But Sloan was wary of the public response to the revelations from the White map. “It’s dangerous when you put out there all the options and people leap to conclusions,” she said as she carefully set the map back in its box and replaced the lid.
The situation, Brent Lane told me, reminded him of the 2004 film National Treasure, in which Nicolas Cage plays a historian who deciphers a coded map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. “We had to have credible research behind this,” he said. “It was all rather sensational. We wanted it covered methodically and soberly.”
White or his assistant drew a fort and then hid the image under a patch. Someone then drew another fort symbol in what certainly seems invisible ink on top of the concealing patch. The fort might have been planned but never built, or a mistake that required fixing, as White had done with the patch over Secotan. Yet if it was simply to cover something that was never built, why use invisible ink to draw a similar image on top of the patch?
There was only one way to find out. Archaeologists had to go to the X marked on the map and dig.
* * *
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The search for the colonists didn’t start this decade; it didn’t start this century,” Brent Lane told reporters at a crowded 2012 press conference in Chapel Hill three months after Sloan first slid the map onto the light table. “It started as soon as they were found to be absent from Roanoke Island…I would say every generation in the last four hundred years has taken this search on.” But, he added, “none of them had this clue on this map.”
Sloan declined to attend the event in person, appearing instead on a screen set up at the university’s Wilson Library. On the stage, it was clear that the scholars associated with the First Colony Foundation interpreted the discovery differently. Principal archaeologist Eric Klingelhofer suggested that “parts of Raleigh’s exploration in North America were a state secret, and the map ‘cover-up’ was an effort to keep information from the public and from foreign agents.”
Historian James Horn felt vindicated by “a pretty amazing piece of evidence from a source that has been staring us in the face all along.” He had long advocated the view that the colonists went fifty miles inland as White suggested. “We believe that this evidence provides conclusive proof that they moved westward up the Albemarle Sound to the confluence of the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers.”
“This is really a good solid lead,” countered Lane, “but it’s not conclusive, and it won’t be until we find something.” The fort symbol was just a mark on a piece of paper until archaeologists could find physical remains in the ground. And it was not drawn to scale; the red-and-blue lozenge covered territory on the ground amounting to thousands of acres in rural Bertie County. This was no simple treasure map.
Members of the First Colony Foundation following the patch discovery; clockwise from bottom left, James Horn, Brent Lane, Phil Evans, Eric Klingelhofer, and Nicholas Luccketti. Briana Brough for The New York Times/Redux
Though they said nothing about it at the press conference, the foundation already had its eye on a specific parcel of land fronting the Albemarle, between the mouths of the Roanoke and Chowan Rivers. Luccketti had dug there in 2006 when a massive housing development was planned that required an archaeological survey before construction could commence. His team uncovered a mix of Native American and European artifacts, including gray and green English pottery common in the seventeenth century and wine bottles manufactured after 1650. None of this was surprising, because a Virginian named Nathaniel Batts established the first European trading post in what is now North Carolina near there in the 1650s.
With the onset of the Great Recession, the development plan collapsed. Luccketti still had the artifacts from the site boxed up in his Williamsburg office. When he and colonial pottery expert Bly Straube took a closer look at the finds, they concluded that they were of a sort that could date to the late sixteenth century. “Here was a suggestion that there may be something at this site relating to the Roanoke colony,” Luccketti told me.
Another piece of evidence pointing to the region was a red dot hidden under the patch that marked the site of an Indian village almost precisely where they dug. Some historians believe the red dots and markings on White’s map show where the English visited. As at Roanoke, the settlers would be likely to build close to a Native American village that could offer food and protection.
Another map provided an additional clue. As part of his 1590 volume on Virginia, the Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry published a black-and-white map of the region that is more detailed than White’s. He likely based this copper engraving on a more precise map since lost. The engraving features more inlets into the Carolina sounds, as well as sixteen additional place-names. The place where Luccketti dug matched the location of an Indian village marked as Mettaquem on de Bry’s reproduction, located at the same spot as the red dot on White’s watercolor.
Ralph Lane mentions leading an expedition past Mettaquem, which may mean “big trees” or “great woods” in Carolina Algonquian, in 1586. It was under the control of King Okisco, ruler of the Weapemeoc who dominated the northern side of the Albemarle Sound. They were subject to the larger and more powerful Chowan tribe, to the north and west. Lane reported that Okisco later sent two dozen of his “principalest men” to Roanoke Island and that he pledged obedience to Queen Elizabeth, at the order of his Chowan chief. By placing the fort symbol in the vicinity of Mettaquem, White might have been suggesting that the English had their eye on the area. In his 1586 report to Raleigh, Lane suggested building a series of small forts, called sconces, to protect a passage between the Chowan River and Chesapeake Bay to the north. There is no evidence that he did so, but Mettaquem was at a strategic juncture that an experienced military engineer like Lane would surely have appreciated.
In part to keep its location secret and in a nod to the treasure-map nature of their hunt, Luccketti and his colleagues called the place of their prospective dig Site X.
Like Sloan, Luccketti was reluctant at first to talk with me. Given the publicity frenzy surrounding the map, he was wary of reporters and wary of making claims before the results were fully analyzed. Publicity, however, is a key method for nonprofit groups like Evans’s foundation to attract funding for future excavations, given the paucity of government grants for archaeological work. He finally relented, but he refused to give exact directions to the site because of worries that artifact looters might learn of the location.
One still and humid summer morning, in a fittingly clandestine manner, I rendezvoused at a local country store with Swindell and followed his truck down a back road dotted with farms between pine woods. He turned onto an unpaved road and waved me through a gate that he locked back up once I had passed. My car bumped between rows of soybeans before we parked on a grassy slope. Beyond, to the east, the orange glare of the midsummer sun lifted above the still expanse of the Albemarle Sound, which stretched to a hazy horizon. Roanoke Island lay just over the earth’s curve.
When I got out, the air already felt viscous. Immediately in front of me was a narrow meadow framed by thick woods and punctured with half a dozen rectangular holes.
“No social media!” Luccketti barked by way of greeting. “No Facebook, no tweeting, no texting!” Short and stocky and given to a downcast expression and low-key manner, he earned the nickname Eeyore, after the pessimistic donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh. Today, however, he was uncharacteristically on edge.
Just then, a tall middle-aged man in a polo shirt walked up. “He’s our leak,” the man said quietly to Luccketti, nodding discreetly over his left shoulder. “He’s been taking pictures.”
I turned to see a worker in jeans and a T-shirt shoveling dirt from a neatly cut trench. Another was standing over a mesh screen boxed in plywood laid on top of two sawhorses, sorting through the dark earth for artifacts like pottery or bone. “He told the guy with metal detectors wher
e this place was,” the man added. Luccketti frowned. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, and stalked off toward the trench.
He returned without comment and walked me down to the beach that bordered the Albemarle. On either side of the field was a cypress swamp. To my left, across a mile or so of flat water, were the gables of Edenton, a sleepy North Carolina colonial capital that marked where the Chowan River entered the sound. To the right was a small cove formed by the mouth of Salmon Creek. A golden eagle soared by. It was easy to imagine lookouts peering down the sound as an English pinnace rode nearby at anchor, invisible to any Spanish ships that might venture into the interior in their hunt for the trespassers.
Walking back up the gentle slope, Luccketti led me to a folding table set up in the full sun of the open field. On either side, close to the trees, volunteers were busy shoveling and sifting. He rifled through a stack of binders and pulled out a map of the site. Swindell, a specialist in Native American archaeology, joined us. “It makes sense as a location,” he said in the melodic drawl of eastern North Carolina. “You’ve got a Native American settlement right next door. We’ve found 275 pounds of Indian pottery from very early until the seventeenth century. This land has been intensively used for a thousand years.”
The team dug six trenches during their first season in 2012, uncovering more English and Indian pottery and several Native American pits possibly used for storage. There was a scattering of iron slag and bits of brick. A dog burial came to light. This was clearly a place where the two cultures met. Some of the excavators thought they could make out postholes and ditches in the damp soil. The excited archaeologists speculated that they were finding remnants of Lost Colonists who had built a new settlement adjacent to the indigenous village. But to be sure, they needed to find artifacts and remains of buildings that could be precisely dated.
When the team returned the following summer, they brought along what looked like a jogging stroller that held a ground-penetrating radar device. Guiding it around the site, the expedition members mapped metal and disturbed soil under the field. The results were dramatic. Long shadowy lines under the earth, and the outlines of rectangular and circular structures or enclosures, suggested there had once been architecture here. Though there was no definitive proof yet, and they all knew of the failures of radar at Roanoke, the team was encouraged. “Evidence of an early colonial presence is definitely there and with it the real possibility that it occurred in the late sixteenth century,” their 2013 report noted, adding that “an Elizabethan presence at Mettaquem opens up for us an opportunity to change the traditional, simple image of Settler vs. Indian.” Indians and early Europeans here seemed to mingle together freely.
While researchers examined the earth, an underwater archaeologist used a similar radar tool to map the bottom of Salmon Creek, identifying the outline of what appeared to be a wooden ship. “The possibility exists that it is Elizabethan, and none of the boats left with the Lost Colonists has ever been found,” the report noted. The scientist planned a future dive to examine the wreck and determine its age and origin.
As on Roanoke Island, however, the promising outlines in the soil turned out to be of later origin. What looked like postholes were roots of long-fallen trees. The iron-working areas dated much later. And some of the Indian pottery was made centuries before Columbus left Spain.
Undeterred, Luccketti and his team dug further. During the 2014 season, his excavators uncovered a few small L-shaped bits of metal that resembled similar artifacts found at early colonial Virginia sites. They could have been used to stretch the canvas of a tent or animal skins. These small pieces offered further hope. Two priming pans from firearms also appeared in the sorting screens. The archaeologists found one pan too worn to identify, but the second appeared to be from a popular late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century firearm. There was also an iron buckle that could date from either the sixteenth or the seventeenth century, as well as a lead seal similar to one found by Noël Hume at Fort Raleigh. These seals were fastened to bolts of finished cloth to certify their length and quality: a likely sign of trade goods.
The archaeologists also picked out aglets, the tiny tubes of metal used to secure a lace. Today they are the bits of plastic at the end of a shoelace, but in Elizabethan times they were common on clothing. Similar objects had been found on Roanoke during Luccketti’s dig in the woods just northwest of the earthwork in 1995. A few have turned up at Virginia sites dating to the 1640s, but they appear less frequently after the time, suggesting the Site X artifacts could be Elizabethan.
Luccketti reached into a plastic bag and pulled out what he felt was their ace in the hole and handed it to me. The triangular-shaped piece of ceramic had a green and smooth outer surface, while the interior was reddish and rough. This was, he told me, one of several dozen bits of ceramic, made on the boundary between Surrey and Hampshire in southern England and therefore called Border ware.
It wasn’t much to look at. Luccketti read my mind. “The mundane nature of this is what makes it important,” he said. “If it was a pretty object, then the Indians might collect it.” Native Americans viewed most European goods as exotic and therefore desirable. White found this out when his trunks, carefully hidden in a deep trench by the settlers, were dug up and looted by the time he returned in 1590. The Indians took everything they found useful. Even broken glass could be turned into arrowheads, which is why early English traders at Jamestown could sell rum, but not the bottles, to Indians.
Simple pottery, by contrast, was of little value because the Indians had their own. Luccketti felt confident that I was holding part of a bowl used by a Lost Colonist. “We think this was where they came after Governor White left,” he said confidently. I handed the bit of ceramic back. “But couldn’t this pottery be from one of Lane’s 1585 and 1586 explorations?” I asked. “After all, we know he was in this area.”
He slowly shook his head as he slid it back into the bag. The air was growing hot, and we were both sweating. “Lane’s visit was too brief to produce lots of broken pots. The only likely owners were English who spent a good deal of time here, and that could only be the 1587 settlers.”
But wasn’t Border ware made long into the seventeenth century?
Yes, he acknowledged, the English imported Border ware well into the seventeenth century, so its presence alone doesn’t necessarily point to Elizabethans. In fact, archaeologists dug out four pieces at a 1660s plantation house just a mile down the road. But, he said, its presence diminishes over time. Border ware accounts for more than a quarter of the ceramics found in a Jamestown well used from 1607 to 1610. A well used between 1616 and 1619 contained less than one in ten pieces. At a nearby settlement dating between 1630 and 1650, the figure drops to only one sherd in fifty. After 1650, it is a rarity—literally one piece in a thousand.
“Here, we’ve opened up forty square feet and found thirty sherds of Border ware making up three or four vessels,” he said. “We think this represents the Roanoke colonists.”
* * *
—
Later I asked Jacqui Pearce at the Museum of London Archaeology for her opinion. Pearce literally wrote the book on Border ware in 1992. At the time of the Roanoke voyages, she told me, potters began to make vessels in this style for cooking, eating, and drinking, as well as for bedpans, candlesticks, ink pots, and even chicken-feeding containers.
The pottery found at Site X, she added, appeared to be from a common form of dishes. This particular style, she explained, changed little from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. That makes it difficult to assign even an approximate date to manufacture. Luccketti’s claim hinges on the argument that if the pottery were from the post-1650 Carolina frontier, it wouldn’t be found in such large quantities.
It was a good scientific theory, but a slim thread to carry the full weight of a Lost Colony solution. Pottery unearthed here that comes from a tall jar made in Devon ma
y be a better candidate for an undeniably Elizabethan artifact. But the other material found so far at Site X—the hooks, the lead seal, the guns, the belt buckle—could conceivably be goods traded south from Jamestown decades later. Like the material Luccketti found on Roanoke Island, such as the European copper plates of an Indian necklace, the objects are intriguing but can’t definitively be linked to the Lost Colonists.
Nevertheless, a few days after my visit, the First Colony Foundation announced at another crowded press conference that it had sixteenth-century artifacts pointing to the Lost Colonists. Luccketti’s 2015 report maintained, “It cannot be a coincidence that the Indian village site labeled by the Elizabethans as Mettaquem, and identified as such by First Colony Foundation archaeologists, also contains English artifacts attributable to the period.”
He stopped short, however, of claiming to have solved the mystery. “Our working hypothesis is that the Elizabethan artifacts at Site X represent perhaps a small group of survivors.” This was not necessarily the Cittie of Raleigh, he suggested, but a smaller settlement built after White left and the colonists decamped upriver. Many of the resulting headlines and stories, however, didn’t capture the nuances of “working hypothesis” or “perhaps.” One Australian paper announced, “England’s Lost Colonists ‘Went Native’ in America.”
The notion that at least some of the settlers went where White suggests they planned to go, fifty miles inland, was a reasonable one. But I was skeptical that a few pieces of Border ware were enough to clinch the case. Subsequent excavations found more pottery but no sign of the fort suggested by the patch. Nor was there a silver bullet; there wasn’t, say, the skeleton of a woman buried on her back, in an east-west orientation, reliably dated to before 1650. Such a find would be strong evidence for a Lost Colonist, because Indians placed their corpses on their side in the fetal position, and the Lane expedition was all male.
The Secret Token Page 20
