The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

One autumn afternoon I visited Hubby Bliven, the curator of the Roanoke Heritage Art Gallery and Military Museum, a rambling wooden shed in the backyard of his century-old family home on a backstreet of Manteo. His collection includes a Pleistocene horse tooth and captured Nazi regalia and most epochs in between.

  Treasure hunting and the Roanoke voyages run in his family’s veins. An ancestor on his father’s side was Blackbeard’s quartermaster, he said. “On my mother’s side we’ve been told by numerous sources that we are kin to Eleanor Dare and John White from Devon,” the gray-bearded sixty-eight-year-old added. “And one of the men that came over was a Mann, which is my mother’s maiden name.”

  He showed me case after case of Indian artifacts laid carefully on red baize. “That’s a platform pipe from the Archaic period about four thousand years ago,” Bliven said. “My wife found that in her chicken yard. And these arrowheads, well, the oldest is dated about nine thousand years.” He had never, however, found a recognizably Elizabethan object in all his decades of collecting.

  I asked where he thought the settlement was built. “If I were on a ship and I saw a natural harbor like Shallowbag Bay, that’s where I would put my boat. It is easier than going to some other part of the island.” He predicted it is under today’s Manteo, specifically on the outskirts in a neighborhood called Mother Vineyard that is home to an ancient scuppernong vine also nicknamed Sir Walter Raleigh’s vine (though horticulturalists say it actually dates to the eighteenth century). The vine has long been linked to a romantic tale about Virginia Dare.

  When I asked Prentice and Luccketti about this option, they agreed it was promising. Unfortunately, the upscale neighborhood on the eastern shore of Roanoke is covered in ranch homes and split-levels set off by carefully tended lawns and azalea beds. Owners are reluctant to let archaeologists dig up their turf.

  A second possible location is on the western side of the island. In 2007, a local named Scott Dawson stumbled on an unusual feature while tramping through the woods with an eye out for Civil War material and Indian pottery. Dawson, who grew up on Hatteras—the island Elizabethans referred to as Croatoan—is a thirtysomething with a surfer’s build. At the time he worked as a blacksmith at Manteo’s Roanoke Island Festival Park. Like Bliven, he grew up hunting for artifacts and claims relation to a Blackbeard crew member.

  Beachcombing along the Outer Banks is more than a leisurely pastime for tourists. Locals call it progging, an old British term for foraging. The Carolina Algonquians told Barlowe that they scavenged nails from a European shipwreck. Later islanders built their houses from beached vessels and survived by selling washed-up merchandise. They were often accused of stealing goods claimed by insurance companies or even of allowing shipwreck victims to drown so they could plunder their belongings with impunity. When a northeaster in 2006 pushed a cargo container of Doritos into the ocean and thousands of small bags littered the beach, school was let out early so the children could collect the snacks. (A local teacher told me, “I had a kid bring me a knee bone, and I said, ‘Please don’t bring me human remains!’ ”)

  One brisk winter day, Dawson took me to a wooded area less than a mile from Fort Raleigh that is quickly succumbing to a suburban development. Part of the land is owned by the park service, but much of the area has been bulldozed to make way for homes and culs-de-sac without any oversight by archaeologists. I tried to keep up as he strode through brambles that grabbed at my coat and pants. “I started to think that I was crazy wandering through the woods,” he said. “Then I found this.”

  We had emerged into a small clearing. Through bushes and tall pines, I could make out the marsh where a creek met the water separating Roanoke from the mainland. Wingina’s village would have been directly opposite. At my feet I spotted a barely discernible depression about a foot wide and nearly filled with a cushion of pine straw. The ditch ran in a straight course into the thick brush where the clearing ended. We used an iPhone app to draw a crude map as we followed the ditch as it curved through the trees.

  Dodging low branches and brambles, we walked in single file and discovered that one side alone stretched nearly eighty feet. In a few minutes we found ourselves back where we started. “It is an enclosure!” Dawson said with excitement. “But it’s a weird shape,” he added. “Maybe it was built to follow the landscape.” He called it Fort Blob.

  “This is a cove, a nice place to put a longboat,” Dawson remarked as a cold wind blew off the water to the west. “Imagine that Lane is trying to defend against Spaniards. The Spanish were on their mind. They robbed two Spanish ships on the way here, sacked Puerto Rico, and stole salt. He wants to be tucked in.” From this vantage point, Lane could also keep an eye on Wingina.

  Williams would have agreed. “This harbor is the natural site for a settlement on the island,” he wrote in 1895. The creek also supplied freshwater, a vital commodity in short supply on the sandy island. There is also an undated document found by Quinn that makes recommendations on how Lane should construct his 1585 settlement. If based on an island, he should build a second fort in another location in case of attack. Also, a Spanish captive on Grenville’s fleet in 1586 reported a fort “of little strength” on Roanoke Island located “inside by the water.” Quinn suggests that he may be describing a fort situated on the western shore facing the mainland. There is the added detail that White mentions coming to this side of the island in 1590.

  When park service archaeologists briefly examined the trench that Dawson showed them, they found in it “no discernible pattern” and dismissed it as a possible animal path or a drainage ditch. Animals don’t walk in circles, and drainage ditches don’t form rough enclosures. As I walked the spongy depression with Dawson, the site struck me as an obvious place to build a fort or settlement. And the narrow and shallow trench was remarkably similar to the one that archaeologists in the mid-1990s finally recognized at Jamestown after a century of looking for the fort, leading to the greatest find in American colonial archaeology.

  For a brief moment, I felt a thrill that the first English town in the Americas might lie undisturbed under my feet. Then I noticed a bright pink ribbon tied to a stake that was poking out of the ground. Later I learned that the Lost Colony Research Group, an organization of enthusiasts that includes a professional pianist, a retired engineer, and a self-confessed “obsessive genealogist,” secured a permit in 2015 to examine the ditch using nondestructive methods. Tom Beaman, an archaeologist at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh hired by the group, conducted ground-penetrating radar and metal-detecting tests on the site. When I called him he said, “The early results didn’t meet any of our hoped-for expectations.” The only way to know for sure is to dig, but three years later he had yet to submit his data, a necessary step before the park service would consider granting an excavation permit.

  There was a third possible location for the settlement, but it was one that I had been avoiding.

  * * *

  —

  I think John White would still feel at home here,” said J. P. Walsh when I visited the gleaming new Coastal Studies Institute between the towns of Manteo and Wanchese. We were standing on a balcony at one end of a building that looked like a white skyscraper that fell on its side. We had a panoramic view of the marsh and sounds beyond.

  With his stocky build, shorts, and sunglasses pushed back on his baseball cap, Walsh looked more like a local fisherman than a sedimentary scientist. “The basic form and character is there, like when you go back to your hometown and the road and the curves in it are the same, but what’s alongside it may be different.” This immutable feeling of the land is an illusion, as Walsh well knows. That’s why he’s here. Few places in North America undergo such rapid and fundamental change as the Outer Banks and Carolina sounds. White drew several inlets that no longer exist, while in 2017 a crescent-shaped hundred-acre island suddenly appeared off Cape Hatteras.

  Later that breezy
summer afternoon, he and a colleague took me along on their boat to draw cores out of the Albemarle Sound. Their goal was to understand how the landscape has altered over time. We anchored a few miles off the north end of Roanoke. The distant white granite monument marking the Wright brothers’ first flight shone like a beacon in the hot sun on a distant grassy knoll. The scientists stuck a simple plastic tube with a homemade plastic handle over the side. After screwing it into the mud, they hauled it back up and used a putty knife to cut sections the size of a thick silver-dollar pancake.

  “Sometimes it gets stuck and you have to jump in to wrestle it out,” Walsh said. “That’s no fun in January.” Sealed in plastic bags, the environmental time capsules would be analyzed later in the lab.

  Research suggests that the English arrived in a stormy era that punched a host of holes through the narrow barrier islands. In a 1585 map, White depicts nearly a dozen inlets in the vicinity. Today there are just three. Ocean water poured in to mix with the freshwater flowing down from the interior of North Carolina and Virginia, altering the habitats of fish and shellfish in the process. Battered by waves and tides, the forests at the island’s southern end began to give way to swamp.

  A century or so later, as the second wave of English settlers appeared, most of those openings began to clog with sand, and the waters of the sound became less brackish, yet again changing the forms of life below and above the water’s surface. “The closure of inlets, mostly over the last two hundred years, reflects a more stable climate, fewer storms, and a decrease in wind and wave intensity in the North Atlantic,” he said.

  President Monroe’s 1819 visit was, in part, to see if the rapidly closing inlet between the Atlantic and the Albemarle might be artificially widened. The plan was abandoned as too expensive.

  When that inlet filled in, the Albemarle rushed down the west side of Roanoke and into the Pamlico, dramatically altering the flow of water. The new currents abraded the sandy bluffs along the north end of the island. Just how much land has been lost is a topic of fierce debate between geologists and archaeologists. Walsh pulled up the anchor as his colleague started the boat. We sped back toward Roanoke’s northern shore. Gray bands marked the rocks dumped by the National Park Service to protect the historic site and a nearby old cemetery. I could plainly see how the hard barriers diverted the water to the neighboring shores, gouging large hunks out of the crumbling bluffs.

  We veered away from a set of rickety posts stuck in the shallow water used to attach fishnets, remarkably similar to those used by the Native Americans that White drew. “This was all land back then,” shouted Walsh over the engine’s roar. He pointed at the depth finder, which had read ten feet and suddenly dropped to seven and then six. We were still more than half a mile offshore.

  “Twenty-five hundred feet,” he replied, when I asked how much land had been shaved off Roanoke’s northern end in the past four centuries. If he is right, then nearly half a mile of the shore where the colonists likely settled was submerged long ago. Swift currents and storms would have buffeted, broken up, and buried the tons of artifacts and trash the settlers generated. If so, then we will never know what the first English village in the Americas looked like. The lanes and homes, the fields and public buildings, the cottage where Virginia Dare was born—all will have vanished.

  Locals have little trouble believing the north end of Roanoke Island is sinking under the waves. Williams himself noted the water rise when he visited more than a century ago. One Manteo shopkeeper told me that the streets are underwater so frequently now that the town places “No Wake” signs along the roads so that cars don’t splash water into the buildings on either side.

  Later I pored over the latest geological maps of Roanoke. According to the data, the top part of the island, the north end, had been progressively shaved away in the past several centuries. The change seemed hard to deny, but archaeologists are reluctant to accept the judgment of geologists. “If you look at the maps from the 1700s, the island’s geography has not changed much,” Prentice from the National Park Service told me. “And it hasn’t changed much since the Civil War. I just don’t buy that a couple of thousand yards are gone.” Jamestown, after all, was said by geologists to have been washed away by the James River, a conclusion that Kelso proved wrong when he uncovered the original fort. And Noël Hume’s workshop proved that major activities took place on what is still land. Evans from the First Colony Foundation remained confident the mystery of where the Lost Colonists first settled could still be solved.

  The closing of old Roanoke Inlet altered the currents in the Albemarle Sound, and geologists estimate that two thousand feet or more of Roanoke Island’s north shore has been lost to erosion—possibly sweeping away all remnants of the colony settlement. J. P. Walsh and Ian Conery of East Carolina University/UNC Coastal Studies Institute

  But the discovery of a dramatic clue overlooked by centuries of historians—even Quinn—turned the spotlight away from Roanoke Island and swung it instead to one of the two destinations mentioned by White, a place that lay “fifty miles into the main.”

  | CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Cover-Up

  The atmosphere was gloomy when the First Colony Foundation board met the day before Thanksgiving 2011 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. After more than half a dozen years of intensive excavations to find remnants of the Raleigh colonists on Roanoke, Evans’s group had little to show. No one could agree on what to do next.

  One of their newer board members, Brent Lane of the University of North Carolina, enjoyed volunteering at the excavations, but he was weary of digging dry holes. “It’s an astoundingly sterile place,” he told me later. “Dig under the theater! Dig under the parking lot! It’s been eating away at these guys. I realized that the broader story wasn’t going to be told by working exclusively on Roanoke.”

  Lane is a bearish man with a trimmed white beard and a voice like a Tar Heel Garrison Keillor. His presence tends to fill a room. Though he grew up in a suburb of the state capital of Raleigh, his father was from the Albemarle Sound region. As a youth he fished eastern North Carolina waters and as a college student mapped the area’s extensive peat bogs. “We worked in small boats and four-wheel drive trucks,” Lane recalled. “On foot, you had to hack your way through with a machete. I knew this area the way the Roanoke colonists did.”

  While he doesn’t claim a blood relation with the leader of the first colony—his ancestors arrived here in the 1630s as indentured servants—Lane admitted “the affinity of a shared name inevitably draws you to a person.” The business aspects of the 1585 expedition particularly appealed to his professional interest in the growth of the global economy. He didn’t truck with romance. “The Roanoke voyages have nothing to do with Virginia Dare and the poor lost white people—the lost cause of the sixteenth century and all that southern gothic shit. The real story is geopolitics, colonization, the advancement of science, and the development of investment.”

  So in 2006, after reading a newspaper story about the foundation, he called Evans, and the two hit it off. They shared a deep fascination with the Roanoke voyages and were equally excited by the challenge of finding physical clues left by the colonists. Evans invited him to join the board.

  In an attempt to nudge the foundation away from its Roanoke fixation, Lane put Evans in touch with Tom Thompson, the economic development chief of rural Beaufort County, one hundred miles southeast of the state capital. The county spans both sides of the Pamlico River, which flows into the sound of the same name. This was the area that Grenville and Lane’s expedition explored during the summer of 1585 before settling on Roanoke and also where White made some of his most compelling drawings of Native Americans and their villages. An engraving of his watercolor of Secotan, reprinted innumerable times, heavily influenced the way Europeans imagined an Indian community. Anthropologists still consider the image a masterpiece of their field
, because it captures in one scene the way the locals hunted, prayed, farmed, ate, celebrated, and honored their dead. Eager to draw tourists to a county suffering from high unemployment, Thompson asked the foundation’s archaeologists to identify the location of Secotan, in order to reconstruct the settlement.

  They agreed and turned to White’s map of eastern North Carolina, called La Virginea Pars, or “the parts of Virginia,” for hints to its precise location. They zeroed in on a point of land across the creek from Bath, a colonial North Carolina capital famed as the home of Blackbeard the pirate. The Canadian potash company that owned the site, however, refused to allow excavations. Soon after, Thompson left his job. “It all fell apart,” said Lane. “But it demonstrated the value of the map.”

  White’s watercolor is a work of art. Elizabethan ships glide across the sounds below long fluttering banners as Native American log canoes float in the light blue rivers. The painting is part of a collection of White’s New World drawings owned by the British Museum. But the image that covers the landscape between the southern Chesapeake Bay and the southern terminus of the Outer Banks is as much science as art. White based the drawing on the meticulous cartographic work done by Harriot, and its faithfulness to the complicated shorelines wasn’t equaled for at least two centuries.

  “It was incredibly accurate and precise,” said Lane. “I found that it hadn’t been used much as a tool for investigation.” Lane brought a reproduction of the map, along with his father’s fishing charts, when the board met that November day in 2011. As the group debated where to excavate next, he idly scanned White’s drawing for the hundredth time.

  “Why are there patches on the map?” he asked abruptly, looking up at the other board members.

  There were two. The first was a long oval one in the bottom third that covered part of Beaufort and surrounding counties, about fifty miles west of Hatteras Island. A smaller round patch covered the spot where the Roanoke and Chowan Rivers merge to form the Albemarle Sound, about fifty miles west of Roanoke Island. No one in the room had noticed the coverings before. Lane said he would contact British Museum curators to get their opinion. If they were lucky, he figured, what lay under the patch might provide new information that could revive the effort to locate the Secotan village that locals had hoped to reconstruct.