The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  In 2015, after years of patient negotiations, Dawson finally won access to the site that Phelps excavated. The hilly patch of dune was covered in twisted live oaks and lay between a marsh and the Pamlico Sound, one of the last undeveloped lots on the road.

  “It was the mother lode,” Horton told me one morning as he showed me around the site. The extensive shell deposits from the leftovers of Indian meals seemed to show continuous occupation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Phelps believed there was a gap in occupation in the decades around the time of the Roanoke voyages, but Horton’s unpublished results strongly suggest the continued Native American presence, a finding backed up by the village noted at the site on the de Bry map.

  One afternoon Horton’s dig director, Charlotte Gouge, came across a hunk of iron as big as an orange while working with her trowel in a trench not far from where the ring was found. “There was a cylindrical ball shape on the end that caught my eye,” she said. With Horton’s approval, Dawson took it back to his garage. “I fried it.” More precisely, he applied electricity to the lump in order to reverse the oxidation that took place while it lay for four centuries or so in the damp ground. The conservation process, called electrolysis, shed the rust and revealed a distinct shape.

  University of Bristol archaeologist Mark Horton, right, ponders a new trench on the Cape Creek site on Hatteras. The dig is operated and funded by the local Croatoan Archaeological Society.

  “I picked a cold night because you immerse the object into a liquid that evaporates in warm air,” Dawson explained. After zapping it, “I knew immediately what it was.” He then applied museum-quality wax to protect the surfaces from air that might trigger further rusting. Dawson recalled showing the cleaned artifact the next morning to Horton, who was dumbfounded. “Scott!” the archaeologist cried. “That’s a rapier!”

  The full weapon is a slender straight blade with two edges and an elaborate hilt, and it grew in popularity after its invention early in the sixteenth century. French, Spanish, and Italian soldiers or gentlemen of the era called it an épée, as modern fencers still do. By the 1570s it appeared in England under the term “rapier,” which may derive from the Spanish word for elegant clothes. It was what today we call a dress sword.

  Dawson’s electrolysis revealed part of the rapier’s handle, complete with a sweeping ring that curved down to protect the hand of its wielder. Somehow a gentleman’s dress sword found its way to an old Native American trash dump. The style, Horton concluded, fit late-sixteenth-century models. And because a gentleman was unlikely to part with his rapier, and less likely to sell it, it seemed an unusual trade item to turn up on a remote barrier island decades after its manufacture in England.

  Like the ring, the rapier was a tantalizing clue pointing to Elizabethans living on Croatoan. One breezy April evening, I drove to the dig house, a beach cottage that doubled as bunk room and laboratory for the annual excavation season. I waited as a herd of deer trotted across the road as the lighthouse beam swiveled above the dune grass. Horton was on a sofa drinking beer as his students bustled about, cataloging turtle bones and washing pottery on the porch while others cooked pasta. He was suffering from his first bout of poison ivy, after refusing advice to wash immediately, and one eye was red and puffy. He paused periodically between swigs to scratch his bottom, which apparently was likewise affected. (“When he uses my phone, I want to wash it off immediately,” one of his assistants told me.) “Right!” he said ebulliently by way of greeting, and hauled himself up to rummage through a plastic box as his trousers fell to alarming levels. “Mark!” exclaimed several exasperated students simultaneously.

  “Aha!” He handed me the bit of sword hilt, ignoring their outrage. It was a small curving piece of metal designed to protect the wielder’s hand. “You could argue that this is Manteo’s. After all, he was made a lord and likely given a rapier in the ceremony.”

  The image was seductive: Manteo returning to his Indian village as an English lord in velvet and taffeta finery with a gentleman’s dress sword. Alternatively, the object might have belonged to one of the Lost Colonists, perhaps a Cittie of Raleigh assistant who had purchased the status item before the voyage after receiving his coat of arms. It also could have been exchanged for food by a hungry Lane settler in the hard days of 1586, or even been given, traded, or stolen from one of the men left on the island at Grenville’s 1585 arrival.

  Horton believed these and other artifacts, like the ring, copper bun, and evidence that people were making lead balls to shoot guns, were proof of Elizabethans among the people of Croatoan. Metalworking certainly suggested Europeans were here for a long period of time, not just on a brief visit. And if the items were made and used by Native Americans, they had to obtain the technology as well as the materials.

  The lives of the Croatoan clearly underwent dramatic changes between 1600 and 1700, before a new wave of English began to settle the Outer Banks. For example, the protein of choice switched from surf to turf. Through painstaking analysis of thousands of bits of bone and shell, Horton’s team members discovered that the locals began to leave behind far fewer fish and turtle remains and many more deer and bird bones. The simplest explanation for this shift was the introduction of firearms. The people of Cape Creek were making lead shot and also using dress pins, a sign that the Indians had adopted Western clothes along with weapons. One scholar says, “The fashionable Elizabethan woman was a walking pincushion.” But pins are notoriously difficult to date, because their shape did not change much over the centuries.

  “They are living as Native Americans, but we’re finding material culture to suggest they are wearing clothes and living a partly European lifestyle,” Horton added, then paused reflectively as he explored his left nostril and rubbed his reddened eye.

  For Horton, the Cape Creek finds revealed the pivotal moment when Old World met the New World as the Elizabethans shared their technical knowledge with the Croatoan, who in turn trained them in the ways of surviving in a strange environment. They became a hybrid culture even before the second wave of English colonists arrived. As far as Horton was concerned, he had all but resolved the four-century-plus mystery.

  Taking a last swig from his bottle, however, he acknowledged a serious gap in his carefully constructed theory. Much of what seemed Elizabethan was mixed together with other artifacts dating to the second half of the seventeenth century, at least six decades after White’s 1590 voyage. “It’s deeply problematic that this stuff turns up two generations later,” he had admitted earlier that day. “Can I have another beer?” he called out plaintively to no one in particular. The students did not interrupt their tasks to reply, much less comply.

  All the possible goods that Horton claimed were owned by Raleigh’s settlers, in other words, might be trade items pawned off on Indians from the English settlements sprouting along Chesapeake Bay in the seventeenth century. The rapier might be an old-model sword traded south from Jamestown decades later. An antiquated gun might end up in the hold of a ship bound for the Chesapeake and then be sold for deerskin or corn. Even a chunk of European copper might simply be a sign that a passing trader or a castaway showed a local Indian how to melt down and hammer out a pleasing shape.

  Native American trade networks stretched hundreds and even thousands of miles long before Europeans arrived; the copper worn by Carolina and Virginia Algonquian chiefs and the stones of their axes came from distant mines and outcrops, and their shell beads were traded far to the west. Native Americans also were adept at making any object useful. Horton’s team found a tiny piece of glass shaped into an arrowhead. Everything that Horton found could have made its way to Croatoan without the involvement of a Roanoke colonist.

  I fingered the earliest clearly dated object found by Horton’s team, a metal disk made in Antwerp and stamped with the year 1644. Called a coin weight, it verified that a gold or silver coin actually weighed the amou
nt specified by the government producing it. Others retrieved, including one measuring the weight of Hungarian ducats, were made in 1648. But Horton had an answer for why what he insisted were sixteenth-century artifacts were mixed with such later objects.

  “We’ve excavated other bits across Hatteras Island, and this Elizabethan material doesn’t turn up; it is just here,” he said. There was something special about Cape Creek. “What if the rapier was an heirloom, until it became too worn and broken that they threw it away? Oh, there’s Granddad’s old sword in the corner rusting away, why are we keeping that!”

  The Lost Colonists, he went on, would have held on to their precious reminders of home—a sword, a cloak, a Nuremberg token emblazoned with a cross—until the objects were too worn or lost their meaning. In the meantime, they began to obtain trade items as the European presence to the north increased. “If you can explain the social context, then it suddenly makes sense. The things we are finding are not those they would be trading from Jamestown anyway!”

  While it is true that selling guns and swords and even bottles to Indians was forbidden in the early years of the Virginia colony, there is little doubt that hungry settlers were willing to part with whatever they had for food. Powhatan, for example, acquired hundreds of swords, despite the ban. As compelling as Horton’s vision was—Natives and Lost Colonists peacefully learning from each other—it wasn’t the only explanation for how European material ended up in the Cape Creek village.

  Horton smiled indulgently at my skepticism and then poked around in another plastic box. He triumphantly pulled out a plastic bag containing an object he was sure clinched his case. It was a sliver of dark stone no bigger than a half dollar found in 2015 next to what resembled a lead pencil. “I immediately thought of Jamestown,” he said with satisfaction.

  Several years earlier, archaeologists working there uncovered a similar, though larger, piece of slate, incised with faint marks. A combination of high-tech NASA analysis and drugstore talcum powder revealed that it was the oldest European drawing pad known in North America. The Jamestown slate was crammed with pictures of birds, lions, and a man in a ruff smoking a pipe, as well as two symbols, possibly copied from Harriot’s long-vanished Algonquian dictionary. “Slate and chalk are easily found in England, and you could make a note or a list or sketch anything,” Sloan from the British Museum told me later. Sometimes a lead pencil was used to cut an image so that it would be indelible.

  Horton’s slate was even smaller and the incisions fainter than the one at Jamestown. He photographed the surface and magnified it back in Bristol. “I saw it and said, egads!” he recalled as I examined the tiny bit of rock. “What it is actually showing is quite clearly the murder of Wingina!”

  He could make out a soldier in an Elizabethan-style outfit shooting a gun at the neck of a Native American dressed with a headband and two feathers. And the only person who might have drawn this scene of Lane’s men assassinating the Indian leader, he believed, was the artist on the 1585 expedition: John White. This, therefore, was the governor’s personal writing tablet portraying a European soldier firing point blank at an indigenous man.

  He grabbed his laptop and flopped back on the sofa. After opening a file with a magnified image, he handed the computer to me. I could make out two lines that might be a gun barrel and the outline of what was conceivably an Indian head resembling the one on the old nickel. There were dots suggesting bullets in between, but I felt like I was gazing at the summer sky with a friend who imagines a rabbit in a cloud. “Can anyone see the soldier here?” Horton called out to the room. “It is very obvious when you see it.” Reactions were mixed. “I’m dubious,” said one team member who bent over my shoulder. “If you squint,” said another. The scratches, I said, all seemed so impossibly small, though Horton gleefully parried that White was a talented miniaturist. In this he was right; the artist’s drawing of the fort Lane had built in Puerto Rico includes the minuscule image of the flagship Tiger painted in such detail that the awning over the stern deck is clearly visible.

  If the archaeologist was correct, then the slate depicted one of the most important moments in American colonial history, the first murder of an Indian leader by the English, and one that sealed the fate of the Roanoke voyages. The event served as a grim harbinger of subsequent violence perpetrated by European Americans.

  I tagged along a few days later when he took the object to the same NASA center that examined the Jamestown artifact. Technicians put it in a chamber to obtain high-precision three-dimensional X-ray images—3,142 to be exact. Gathering all that data took less than an hour, but that would be just the start; the information then required extensive and expert tweaking to provide anything like a better close-up. Busy with other projects, Horton had not quite gotten to it a year later. When I tried to reach him, I was told he was in Zanzibar or, no, was it Madagascar? Months later he emailed me that his slate analysis was not yet complete. “I am still not totally happy with it,” he wrote, “but as you know I think this remains our best evidence. I still think there is clearly an image of a soldier, but I am sure you must think its looking into clouds.”

  I felt frustrated by the slow pace of research. Horton was juggling too many projects to bring his full attention to bear on his Cape Creek finds. But there was, I realized, one artifact outside his control that might yield fresh results, the one that ignited the search for Roanoke settlers on Hatteras in the first place.

  * * *

  —

  The ring that Phelps found at Cape Creek in 1998, hailed as a potential major breakthrough, still rests in the library vault at East Carolina University. Amid all the muddy potsherds and bits of copper, this glamorous object seemed the only personal link to Raleigh’s colony. But because Phelps published no scholarly reports on the artifact, the only information I could find was in old news clips.

  A local historian in Manteo filled in some of the gaps. She studied the ring shortly after its discovery and had asked a friend, John Brooke-Little from London’s College of Arms, to take a look. The college granted White and his assistants coats of arms four centuries earlier. Recently retired, Brooke-Little had served at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and was known for sporting a long cape while commuting on the subway. He named one of his sons Merlin.

  When I visited the Manteo researcher, who requested anonymity, in her windowless office at Fort Raleigh, she dug out of a crammed file cabinet a handwritten response that she received from the heraldry expert after sending him photographs of the ring. “The seal and drawing is quite clear,” he wrote on October 27, 1998. “It is a lion passant; the tail is not erect and shown in the way in which it is usually drawn.” Brooke-Little added, “I have done a couple of hours research at home in my library and I find that a family of Kendall of Devon and Cornwall are credited with a lion passant crest, although preliminary research seems to indicate that this was not officially recorded.”

  His response excited the Manteo historian, who has devoted a large portion of the past several decades to unraveling Roanoke’s innumerable historical knots (she found, for instance, the record of Eleanor Dare’s birth in London). She knew two Kendalls were associated with the Roanoke voyages. A Master Kendall was part of Lane’s 1585 expedition, while Abraham Kendall was aboard Francis Drake’s 1586 fleet that rescued the colony leader and his men. Either man might have traded or lost his ring while on Croatoan, though neither was linked to the Lost Colony.

  “So we had a strong suggestion of the presence of a man with the right name to a crest of a ring that was found,” she told me. “Reasonable enough. But that needed in-depth research.” She informed Phelps that Brooke-Little’s results were preliminary, and proposed a ten-thousand-dollar project focused on a study of the ring. “The College of Arms is notorious for burning up money. Of course [Phelps] never got the money, so I have not pursued it beyond the original research,” the researcher added. “And Brooke-Lit
tle”—who died in 2006—“did not follow up.”

  It seemed a promising thread to follow. So while in London, I made an appointment with a herald at the imposing seventeenth-century compound that houses the college, in the heart of the capital. A gold crown surmounted the iron gate leading into a broad courtyard. The top of St. Paul’s cathedral dome peeked out above the dormered roof.

  Inside, the lobby seemed more an altar of a wealthy nature cult than a memorial to English genealogy. Behind an elaborate polished balustrade sat a wooden throne empty save for a purple cushion. On the step below the throne was a golden lion the size of a Chihuahua and the miniature head of a black elephant embracing a small sword with its trunk.

  A balding man with a ruddy face and checked shirt and tie popped out from behind a thick oak door. Christopher John Fletcher-Vane, son of a baron and the current Portcullis Pursuivant of Arms in Ordinary, ushered me briskly through the same door and bounded up several flights of stairs. “I haven’t been a herald long,” he explained apologetically as I tried to keep up. “I was a barrister for forty years, but I studied archaeology at Cambridge and excavated an Anglo-Saxon palace.” His office was heavy with bookcases and oil portraits of men with white wigs. One particularly forbidding face was that of his ancestor who served as royal governor of Massachusetts and helped found Harvard College, where George Bancroft would later resurrect Virginia Dare and recast the Roanoke story as a romantic tale.

  Heralds began as sports announcers. They kept score at medieval jousts. To call out the correct names of combatants, they had to know the shields and crests used by the contestants encased in armor. That expertise made them useful to the crown. In 1484, King Richard III set up the College of Arms to corral the growing menagerie of supporting dragons and jumping unicorns and to grant new ones for up-and-coming families favored by the monarch. The college still oversees royal ceremonies like the opening of Parliament, while doing pay-the-bills genealogical work and producing fresh coats of arms for those who want a little more toff in their tree.