just starting his literary career. There simply were not enough facts to come to a definitive conclusion. Speculation was inevitable and, indeed, enticing. “Imagination received no help in its attempts to trace the fate of the colony of Roanoke.”

  Bancroft was a friend of the son and nephew of the Brothers Grimm, who were then collecting Teutonic folktales with their disturbing themes of lost and hungry children in dark woods. Germans in this era drew on a mythical past to define their emerging identity. By reframing the Roanoke story as one of mystery and allure—a lost white child in a wilderness of dark savages—Bancroft did the same for the United States by turning an obscure failure into the start of the American experiment as well as our original national folktale.

  He made what appears to be the earliest recorded reference to Virginia Dare since John White’s brief mention. She was, Bancroft writes, “the first offspring of English parents on the soil of the United States.” This was a brand-new way of seeing the governor’s baby granddaughter, as a symbol of the fledgling country destined to grow up to conquer a continent. Roanoke was, in essence, the nation’s humble Bethlehem, and Virginia Dare was its infant savior destined for sacrifice.

  Bancroft’s radical new assessment of the forgotten colony quickly captured the attention of both scholars and the public. The country was hungry for an origin story more enchanting than the spoiled fops of Jamestown or the straitlaced Puritans of Plymouth, neither of which measured up to a romantic legend like England’s king Arthur and France’s military hero Roland, leaders felled by overwhelming odds but whose sacrifice helped forge a common identity. Roanoke, with its knights and villains and its brave but outnumbered few facing an alien culture, provided all the elements for a national myth.

  Shortly after Bancroft’s work was published, the Raleigh Register bemoaned the fact that Roanoke Island’s contemporary inhabitants were ignorant of the fact that this was “that paradise of the new world, in which Providence has decreed the nativity of a great and mighty people.” A few months later, just before the Battle of the Alamo, the president of the American Historical Society gave a talk at the U.S. Capitol in Washington echoing Bancroft’s reassessment of Roanoke. “The fate of this last colony was never ascertained,” said Lewis Cass, referring to John White’s settlement. “It disappeared, but why, or how, was unknown then, and is unknown yet.” Such questions, he noted, lend “to the narratives of these early efforts that romantic interest, which is equally delightful to youth and age.”

  For the remainder of the nineteenth century, imagination indeed dominated the strange tale of the lost settlers. The Roanoke story spawned a whole genre of dark romances about a blond-haired Virginia Dare, a beautiful huntress roving the Carolina woods while fending off Indian suitors and evil shamans. Bancroft resurrected interest in Raleigh’s venture that spawned the very term “Lost Colony.” But it wasn’t until the end of the century that this mythic kindling reignited the search for the vanished settlers.

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  There is no approaching the mystery of Roanoke without passing the Cerberus of David Beers Quinn. By all accounts a compact and polite man with a quick Irish temper, this historian from the University of Liverpool did more than any person since Hakluyt to collect every shred of documentary evidence he could find relating to the Raleigh voyages to the coast of North Carolina. An Irishman teaching in a working-class English city in the aftermath of World War II, Quinn was an outsider in the clubby world of British historians at a time when American colonial history was, at best, a peripheral topic. “He was not interested in scholarly esteem, or in being one of the boys,” one of his many protégés told me.

  For six decades, with his wife, Alison, who won awards for her proficiency in the art of indexing, Quinn systematically scoured European archives. He recovered the long-lost stories of sailors deposed by Havana inquisitors and obscure English contracts that shed light on the voyages’ financing and organization. He tracked wills and letters providing insights into overlooked figures like Fernandes and assiduously cataloged thousands of details, from the number of cannon on the Tiger to North Carolina stone sources.

  “I have thought of myself very much as a historical work horse,” he once said, “clearing the way through documentary tangles for others to follow.” In so doing, Quinn transformed Raleigh’s venture into a credible research topic, though academics remained leery of what is still seen by many as a cheesy romantic legend. “He was the first scholar to put Roanoke on the map,” said NYU’s Kupperman. Quinn sailed the sounds and tramped through the sands of the Outer Banks to get a feel for what the settlers encountered, carrying a suitcase of Virginia Gentleman bourbon to ensure a warm welcome at remote Coast Guard stations.

  In several thick volumes nearly biblical in their authority, Quinn wrote concise explanations to guide those who came after through the thicket of primary accounts, letters, and reports, often written years after the event, that can be hard to decipher. What for an Elizabethan was a creek, for example, we would call a harbor. Even something as straightforward as a list of passengers on a Virginia-bound ship proves to be deceiving; some said to be in the New World never went, while others not on the list might have been there. “The attempts to knit together the scraps of hard information, vague tales, and carefully judged speculation has not been an easy task,” he once acknowledged.

  No history, least of all one that touches on Roanoke, comes fully formed. He learned that he could “restrict himself to what is exactly, or more or less exactly, known” or “let his fancy ride free from the documents and fill the gaps with whatever theories may cross his mind in order to make a good story.” Instead, he chose a sensible middle ground—“to stick as closely to the documents as they will permit, but to point out carefully their limitations, ambiguities, and omissions, and then attempt, cautiously, to fill them.”

  Yet even Quinn could not resist the temptation to solve the mystery of the colonists’ disappearance. In 1984, on the four hundredth anniversary of the voyage by Amadas and Barlowe, he made headlines by announcing that he had clarified the fate of White’s settlers “with reasonable certainty” based on “what now appears to be a measure of solid history.”

  He began by dismissing White’s insistence that the settlers were at Croatoan as “clouded by sentiment,” given that the island was “unsuitable for an agricultural colony.” He asserted that “the main body of the colonists had indeed joined the Chesapeake Indians as early as 1587.” These were the people Harriot met during his sojourn on the southern edge of Chesapeake Bay in the winter of 1585 and 1586. The historian insisted “with some confidence” that the Cittie of Raleigh was built not on Roanoke Island but near the site of today’s port city of Norfolk just south of the great bay.

  Quinn envisioned the settlers using their small pinnace to haul building materials scavenged from Roanoke to the new site, where they built a proper English village protected by a palisade, complete with “enclosures for breeding rabbits.” White’s settlers, he seemed to suggest, succeeded in their utopian vision until disaster struck when the Jamestown settlers appeared at the mouth of the Chesapeake in the spring of 1607. The arrival of a second batch of English prompted Powhatan to destroy the little settlement before their fellow countrymen could join forces with them. It was a dramatic end to a stubborn band of valiant Englishmen.

  This pronouncement was the academic equivalent of tablets from Mount Sinai. But the more I examined Quinn’s reasoning, the more I realized that he had failed to point out the “limitations, ambiguities, and omissions” of his sources.

  The historian relied heavily on the words of Strachey, a man who spent barely a year in Virginia, and Purchas, a vitriolic Indian hater who by
his own account never traveled more than two hundred miles from his village in Essex. They, in turn, got their information from Machumps, a man with a motive to misinform the English in order to accrue power. The London Company also had reason to insist the colonists were still alive, to reassure nervous investors and prevent financial collapse. Quinn ignored Smith’s accounts and rejected White’s conclusion that the settlers moved to Croatoan or, possibly, fifty miles inland. Nor was there archaeological evidence to back up his notion of a Cittie of Raleigh near Norfolk (full disclosure: my childhood hometown).

  Even Quinn’s closest acolytes, I learned, were skeptical of his conclusion, which failed to win wide acceptance among other scholars. “I don’t find much evidence for that theory,” said historian James Horn, president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation. Of course, Quinn was modest—and savvy—enough to know that his word on the Roanoke voyages was not likely to be final. “The story of the colonies is a continuing process of discovery and interpretation, to which an end is not in sight,” Quinn wrote before his death in 2002 at age ninety-two. He predicted, however, that the new insights would have to come not from rummaging through archives, which he had picked over so thoroughly, but from digging in the ground.

  Since definitive evidence still eluded the historians, I set out for eastern North Carolina, where archaeologists claimed to have new and compelling clues to the settlers’ fate.

  | CHAPTER SIX

  Child of Science and Slow Time

  If you look at the maps long enough, Roanoke Island can begin to take on the shape of a question mark, as if geography set the stage for a riddle. At the south end of the island is the fishing village of Wanchese, a cluster of piers, warehouses, and mobile homes with easy access to the Pamlico Sound. People have lived and fished here for at least two thousand years. Midway is the arc of Shallowbag Bay that faces east, bordered by the neat grid of the Dare County seat of Manteo, with its Uppowoc Avenue and Sir Walter Raleigh Street lined with tourist shops. Adjacent is a state park with mock-ups of a Carolina Algonquian village and Tudor settlement dominated by the masts of the Elizabeth II, a reproduction of one of the sixteenth-century ships that carried the 1585 settlers to Roanoke. At the northern tip of the island, where it begins to bend to the west, sits Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.