In the summer of 2017, Luccketti and his team donned hip waders to look for artifacts in the marsh just west of the main excavation site and recovered a few more pieces of the same pottery. “I think we’ve done enough work here at Site X,” he told me, a note of natural pessimism in his voice. “We don’t know exactly what we’ve got here. It remains a bit of an enigma.” Luccketti said the foundation planned a new excavation—back on Roanoke Island. But, he added, “we would have to raise the money first.” Meanwhile, the owner of Site X sold the land to a trust that intends to turn it over to the state, which will convert it to a park.
Unhappy with the direction that the work was taking, Brent Lane had by then resigned from the board. “It was getting too claustrophobic,” he told me. “And I’m tired of the competition with the Hatteras folks.” While the foundation focused on Site X, another team was working fifty miles south of Roanoke, on Hatteras Island. Lane made an annual pilgrimage to that rival camp to volunteer for a day or so, and the next time I saw him he was happily sifting through the sand and mud there.
“I greatly joyed that I had safely found a certain token of their safe being at Croatoan,” Governor White had written after he found the carving on the post in 1590. Amazingly, it was only recently that anyone bothered to look for the Lost Colonists in the very place they said they went. Even then, it took a ferocious hurricane and a persistent wrestling coach to get the attention of archaeologists.
| CHAPTER EIGHT
Pot of Brass
The name Croatoan, and its later equivalent, Croatan, has an exotic ring to it, akin to Atlantis or Shangri-La, but with a menacing undertone. In the long-running TV series Supernatural, in which two brothers hunt evil beings, it is a blood-borne virus created by “a demon of plague and pestilence.” Lucifer himself releases the illness in order to kill off humans in a kind of demonic germ warfare. Stephen King evokes a haunting scene of bewitched islanders in the miniseries Storm of the Century, in which the awful word is carved not on a tree but on their foreheads as they jump, one by one, into a raging ocean.
It was, in fact, a dark and stormy night that launched the first concerted effort to find evidence of the settlers on Croatoan, what is today known as Hatteras Island. Just after midnight on September 1, 1993, a ten-foot surge of water driven by hundred-mile-per-hour winds rushed out of the Pamlico Sound and over the middle of the exposed barrier island. Boats lodged in trees, and a house floated half a mile away. The flood even wiped away rain gauge data on a chart at the National Weather Service station. No one on the island drowned, but Hurricane Emily left a quarter of the population homeless.
“It was terrifying,” said Fred Willard, a hulking onetime Maryland marina owner and race car driver nicknamed the “Wildman” who had relocated to the island a few years earlier to fish and coach the high school wrestling team (including a young Scott Dawson). “I never want to live on that island again.”
After the storm passed, Willard and his then-girlfriend, Barbara Midgette, walked down a gravel road that runs between the Pamlico Sound and a little waterway called Cape Creek, at the bend in the L-shaped Hatteras. Amid the half-buried car tires and broken kayak paddles, they spotted fragments of pottery, clay tobacco pipes, and other Native American objects. “We picked up all the artifacts that we could,” he said later. “Everyone told me that I needed Dr. Phelps.”
Dr. David Phelps was an archaeologist at East Carolina University in Greenville, a three-hour drive west of Hatteras, and nearing retirement as a preeminent authority on prehistoric Indians in eastern North Carolina. Willard called the academic and urged him to visit. Months passed. “He kept postponing,” said Willard. In August 1994, Willard loaded some of the objects in his truck and drove to Greenville to confront Phelps in person. “We almost had to put him in a body bag to get him to come.”
When Willard showed up at his office door, Phelps already knew that Native Americans had lived for centuries on this stretch of rolling dunes covered in dense stands of gnarled water oaks bordering the Pamlico. Archaeologists first recorded the site in 1956, and Phelps did a brief excavation there three decades later, uncovering intriguing evidence of fish- or meat-smoking racks, windbreaks, and possibly a longhouse along with Native American pottery mixed in with shellfish remains and animal bones. He already suspected the site could shed light on the Roanoke voyages. Quinn had noted long before the oddity that except for one stray casting counter unearthed by a local on Hatteras in the early twentieth century, no artifacts associated with the Elizabethans had been found there.
“The Cape Creek site offers one of the best opportunities to thoroughly investigate an English-Algonquian contact town…which figured prominently in friendly relations with the 1587 colony,” Phelps wrote at the time. “Every effort should be made to conduct excavations there.” He was more interested, however, in learning about the Native Americans than in pursuing Lost Colonists, and no other researcher dared infringe on his turf.
At the time of the Roanoke voyages, a shallow inlet severed Hatteras to the north from Croatoan to the south. The village was perched just southwest of this waterway. The location provided easy access via the creek to both the Pamlico and the inlet, and plentiful freshwater ponds drew migrating birds, while thick forests were home to possum, squirrel, and herds of deer. Patches of loamy soil made it possible to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. Whelk hoes recovered by excavators make it clear the land was suitable for growing crops. Unlike most of the Outer Banks, this area could support full-time human occupation in prehistoric times; according to a de Bry engraving based on a long-lost White map, there were three villages strung along the fifteen-mile island. Quinn was wrong when he maintained that Croatoan was “unsuitable for an agricultural colony.”
The English were nearly as familiar with the island as they were with Roanoke. Amadas and Barlowe almost certainly visited in 1584, and twenty men landed here with Grenville’s fleet the following year. This is where Lane sent a group of his starving men in the spring of 1586 to keep watch for a resupply vessel and live off Croatoan hospitality. The next summer, White dispatched a delegation here to gather intelligence on the political situation after Howe’s slaying. It also was the home of Manteo, who the governor said “had his mother and many of his kindred dwelling in that island.” This unusual notice given to a woman may signal that she was an important figure in this matriarchal culture. Which village was Manteo’s birthplace is not known, though Cape Creek is an obvious candidate.
Despite this well-known history, it took Willard’s tenacity to prompt the archaeologist to launch a large-scale excavation of the site in 1995. While Phelps’s focus was on Native American life, the possibility of finding artifacts relating to the Roanoke voyages made it easy to round up volunteers to help with the dirty work of digging, sifting, and sorting. “Everybody who lives here has a theory about what happened to the Lost Colony,” one said to a reporter at the time. “And, secretly, in everybody’s heart, there’s a hope that we’ll find something to link them here.”
On a fall afternoon in 1998, the team finished digging a trench in a small clearing surrounded by water oak. One worker hoisted a bucket of soil into a screened box, while another sprayed the mix of mud and sand to expose any artifacts. A lump of earth dissolved into a metal form: a chunky ring. It was incised with the image of a prancing lion on its round setting. There was a sheen that looked to some like gold. Nothing like it had ever been found anywhere in the region.
The discovery transformed the sober, elder academic, a specialist in Native American prehistory and a man who quietly disdained those chasing after the Lost Colony, into an excited schoolchild. “Dr. Phelps just went totally ballistic,” Midgette told a local reporter shortly after the find. “He danced around. There was just sheer elation.” Charles Heath, a graduate student working at the site that day, remembers it a little differently. “We all realized it was special and mysterious,” he told me, “b
ut I really don’t remember Phelps dancing around the site.” The archaeologist himself, with what the journalist called “a broad smile,” acknowledged that “everybody was screaming and excited, let’s put it that way.”
The find bore all the hallmarks of a signet ring used by an Elizabethan man of rank to place his mark on documents using hot wax. In his unpublished field notes, Phelps described tersely what happened next. “Took signet ring from Sq M0H, Zone IIIA, Level 2 to Frank Riddick Jewelry in Nags Head for assay.” Phelps returned with the exciting news that the jeweler determined it was made from 18-karat gold. No gold signet ring of this sort had ever been found in North America. Only one has been found since; owned by a Jamestown colonist who arrived in 1619, it features a skull and crossbones with the owner’s initials.
The Cape Creek ring came from an Indian trash pit that had other European goods dating to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, or a century after the Roanoke voyages. Phelps, however, assigned it a late sixteenth-century date because it resembled pre-1600 rings in British collections. The artifact “is the first direct tie-in we’d had with the Roanoke colonies,” he said to a Virginian-Pilot journalist, who described his voice “wavering with excitement.” Phelps added, “That doesn’t mean the Lost Colony was here, but this begins to authenticate that.” The ring, the story added, “offers breathtaking new clues to the 400-year-old mystery of the Lost Colony.”
The archaeologist had the first physical clue pointing to the settlers on Croatoan since Lawson mentioned the gray eyes of the Hatteras Indians. Newspapers soon reported Phelps had found a link between the ring and the Kendall family, two of whom were associated with the voyages. Yet he published no research paper on the artifact, which exerted a Gollum-like response in its finder. He kept the ring for years at his Florida retirement home. Locals groused that the archaeologist had absconded with an Outer Banks treasure. Only when East Carolina University officials threatened to take legal action did he grudgingly return it—in unregistered mail.
Much more was found in five seasons of excavations, including thousands of bits of bone and pottery and the small figure of a human cut out of European copper but clearly made into a Native American design. Phelps never published a single word on any of it. Squirreled away in plastic bags and boxes, the trove remains locked away and largely unstudied in an ECU storage room. “Signet Ring Crowned N.C. Archaeologist’s Career” was the headline of his March 2009 obituary. Meanwhile, its prancing lion languished in a campus library vault.
* * *
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The fall after Phelps’s death, a new team arrived on the scene at Cape Creek. “Pity that the colonists have been lost twice—first by the English and then by the archaeologists,” Mark Horton said. “Ironic that now there’s a Brit on the case. We lost it, so I guess it is up to us to find it again.” He was sitting at a folding table under a canopy of live-oak trees, peering at a tiny circular piece of metal that had just come out of a small trench close to where Phelps found the ring. “From Virginia Dare’s bodice?” he asked, holding it up and looking at me mischievously.
It had been more than a year since I’d first met Horton, the University of Bristol archaeologist whose offhand comment at a dinner in Cambridge had inadvertently sent me down the Lost Colony rabbit hole. Horton is inexorably drawn to hard-to-solve mysteries. In a Panamanian swamp, he uncovered Scotland’s version of the Lost Colony, which had brought financial ruin to that country a century after Raleigh’s voyages. “It’s an interesting parallel to Roanoke,” he said. “Another grand scheme that went awry.” Now he was drawn to the place that Hakluyt and Raleigh had bet would prove to be England’s Panama.
Though he’s over sixty, Horton’s round figure and red cheeks are those of an overgrown English schoolboy, as is his irrepressible enthusiasm. He is the antithesis of the Harrison Ford image of an archaeologist. He hates hats and, to the dismay of his dig team, refuses to wear a belt around his perpetually sagging trousers. His lackluster hygiene is a source of constant distress to his fellow excavators. Disliking cold, he prefers excavating comfortably close to the equator. Given to spontaneous exclamations like “Right!” and “Cheers!” Horton is a human Google on most matters historical and archaeological.
The voluble archaeologist is also a minor media star in Britain; it is difficult to walk down a village street without an elderly woman accosting him with the phrase “Haven’t I seen you on the telly?” His credits include appearances on a show about the British coastline as well as Julius Caesar and the Druids. He consulted on a mercifully short-lived drama called Bonekickers, with Hugh Bonneville of Downton Abbey fame playing a character based on the Bristol archaeologist (the Guardian called it “a clattering bag of madness” that “was utterly bonkers but curiously satisfying”).
Horton was drawn into Roanoke’s vortex as a result of a comic mix-up. Years earlier, a representative from the town of Manteo showed up in the little west English port town of Bideford with an elaborate brass clock. It was meant as a goodwill gift to Manteo’s sister city, home to Sir Richard Grenville, who led the fleet carrying the Lane expedition. The gift puzzled the Bideford town clerk, because no one in city hall could recall the American twin. Nor had he heard of the North Carolina city. “I googled Manteo and saw it was colonized by the English during the exploration of the New World, but couldn’t find a link with us,” he told a reporter. Newspapers in both countries picked up the amusing story. “Twin Town Twits U.S. Man,” read London’s Daily Mail.
Stung by the publicity, the mayor, Andy Powell, invited Horton to lecture on Bideford’s link with the New World. Fascinated, Powell began to read up on the voyages. Eager to know more, he was put in touch with Scott Dawson, the man who discovered Fort Blob on Roanoke Island. Dawson grew up near Cape Creek on Hatteras, and he watched with alarm as wealthy outsiders bought up land in the area to build massive summer homes with views of the sound. Despite being designated by the State of North Carolina as an important archaeological site, no state or federal laws protect the site from destruction.
Dawson told Powell that construction workers claimed to find old swords and human bones as they dug foundations. “One crew said they filled a bunch of black Hefty trash bags with bones and reburied them, so they wouldn’t have to stop working,” Dawson recalled later. “They were probably Indian, but the guys said they were buried in a row”—a European rather than Native American tradition. When Powell and Horton visited Hatteras at Dawson’s invitation in late 2009, he urged them to organize a professional excavation before it was too late.
The wooded lot where Phelps dug had not yet been developed, but the owner refused to allow the archaeologists access. Many locals were still bitter that Phelps hauled away their island’s heritage. Dawson’s status as a local helped secure permission, however, from the owner of a nearby lot. With funding from a philanthropist and volunteer help, Horton and his team of British students began digging.
Almost nothing was known about the early history of Croatoan, which was renamed Hatteras in the late seventeenth century after a storm filled in the inlet separating the two barrier islands. Lawson noted the presence of Indians on his visit in 1701; they fought on the English side in the subsequent Tuscarora War and were rewarded with sixteen bushels of corn. By then, European settlers had begun to encroach on their land, and in 1731 only half a dozen or so remained in “Indian Town.” Within another few decades they had all but vanished. Horton’s finds revealed that the two groups traded with each other while retaining their own separate communities.
But the British archaeologist itched to dig closer to where Phelps found the ring and other artifacts that dated a century or so earlier. When bulldozer operators building a driveway on an adjacent lot sliced through a three-foot-high thick deposit of Native American material, Dawson wrangled approval from the owner to excavate a trench nearby, starting in the spring of 2013.
By then Dawso
n, now a schoolteacher, and his wife, Maggie, a nurse, had formed the Croatoan Archaeological Society to oversee the work. Organizing cookouts and concerts, they raised money to fly the British team to the United States and pledged to keep the artifacts on the Outer Banks. They recruited friends and family to assist Horton’s students. By giving talks at the local library and conducting excavations behind the local secondary school, the team overcame the community’s initial wariness.
Vacationing BBC reporter Nick Knowles volunteered to work the sieves that March. “The Lost Colony is a story I had been slightly obsessed with for years,” he recalled. “So I jumped at the chance to take a few days off from work to fly out and join the dig.” That day, “just as the next bucket was being tipped in, I saw the shape and put my hand over it to protect it. I knew straightaway what it was. I had just seen the ones on display at Fort Raleigh.”
Knowles had picked out a token made in Nuremberg like the ones Harrington found in 1950 at Fort Raleigh. Though later specialists pegged those tokens as dating to later than 1586—and therefore more likely of Jamestown than Roanoke vintage—Horton maintained the artifact was strong evidence for Elizabethans. “The only time that Roanoke and Hatteras are linked was in the late sixteenth century,” Horton stubbornly insisted. “The art historians are simply wrong.”
The same day Knowles found the German token, the team also uncovered a chunk of smelted copper with traces of lead, tin, and antimony, suggesting that metalworking similar to that conducted by Gans on Roanoke was taking place here as well. The metal proved to be European in origin. While the token might have been passed along in trade, the chunk of smelted copper, Horton argued, showed that Europeans were not just passing through; they were conducting metallurgical work beyond the abilities of Native Americans in that day.
The Secret Token Page 21
