The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  He taught how to read the subtle changes in soil to spot building remnants. Foundation posts stuck deep into the earth attract tree roots eager to suck up the organic matter in the sandy soil. A root might be a ghostly remnant of a colonial structure, or it could be just a root. Telling them apart required patience and skill. Gone were the massive trenches and unskilled workers of the days of Williams. Digging was now only the start of archaeology; it was careful analysis of the finds that mattered, and Noël Hume’s definitive volumes on colonial artifacts are still the most dog-eared books on every colonial archaeologist’s shelf.

  In 1982, Noël Hume joined Harrington and Quinn at Fort Raleigh to hear a presentation by a young historian and park ranger named Phillip Evans. Before his distinguished elders, Evans postulated that Harrington’s pit found in the 1960s was almost certainly a watchtower on the palisaded edge of the Cittie of Raleigh. He cited a remarkably similar shape found by Noël Hume at a 1622 settlement on the James River.

  Excited, the historian and the archaeologists urged an intensive investigation. Using state-of-the-art metal detectors and magnetometers that detect the magnetic properties of underground material, park service researchers spotted a wealth of exciting outlines—even what looked like a large triangular fort—that promised to reveal the missing settlement at long last. As so many had before, the excavators began their digs optimistic that at last they had found the town. They were quickly humbled. One of the most promising features they observed yielded only a 1969 Pepsi bottle.

  Archaeologists subsequently kept their distance from what seemed to be America’s colonial sand trap. But Noël Hume’s wife, Audrey, an accomplished archaeologist in her own right, remained intrigued by the challenge. She shared a birthday with Virginia Dare, which spawned her lifelong fascination with the Lost Colony story. As a child, she even begged her parents to change her name to Virginia. At her urging, the couple paid a visit to Fort Raleigh in 1990, precisely four centuries after White recorded the first Roanoke artifacts.

  “Every archaeologist dreams just once in his life he’ll find treasure,” Noël Hume wrote years after his work was done. “Mine substituted copper for gold and antimony for silver, and it came not from a sunken galleon or an Egyptian tomb but from Roanoke Island.” What he ultimately found proved to be “the most exciting in a lifetime of discoveries.”

  Excavating a space no bigger than a beach towel near Harrington’s pit during a cold and stormy January, Noël Hume’s team uncovered more than one hundred artifacts, an unprecedented bonanza for the archaeological void that was Roanoke Island. For the first time in more than four hundred years, an intimate glimpse of life in Raleigh’s colony emerged. A spilled drop of copper still clung to the side of a broken crucible, a vessel designed to withstand heat from molten metal. Later analysis revealed traces of zinc, copper, and silver in the shattered remnants of at least six of these triangular-shaped vessels. Each stood only three inches high. One had a peculiar rim that Noël Hume traced to the Austrian Tirol. The excavators also carefully extracted a small chunk of antimony used to purify metals like copper, silver, and gold, an unmistakable marker of an Elizabethan metallurgical tool kit. There were bits of English coal suggesting a forge, as well as tiles that could withstand high heat. The bricks unearthed previously at the site had been shaped, they could now see, for use in a forge.

  An archaeology team led by Ivor Noël Hume (in jacket) in 1992 excavates the workshop used by Joachim Gans and Thomas Harriot on Roanoke Island. The earthwork reconstructed by Jean Harrington in 1950 rises in the background.

  Noël Hume realized this wasn’t a corner of a fortification or a watchtower. This was the very workshop where metallurgist Joachim Gans conducted his work during the 1585–86 mission. In his thick report, which remains unpublished, he envisioned the structure as “a carport-like shed with a slightly sunken floor and perhaps breast-high log walls to control draft and allow smoke to escape from one or more brick built furnaces within the structure.” Four posts at each corner likely supported a thatched roof to protect the workers from the elements. A 1556 German manual on metallurgy includes an engraving of just such a building, with the chemist on a stool within preparing his experiments. Another engraving depicts a furnace foreman sampling butter from a pot, “that the poison which the crucible exhales may not harm him, for this is a special remedy against that poison.” Remnants of a butter pot from western England were found strewn on the workshop floor. “There is, of course, no proving that Gans and his workers sat around in their laboratory eating butter,” Noël Hume wrote, “yet it is hard to dismiss the West of England jar’s presence as purely coincidental.”

  The trench team, led by William Kelso, who would go on to rediscover the 1607 Jamestown fort, also identified seeds and nuts, as well as blue-and-white pharmaceutical jars, the medicine bottles of the sixteenth century. Gans likely shared the space with Harriot, who spent much of his time on Roanoke analyzing potential pharmaceuticals that could prove popular in England. It was these—in particular sassafras and tobacco—that ultimately secured England’s control of eastern North America.

  Kelso and the excavators also recovered fragments of a clay pipe, including a mouthpiece, “where it had almost certainly been between English—or maybe German—lips,” Noël Hume noted. Harriot learned that the Indians dried the leaves and turned them into powder, which they used by “sucking it through clay pipes into the stomach and head.” He believed “the fumes purge superfluous phlegm and gross humors from the body by opening all the pores and passages.”

  Harriot passed the pipe-smoking practice that he learned here, and that would eventually kill him, to Raleigh, who in turn popularized this method of smoking in Elizabeth’s court. Despite attempts by her successor, James I, to stamp out the practice, even today the use of pipes remains closely identified with Englishness. (The Spanish, by contrast, picked up the Caribbean habit of rolling tobacco into cigars.) More important, the English craze for tobacco eventually made the later Jamestown settlement—and English settlement of North America—financially viable.

  Noël Hume’s dig provided a visceral picture: an English Christian and a German Jew working side by side in a state-of-the-art laboratory, drawing on Native American expertise and an eclectic mix of French, German, Spanish, and Indian equipment to investigate New World resources. This was where Gans sweated while stoking a forge in the Carolina heat as Harriot quizzed a Native American elder on the healing properties of local plants.

  But the excavation raised a perplexing question: Why would Lane’s men build a smoky workshop next to their fort, rather than inside it, or in an open area to diffuse the fumes, as was done at Jamestown? Curious, Noël Hume dug into the earthwork’s original ditch, deep inside the reconstructed redoubt. There he found bits of crucible and other pottery resembling those discovered in the workshop.

  “The ditch cuts through the debris from the research center, which then turns up inside the fort,” he told me shortly before his 2017 death. By then nearing ninety, he retained a sharp mind and tongue. “I can’t prove the date of the fort, but it is after 1585. Harrington was a dear man, but he didn’t get it right.” Harrington had also found a piece of smelted European copper below the fort parapet in the 1940s, which reinforced Noël Hume’s suspicion that the earthwork was built after the workshop—and probably long after Raleigh’s colonists had abandoned the site.

  The archaeologist’s contention that the centerpiece of what many consider the nation’s spiritual birthplace was an illusion vexed the National Park Service. “If a bunch of fellows were building a fort in the 1700s, then someone would have left behind alcohol bottles,” scoffed Guy Prentice, an archaeologist from the park service’s Southeast Archeological Center in Tallahassee. Their absence can only mean it was built in the Elizabethan era. Even Kelso is skeptical of Noël Hume’s assertion that Fort Raleigh has nothing to do with the Cittie of Raleigh. He told m
e that Lane’s soldiers might have used crucibles to make lead shot, thus explaining the pieces found in the trench. In 2016, Prentice led a dig to resolve the controversy but found “everything was jumbled and mixed.”

  The morning I met Deetz, his small team was re-excavating a parking-space-sized area at the workshop site, just across the path from the fort. “Harrington didn’t dig deep, and he wasn’t here every day,” he explained, adding that Noël Hume’s team might have missed something. “So here we are, digging for the third time.” There is a piece of virgin ground nearby, but park service policy is to leave something for future generations.

  He and two students took turns shoveling the sand-flecked soil into a screen propped on two sawhorses as another sifted through it by hand to spot any stray artifacts. Deetz held up a piece of asphalt from the 1920s road and sighed, throwing it over his shoulder. There was also an electrical casing of indeterminate age and a 1952 penny. He recognized the remnants of a Fireball wrapper as the favorite brand of one of Noël Hume’s team members nearly three decades earlier.

  In the afternoon, players in the still-running outdoor drama arrived at the nearby amphitheater for rehearsals. The choir voices drifted over the trench: “O God that madest earth and sky, and hedged the restless seas.” At that moment, one of Deetz’s students plucked a mottled gray bit of ceramic no bigger than a quarter from a sifting screen. Deetz eyed it with interest, then with something like excitement.

  I followed as he rushed down the wooded trail to the visitor center with its small display of the few Roanoke artifacts. Within a Lucite case was a small shallow dish dug up by Noël Hume that was missing a piece. The broken bit of pottery recovered minutes before seemed to fit as perfectly as the slipper on Cinderella. “Brought from Europe, this shallow dish, known as a palette, may have been used during alchemical trials,” read the description. It was clearly part of Gans’s metallurgical equipment.

  By the end of the day, the team had four slivers of Elizabethan-era pottery, including part of a crucible and a bit of French stoneware. “That’s a good haul for Roanoke,” Deetz said, allowing himself an easy smile. “That’s more than you sometimes find in an entire season!” As the team packed up, I walked over to a new sign beside the fort that reads, “At this spot, Lane busied his men with constructing such an earthwork.” It was a retreat from the old claim that it was Lane’s Fort, but still inaccurate from the perspective of Noël Hume. There was no marker commemorating the workshop that the archaeologist considered his single greatest find.

  Later, I visited Fort Raleigh’s cultural heritage officer, Jami Lanier, to pick up an archaeology booklet. She extended it to me, only to abruptly pull it back as I reached out. “I’ll give it to you, but only if you write that the fort is Elizabethan.” I smiled at the joke. Then I noticed she wasn’t smiling back. The park service never published Noël Hume’s workshop findings—a rare copy sits covered in dust on a high shelf in a ranger’s office—and the standoff continues even after his death. Take away the earthwork, I realized, and Fort Raleigh National Historic Site is nearly as lost as the Lost Colony itself.

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  Even as archaeologists were busy digging just west of the fort in search of the settlement, the Cittie of Raleigh might have been in the act of vanishing just a few hundred yards away. Not long after his 1982 meeting with Noël Hume and Harrington, Evans played hooky and made a serendipitous discovery that fired up a new generation of seekers. It was a sunny spring morning, and the young ranger took a walk on the beach below the parking lot a hundred yards or so northeast of the earthwork. “I saw a ring in the water and wondered, what the heck is that, so I waded out and realized it was a barrel.”

  He knew that colonists in coastal areas commonly sank barrels into the ground to create a well. These features were a reliable marker for early European settlements. The fragments of wood he discovered went into a water-filled bucket in the maintenance shed. Two days later, the park superintendent’s son found another round shape off the beach, about fifty yards from Evans’s discovery. It turned out to be a hollowed log. It joined the barrel ring in a trash can of water. (“Otherwise they would have turned to powder,” Evans explained.)

  Later, when they were analyzed using radiocarbon methods, the dates fell well within the Elizabethan period. The finds suggested that archaeologists had been looking in all the wrong places. Rather than west of the fort, perhaps the settlement was to the northeast. But erosion was quickly eating away the fragile bluffs, a problem that Williams observed and that was noted officially in 1972. The park service response was to dump massive granite blocks along the shore by the amphitheater, which only sped up erosion along the adjacent beaches.

  Evans left the park service for law school and then opened a practice in Durham but continued to return to the island regularly. He couldn’t shake his fascination. He walked the woods repeatedly in an attempt to trace White’s 1590 steps. When a 2003 hurricane tore away huge chunks of land, he grew worried that the first English settlement in the New World was disappearing before it could be found. He organized the First Colony Foundation to conduct emergency archaeological digs. The results along the bluffs were a few pottery pieces, and underwater archaeology just offshore was inconclusive. But Evans, his hair now white, doggedly continued the work, using his own funds and those raised from friends and other enthusiasts. His quiet and courtly demeanor, longtime acquaintances told me, was deceiving. “Phil is like a moray eel,” said Nick Luccketti, one of the archaeologists he tapped to do the job. “You have to cut off his head to make him give up.”

  Luccketti grew up in New York and went to college at Virginia’s College of William and Mary in Williamsburg to take advantage of the longer baseball season. He soon fell under the spell of Noël Hume and cut his archaeological teeth on some of his breakthrough colonial Virginia excavations; he also took part in the early 1990s dig at Fort Raleigh. Inspired by the workshop find, Luccketti joined forces with Evans to continue the search for the Cittie of Raleigh. Yet he grew so frustrated with the dearth of artifacts that he once resorted to a psychic.

  A Canadian tourist named George McMullen and a companion stopped one afternoon in 1995 to watch him dig yet another barren trench northwest of the fort. McMullen had no formal scientific training but told the excavator that he was an intuitive archaeologist who practiced psychometry. This, he explained, is the use of extrasensory perception to intuit the history of an object. “That is to say, I hold an object in my hand and information comes to me as to who made it, where it was made, and the time it was made—often far in the past,” he writes in his book One White Crow.

  “These guys showed up and we weren’t finding anything,” Luccketti recalled. “And so we said what the hell! Tell us where things are.”

  According to park service documents, McMullen used his psychometric abilities to sense a longhouse surrounded by a palisade. The inhabitants were twenty-five of the Lost Colony gentry who lived separately from the common settlers. Nearby he envisioned barracks for soldiers along with a shed for storing gunpowder and a dock with a small warehouse. McMullen also intuited a nearby well and three bodies. A hand-drawn map made by his assistant Sam Sumner notes that it is “unknown whether fallen bodies or graves. George stated one body died of snake bite.”

  When the Canadian pointed out the specific location of the fort’s corner and the well, “we said, okay, we will dig a hole there,” Luccketti, who has the build of a bulldog, told me later. His team excavated four small test pits based on McMullen’s intuition. “We didn’t find anything,” he said. “McMullen said we didn’t dig deep enough.” Park service records note dryly, “Since no mention is made regarding any notable discoveries…it appears safe to conclude that Luccketti’s ground truthings were not corroborative with McMullen’s predictions.”

  Undaunted, McMullen and Sumner requested an excavation permit of their own, submitting the han
d-drawn map as data. The request was denied, but the park service did approve use of ground-penetrating radar. The pair felt the results were promising, but the park service disagreed and denied a dig permit. Two years later, however, park service archaeologists quietly conducted their own radar survey in the same area. Briefly they thought they had found “structures or some features associated with the original colony.” When they dug, however, all they found was a ceramic insulator.

  Luccketti fared better in 2008, when his First Colony Foundation team returned to this area northwest of the fort and uncovered Indian pipes, bits of sixteenth-century French flasks and Spanish jars, seventeenth-century glass beads, and eighteenth-century Pennsylvania crockery. The most sensational find was a set of thirteen copper plates, each pierced by tiny holes and nestled among oyster shells. The plates looked nearly identical to necklaces worn by the tribal leader painted by White.

  When analyzed, the copper proved to be European. Luccketti pictured Joachim Gans hammering out the copper as a gift for Wingina or in exchange for corn or deer pelts. But because it was hard to date the finds precisely, it was also possible the material was traded south after Jamestown was founded.

  The earthwork remains the magnet that has drawn archaeologists to this part of Roanoke Island since Williams’s day. But what if it is like the streetlight under which a drunk looks for his keys? Asked why he’s looking there of all places, he replies, “Because that’s where the light is.” I decided to widen my search beyond Fort Raleigh.

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