The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  One spring morning, I pulled out of the parking lot of the faux half-timbered Elizabethan Inn and followed the two-lane highway running north out of Manteo to the park’s entrance road that snakes through the shadows of dark green longleaf pines, ending in a parking lot butting up against Albemarle Sound.

  There is not much to see. If you didn’t know better, you might swear this was America’s most boring national park, or at least the one that requires the most imagination. Unlike every other unit in the National Park Service, this one has no old home or venerated battlefield, no breathtaking vista or famous fossils, no unique ecosystem or dramatic volcano. There isn’t even a vending machine in the visitor center. The star attraction is a small grassy mound shaped like an irregular star that takes up no more area than the footprint of a modest suburban home. It was built in 1950 to re-create what was thought to be the 1585 fort built by Ralph Lane, but what’s underneath may not even be Elizabethan. On Roanoke Island, where the Lost Colony mystery began, excavators haven’t found enough artifacts in a century of digging to pack the trunk of a compact car, even using extra bubble wrap. The big question here is not where the settlers went but where they started.

  “It’s frustrating,” said Eric Deetz, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has worked on Roanoke on and off for years. We stood amid blooming dogwoods in an open meadow next to the mound. “For every artifact on Roanoke, you find ten thousand at Jamestown. We have so little, and the historical texts are so ambiguous. Where were a hundred people living?” Even an English colony in Maine, established at the same time as Jamestown but which lasted barely one winter, produced more than two hundred pieces of plate armor as well as thousands of other objects.

  Deetz worked with a team that recently uncovered a couple of pottery fragments from an apothecary jar at Fort Raleigh. It made news all over the country, and one London newspaper spun the minor find as a major discovery. “Did Disease Drive Off Colonists on Roanoke Island?” blared the large-type headline. “Medicine jar pottery may provide clues to fate of lost 16th century settlers.” That was nonsense, but the breathless coverage hints at the hysteria that even the slightest find can unleash.

  No one knows exactly where, but Lane and his men landed on Roanoke in the summer of 1585 and set to work building a proper English town and a modest wooden stronghold. This was no temporary camp. “As soon as they had disembarked, they began to make brick and tiles for a fort and houses,” according to a deposition by an Irish soldier who later defected to the Spanish. There was a warehouse to store food and trade goods, as well as an armory to secure weapons. Soldiers lived in barracks, and a jail and gallows loomed over the town center. Senior officers lived in thatched houses outside the compound.

  The colonists also brought tons of equipment to plant and harvest crops and mine for ore, including shovels, spades, sledgehammers, wheelbarrows, and iron hoops for barrels. Each male settler was expected to carry along two sets of light armor, along with a musket, sword, belt, bandolier, and sixty pounds of lead shot, and that doesn’t include what was in the armory. There were primitive guns called arquebuses, pistols, and small cannon to protect the fortified area. The colonists packed most of their goods in chests with padlocks and hinges; even books from this era often had copper fittings apt to survive for centuries even in damp soil.

  And then there was garbage. Elizabethans produced a small fraction of the 4.3 pounds thrown away each day by the average American, but Lane’s men would have gone through twenty bushels of oysters in a single dinner and discarded the thick shells, which decay slowly. White’s settlers would have eaten no less. At least two thousand meals were prepared here, leaving tons of oyster, scallop, and clam remains along with deer, bird, turtle, and fish bones. Plates cracked and bottles broke. Cooking pots toppled over and smashed on the ground. This stuff, much of it impervious to water or insects and of little interest to human scavengers, piled up somewhere.

  Even if Native Americans thoroughly scavenged the site for metal and glass, at least the garbage pits would remain. Deetz, an affable man with a wide face and thick hair, grew up the son of a colonial archaeologist in Plymouth, Massachusetts. He trained early in the art of reading dead people’s rubbish, a key skill in the discipline. “I would hunt around old bottle dumps as a teenager,” he recalled. Most of his finds were mid-twentieth-century mayonnaise jars. “But here,” he asked, looking at the ground around his muddy boots as if he had lost his car keys, “where did they put the trash?”

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  White made the first archaeological finds on Roanoke in 1590 when he recorded the presence of lead ingots, cannon, and looted trunks. No known sixteenth-century map marks the exact settlement site, and there are no known drawings of the town. All we can say for sure is that it was on the north end of the island, possibly near Granganimeo’s village, where Amadas and Barlowe were fed their sumptuous meal in 1584. But no one knows where the Algonquian settlement was either.

  More than a century later, when Lawson passed through the area, he noted “some old English coins which have been lately found; and a brass gun, a powder horn, and one small quarterdeck gun made of iron staves.” Long after the colonists’ departure, their stuff was still strewn around and had apparently held little interest to Native Americans.

  Lawson also refers to the ruins of a fort, apparently the same one shown to the beaver trader half a century earlier. The historic site was already a tourist attraction when President James Monroe visited on the morning of April 7, 1819, while inspecting coastal defenses and ports. According to the Edenton Gazette, he and his staff went ashore “to view the remains of the fort, the traces of which are distinctly visible, which is said to have been erected by the first colony of Sir Walter Raleigh.”

  An 1850s visitor, reflecting the new romantic notions about the vanished colony, noted that the remains of the settlement “are but scanty; and therefore the remains of the fort, glass globes containing quicksilver, and hermetically sealed and other relics occasionally discovered there, give rise to a thousand conjectures destined never to be solved.”

  On the eve of the Civil War, Edward Bruce, a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, arrived by steamer and made his way through “dense copses of live-oak” and past the occasional homestead to the site to sketch what remained. All he could make out was a shallow trench about forty yards square, “in many places scarcely perceptible,” with the outline of a small bastion. “A fragment or two of stone or brick may be discovered in the grass, and then all is told of the existing relics of the city of Raleigh.”

  In 1862, the Union army scored its first major victory against the Confederacy when ten thousand men invaded Roanoke Island, which stood between the ocean and the rebel interior. The sleepy home of ranchers and fishermen quickly turned into a busy community housing thousands of Northern troops and enslaved African Americans fleeing mainland plantations. A soldier named Charles F. Johnson drew an image of “Earth-work Built by Sir Walter Raleigh’s Colony on Roanoke Island,” though it is hard to make out its form in his drawing. He acknowledged that “anyone who was not shown the place would probably pass over it a hundred times without discovering anything so unusual as to warrant the thought of a fortification.” After all, Johnson added, “this has been here some hundreds of years, and in that time the elements have reduced it.” A Northern newspaper described the remains of a star-shaped moat “well worthy of the visit of the antiquarian.”

  Such visits, however, proved destructive. Another soldier stationed on Roanoke published an article mentioning that treasure hunters had dug holes around the fort’s ruins, “but with little success, a vial of quicksilver being the only relic said to have been found.” (He also made the prescient observation that “this article was doubtless to be used in discovering deposits of the precious metals by the old adventurers,” later confirmed by archaeologists.)

&nbs
p; The island again slipped into obscurity after the war. Then, exactly three centuries after the Lost Colonists arrived, a vacationing thirty-eight-year-old writer from Philadelphia stepped out of a boat and began to explore. His arrival launched the first scientific effort to find physical remains of the vanished settlers and resolve a mystery that increasingly fired the public’s imagination.

  Reporters remember Talcott Williams as the first dean of Columbia University’s journalism school. Art historians recall him as one of the naked bathers in Thomas Eakins’s famous 1885 painting The Swimming Hole. Largely forgotten is his pioneering work on Roanoke, which launched the archaeological search for the Lost Colony.

  Williams grew up in the midst of the world’s first major excavations. Son of New England missionary parents, he spent his childhood in Mosul. The walled city in northern Iraq, then part of the Ottoman Empire, lay across the Tigris River from the great Assyrian capital of Nineveh, where British excavators were hauling massive stone statues of forgotten kings and mythical beasts out of the ground. “My early memories are of the trenches in Nineveh,” he recalled, “and its monuments fill my earliest vision.”

  An iconoclast who befriended Walt Whitman and supported the largely unpopular cause of Negro rights, Williams visited the island in 1887. Whitman’s brother had been stationed there in the Civil War, and the poet might have suggested the trip. Williams was interested not just in the English colony but in the Native Americans who lived on the island before, during, and after them. He discovered, on that first visit to Roanoke, an Indian burial thick with skeletons and first noted with alarm the erosion eating away at the island’s north and east shores. He returned half a dozen years later with permission to excavate the fort, which had recently been put under the protection of a memorial association that he helped inspire.

  “By little short of a miracle of accident,” wrote the delighted researcher, “this crumbling mound, ‘child of science and slow time,’ has escaped destruction.” Unlike the Plymouth and Virginia settlements, where later development obscured the colonial past, rural Roanoke seemed the perfect time capsule. His optimism proved short-lived.

  Fully expecting to find loads of artifacts, he proceeded to dig thirteen long and deep trenches, moving tons of dirt and sand with the help of a team of local workers. Like so much else connected with the Roanoke voyages, Williams’s notes and excavation report are missing. But in a brief paper to the American Historical Association, he described the site as “singularly barren.” Other than a single nail, some bits of iron, and a few sherds of Indian pottery, he found nothing. He left the island, baffled by his failure.

  The child of science and slow time suffered badly in the years that followed. In the early 1920s, a crew filming a silent movie about the Roanoke voyages constructed a temporary log fort atop the fragile remains of the original. Soon after, a state highway crew used bulldozers for a road intended to give visitors easy access but which further damaged the site. “Today half of the old entrenchment is gone,” mourned Raleigh’s News and Observer. As autumn rains fell on the unprotected soil, “the joy-riding public is cutting deep furrows in a spot that should be hallowed by a nation.” The outcry prompted the state to move the road, and it used dynamite to do so.

  In the following decade, the State of North Carolina built charming if fanciful juniper-log houses chinked with Spanish moss to resemble the colonists’ homes around what remained of the fort and added a chapel thatched with native reeds that became a “matrimonial Mecca.” Inside the earthwork’s much-abused foundation, Civilian Conservation Corps workers constructed a tall wooden blockhouse. A log palisade enclosed the entire area, which was graded and crisscrossed with trenches for underground power, water, and sewer lines. A paved road was created to carry President Franklin Roosevelt to the site for celebration of Virginia Dare’s 350th birthday in 1937 and to see a performance of The Lost Colony, the new outdoor drama held in the adjacent amphitheater, carved from the wooded dune sloping to the Albemarle. The result was more a set for a Western B movie than an authentic Elizabethan village.

  Tourists and locals loved it. Archaeologists, none of whom were present during all the major construction to see what might have been disturbed or destroyed, were appalled. “By the time this ‘restoration’ was completed,” one later commented, “all visible traces of the ditched fort seen by President Monroe and by other nineteenth-century visitors had been obscured.”

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  Not until after World War II did Jean Harrington, known as Pinky for his red hair and pale skin, begin modern archaeological work on the site. Harrington was hired at Jamestown in the 1930s to prevent the occasional brawls between excavators eager to dig and architects tasked with restoring historic sites for tourists to enjoy. There he met his wife, Virginia Sutton, the first female historian park ranger, and the two pioneered a new field called historical archaeology, which combined knowledge of history and architecture with the latest methods in excavation.

  By then, the log cabins had been dismantled, to the outrage of locals who argued that tourists needed something to draw them to this out-of-the-way forest. Harrington assured them he intended to pinpoint the Lane and White settlements and reconstruct the structures where they once stood. He assumed that the settlement was adjacent to the fort and so focused on that area. As Williams had before, Harrington began work confident of success.

  The team shoveled more than half a mile of trenches yet recovered only an iron bar, a bronze weight, a scattering of lead musket balls, an auger, some nails, and an iron sickle. Along with two dozen pieces of Spanish and northern European pottery, he found a bit of brick and roofing tile and a small lump of worked copper. It was a shockingly small haul for such a major excavation.

  His prize discovery was three small copper disks made in Nuremberg. “These little objects have a unique historical significance, for they are among the very few objects from the site of Fort Raleigh that unquestionably go back to the period of its founding and brief existence,” Harrington wrote, with what seemed relief. The little round artifacts showed, “beyond reasonable doubt, that the site is that of the Raleigh settlements on Roanoke Island.”

  He was referring to what are called casting counters. These look like coins but were used, abacus-like, to do math using Roman numerals. In this era, most people in England had yet to learn the newfangled Arabic numerals (they actually originated in India) already favored by other Europeans. Because each manufacturer used unique mottoes, names, and symbols, they are valuable dating tools for archaeologists. “True good fortune comes from God,” reads the German motto on one. Harrington dated the counters to a decade before the first Roanoke reconnaissance trip, so, he concluded, Raleigh’s settlers must have brought them.

  Even these proved illusory. Later archaeologists and art historians pegged the counters’ minting to 1586 or later, and therefore unlikely to have made it into the pockets of White’s colonists early the following year when they departed England. Their origin now seems much more likely to be from later traders, those based in Jamestown.

  Harrington never doubted the little mound was a remnant of an Elizabethan fort. But where was the town? He could not pinpoint its location, much less what it looked like. “No physical remains of the settlers’ homes were found, nor was there encountered sufficient building or household refuse to indicate the proximity of a habitation area,” he wrote. Using White’s drawings of Lane’s 1585 Caribbean fortification as well as the results of his own dig, Harrington rebuilt the fort in a best-guess effort. A park service sign confidently proclaimed it the work of Ralph Lane. Visitors finally had something to see.

  In the 1960s, Harrington returned to investigate a spot where workers, installing a new water pipe a few yards west of the fort, found brick fragments. His team quickly uncovered a nine-foot-square structure once supported by hefty log posts at each corner. Circular fire pits were buried insi
de, with locally made bricks mixed up with broken European and Native American pots and roofing tiles. The archaeologist was perplexed: Was it an Indian sweat lodge? A small defensive structure? He concluded the building was part of an extension to the fort, perhaps part of the palisade that White noticed the colonists built when he returned to the abandoned settlement in 1590.

  Using the latest Italian Renaissance style, Ralph Lane designed this temporary Caribbean fort, which was built by the 1585 voyagers as protection as they collected salt. British Museum

  By the following decade, a new generation of excavators developed a radically new approach to detect the early European presence in the region. One of the field’s rising stars was Ivor Noël Hume, known by his last two names. A self-taught British archaeologist, he began his career as a teenager sifting through the bombed-out landscape of World War II London. Immigrating to the United States, he eventually led and strengthened Colonial Williamsburg’s archaeology program in Virginia. Noël Hume demanded that every shovelful of dirt pass through mesh to capture the tiniest glass bead or sliver of metal. Seeds and animal bones, long ignored as so much trash, could reveal secrets of diet, ethnicity, and climate, while pottery could pinpoint a specific date. Each artifact required careful cataloging and analysis.