The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  I showed Fletcher-Vane a high-resolution picture of the ring but didn’t mention the name Kendall.

  “The lion looks to me to be the crest, since it is not shown on a shield.” He explained that the crest is what rests on top of a shield that contains the coat of arms, a nod to its use on jousting helmets. He frowned. “But there are an awful lot of lions in heraldry. I can show you a published book on crests and everyone has a lion passant. It is quite difficult to find a list of crests in circulation then. Many people just made them up, and we had no way to stop them. There are lots of self-assumed lions rampant or passant. I’ll show you this book, and you will be horrified at the number of lions passant. It’s a tragedy, that’s what this is.”

  He explained that a “beast rampant” is an animal rearing into the air with three paws raised, while a “beast passant” stands with only one paw off the ground. Then he dashed down the stairs and led me to a small corner room dominated by an ancient copy machine and crammed with books from floor to ceiling. He pulled a thick leather-bound book from the shelves containing countless family names associated with the lion passant crest. I mentioned Brooke-Little’s theory about Kendall. “I find that pretty far-fetched,” he said, flipping through pages. “Kendall is not listed in any of these books.” He was also skeptical that a colonist would have had the status to wear a gold signet ring. Fletcher-Vane looked up Ralph Lane’s family crest, which is a lion rampant rather than passant.

  “Let’s look for John White, shall we?” he exclaimed suddenly. He led me across the lobby and into a hushed hall filled with oversized leather-bound books. Two elderly men bent silently over large volumes. Though it was a bright spring day outside, the dark wood and profound silence gave the main library a tomb-like air. After some discussions with the librarian and a phone call to a nearby office, a young archivist in a pink sweater appeared with a long blue box.

  She unrolled a scroll-like document and spread it across a long table. Dated January 7, 1587, and titled “Grant of Arms for the City of Raleigh in Virginia, and for Its Governor and Assistants,” the document notes the “expedient and ancient custom” of honoring men “employed in the most honorable service of God, their prince, or country in peace or war.”

  This was one of three copies of the only known document associated with the Cittie of Raleigh corporation, the one that mentions White and his twelve assistants. I spotted the name of George Howe, the colonist killed just a week after his arrival in the New World. “He was clubbed to death,” I said a little too loudly, pointing at the name. The archivist looked at me with ill-concealed alarm.

  Fletcher-Vane concluded that neither White nor any of his Lost Colonists were likely to have owned a gold signet ring. “If you were granted a coat of arms and you were leaving for America in ten days’ time, you don’t rush off and get a ring with a crest,” he said as the archivist rolled the charter back up. “That’s just common sense.” He paused for a moment. “Are you sure this ring is gold?” he asked.

  All I knew was what I had read in Phelps’s unpublished notes. As I left, he suggested I contact the nearby Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses the world’s largest collection of decorative arts and might be able to offer further insight.

  “Lions seem to have been a popular choice,” Rachel Church told me after looking over pictures of the Cape Creek ring. She was the museum curator who specialized in signet rings. “We have examples in our collection made in gold, silver, bronze, and brass and of varying degrees of quality.” Church showed me a picture of a gold ring from the early seventeenth century in the collection that was owned by Sir Walter Raleigh’s brother-in-law. The deeply etched eagle opening its wings was striking, far more detailed and carefully carved than the rougher outlines on Phelps’s ring.

  Even as a layperson, I could see its quality and sheen were of a far higher caliber than the Cape Creek artifact. “I would have guessed that yours was more likely to be brass than gold,” she added.

  If the ring were brass, then it was unlikely to be a special possession worn by an Elizabethan noble. “It would be the kind of thing you could have walked into a London stationer’s shop and get off the shelf,” archaeologist Bly Straube told me when I got back to the United States. “It is not specially made for you or your family.” Yet for Native Americans, the cheap alloy was at the time highly desirable. Brass signet rings from the late seventeenth century turn up in Indian graves in Quebec, Rhode Island, and Jamestown.

  I visited the Manteo historian again at Fort Raleigh, and she fished a notecard out of her battered file cabinet written by Phelps on January 19, 1999, that accompanied a photograph of the ring. “The jeweler who cleaned it remarked on its hardness, which indicates a carat-count between 10 and 14 carats—goodly content of silver and copper in the alloy. The ring is a size 10 (just my size!). More later.”

  Then I searched out Frank Riddick, the jeweler whom Phelps said he consulted in his unpublished report. He no longer owns a jewelry shop but has a charter company called Fishy Bizness. Riddick readily recalled the archaeologist’s visit nearly two decades before. “He showed up one day at my shop and wanted to know if it was gold or not,” he said. “There weren’t many jewelers on the Outer Banks then.”

  Jewelers, he explained, typically scratch the surface of a gold ring to make sure it is not just plated, and they can determine the karat using an acid. “But since this wasn’t about buying or selling, we didn’t do that. I just told him that I thought it was gold.” Riddick said he hadn’t conducted any tests on the ring. His offhand opinion, like Brooke-Little’s “preliminary research,” had morphed into accepted fact.

  Next I called Charles Ewen, an archaeologist at East Carolina University who had known Phelps. He agreed to take the ring from the vault to subject it to X-ray fluorescence to determine its precise elemental composition. We met early one afternoon at a student hangout on the fringe of campus. Ewen is a genial academic who inherited Phelps’s position but has tried, with mixed success, to steer clear of the Roanoke vortex. “I don’t have any theories about the settlers,” he told me and then proceeded to give me his. “Except that they probably tried to sail home in the pinnace and drowned.”

  He told me that he was interviewed about the ring by the Russian website Pravda, which was unable to obtain an image of the object; instead it used a picture of Tolkien’s ring of Mordor. “Do you want to see my precious?” he asked, his voice sinking into a Gollum-like croak.

  Ewen reached for his worn leather satchel and pulled out a small white box. He opened the lid and handed it to me like an engagement ring. The object was chunkier than in the photographs, a little bigger than a fraternity ring. The stylized lion that roared within its round setting looked blurry. The metal had a muted sheen that gave off a dull greenish-yellow luster.

  We drove to a nearby facility where archaeologists are conserving remains from Blackbeard’s flagship. Erik Farrell, a scruffy young man in a T-shirt, greeted us in a small lab with a large white table flanked by black file cabinets. He extracted what looked like a cross between a ray gun and a hair dryer from a black case and set the instrument upright on a Lucite stand. “The X-rays hit the thing and bounce back, and the results show up here,” he said with a nod to a laptop screen as he pulled green latex gloves over his hands. “Each element has its own distinct signal.”

  Farrell seated the artifact on top of a small metal disk above the snout of the device and flipped a switch. As Ewen and I leaned over the screen, a series of peaks, like those on a heart monitor, appeared from left to right. “Yep,” Farrell said. “See these blue lines? They should peak here if this was gold. And they don’t. There’s no gold. Only copper.”

  Ewen smacked the side of his head. “Wow, wow, wow!” he exclaimed, his academic detachment suddenly out the window. “It’s a brass ring! MythBusters here!” Farrell confirmed that the ring was made of a brass alloy; small amounts of zinc and lead
were mixed in with copper and a trace of silver. “In this period, you get trace silver in copper,” he added. There was no sign that it was even gilded.

  “The ring is just the latest modern myth about the Lost Colony,” said Ewen as we drove away from the lab to return the ring to the library vault. “It’s not gold and it is not likely to be related to the Kendalls.” A passing storm over the snow-white cotton fields left behind a bright rainbow that seemed to mock my efforts. We looked at the dramatic sight in silence for a moment. Then Ewen spoke. “Pot of brass.”

  I was starting to feel like John White trying to return to Roanoke. Every time it seemed I was well on the way to confirming a new clue—the pottery at Site X, Cape Creek’s rapier, and now the ring—the rug felt pulled from underneath my feet. So when I heard the rumor about Simão Fernandes, I was primed to be skeptical but could not resist pursuing the intriguing tip.

  | CHAPTER NINE

  Rejoicing in Things Stark Naughty

  Few people besides Quinn have thought so long and hard about the Roanoke voyages as Karen Kupperman, now a professor emerita at New York University and a leading authority on the venture. On a bitter winter afternoon in Manhattan, we met for the first time at a café, moving in silent agreement to find a table as far from the chill blasts emanating from the front door as possible. Kupperman wore green-framed glasses and short gray hair, and at first she seemed reserved. She patiently endured an hour or so of my questions about sources, Quinn, and her own theories about Roanoke. By the time we had ordered coffee, she appeared convinced that I was serious about the quest and also not seriously disturbed. “You can’t be too careful,” she explained later. As I would learn, the Lost Colony mystery draws more than its share of obsessives.

  “Have you heard about the woman in Portugal who claimed to have found Simão Fernandes’s papers?” Kupperman asked me, leaning forward and slightly lowering her voice. “The whole story is crazy. I can send you her name.”

  Fernandes was the Portuguese pilot on all three major Roanoke expeditions, as well as White’s archnemesis. More than any single person, he is blamed for the failure of the governor’s colony after refusing to carry the settlers north to the Chesapeake. But as far as I knew, he had left nothing behind in writing. In the late sixteenth century, very few seamen could read and write, and fewer still could do so in a foreign language. The idea that this pirate could put pen to paper—much less put together his memoirs—seemed a stretch. But I was excited by the prospect of an alternative view.

  With the historian’s lead, I pieced together what was known about Fernandes’s alleged papers. In the spring of 2012, a person who identified herself as Marie Carvalho phoned Doug Stover, the park historian at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island. As he recalls it, she said in broken English that she was an engineering student in Portugal who had come across two storage cartons in an archive. Inside were old ship’s logs. A friend had told her they were written by a Portuguese pilot named Simão Fernandes, who she had heard was involved in the first English settlement attempt in North America. Carvalho wanted to know if Stover was interested in seeing the documents.

  The news electrified the small community of Roanoke scholars. If true, the discovery could shed light on everything from the venture’s financial details to his thoughts on the missing colonists. Because Fernandes spent months on transatlantic crossings with all the players and knew Raleigh and Walsingham, any of his observations could provide a breakthrough in our understanding of the Roanoke voyages, which depends so heavily on White’s accounts.

  Stover invited Carvalho to Fort Raleigh for a conference that October to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first performance of the outdoor drama The Lost Colony. Historians, archaeologists, literary scholars, and other researchers were slated to descend on Roanoke Island for the meeting titled “Roanoke Conundrum—Fact & Fiction.” Carvalho said that she had to be in New York on business around that time and agreed to come to the meeting. They discussed logistics. He suggested that she take the train to Norfolk; he could have her picked up for the two-hour drive south.

  Stover then wrote up a memo for a project designed to organize, analyze, and publish the Carvalho papers, which he said were twenty-five linear inches in size and located in Portugal’s national archives. The brief document included Carvalho’s e-mail address and a summation of Fernandes’s historical importance.

  As the October meeting kicked off, word flashed among the participants that the Portuguese engineer had texted Stover that she was on her way. It wasn’t true. She never showed up, nor was she heard from again. Carvalho disappeared as utterly and completely as the 1587 settlers.

  “It was bizarre,” recalled Kupperman, who had been eagerly awaiting her arrival at the meeting. “We contacted archivists in Portugal, but they didn’t know what we were talking about. And it turned out ‘Carvalho’ is the ‘Jones’ of the Portuguese world.”

  Two scholars, including James Horn of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, flew to Lisbon but failed to find Carvalho or the documents in Lisbon’s main archive. “There was a great archivist who spoke English, but we weren’t able to find anything on Simão Fernandes, and she had no recollection of this young woman named Carvalho,” he told me. “It’s like she vanished off the face of the earth.” Even Gabriel Rocha, a Portuguese-speaking historian now at Drexel University, had no luck finding her during a long stint in the Lisbon archives.

  By the time I spoke with him, Stover had retired from the park service, and his memory of the conversation with the Portuguese engineer was spotty; he said that her first name might have been Maria rather than Marie, which was a French name. Even a Freedom of Information Act request I filed resulted in no new leads. The only clue to Carvalho’s identity was the e-mail that she gave the park ranger. She had never responded to him, nor could I get a reply.

  The address was linked to the University of Coimbra, one of the world’s oldest continuously operating learning institutions. Founded in 1290, the university lay in the central part of the country in a city that was Portugal’s medieval capital. Neither Horn nor any other American historian had looked for Carvalho or the documents in Coimbra. “I would go there,” advised Horn. Rocha agreed. The possibility that Fernandes’s papers were somewhere out there haunted them, but they were too busy to follow up.

  Because finding those documents could rewrite the entire history of the Roanoke voyages, I decided to take on the task myself. I flew to Lisbon and headed north, picking up the trail where the historians had left off. I arrived in Coimbra at sunset amid a heavy spring downpour. Students scurried down the streets, their black academic robes pulled like burkas over their heads. The old town’s red roofs, domes, spires, and golden crosses rose up on a steep hill above the Mondego River, glittering as the low sun shot through the lifting clouds. A double rainbow suddenly arched over the university buildings clustered along the hilltop.

  “I can check the e-mail to see if it existed,” said José Pedro Paiva, the head of the faculty of letters, when I met with him the following morning. “It’s an old e-mail, so maybe she was enrolled a long time ago. But it is a very common name.” Two days later, he left a curt response that his tech administrators were unable to trace the address. In the meantime, I shuttled from department to department but found no Carvalho—and there were many—familiar with the documents. On the last day, I made one last-ditch effort to unearth the pilot’s logs in the university archives but came up empty-handed. When I did check the student rolls from the mid-sixteenth century, Fernandes was not listed; it seemed unlikely that the crusty buccaneer was college material. Discouraged, I went back to my hotel and read through everything known about the pilot. There was no sleeping anyway, because a wild graduation party featuring a series of heavy-metal bands blared from a park across the river until dawn.

  To my surprise, I realized that we have more detail about Fernandes’s life
and exploits than White’s and Lane’s combined. In fact, he was better traveled and more cosmopolitan than Raleigh, Hakluyt, or Harriot. He also worked for or knew many of the most powerful courtiers of Elizabethan England. And he could write. Though there is no known portrait, we have a fleeting glimpse of the villain of Roanoke. He wasn’t the tall, dark, and unabashedly sinister figure of the Lost Colony drama, where he struts about the stage kicking dogs and frightening children. A Spanish sailor described him as “bald of the head, blond, of medium thick body.”

  I wondered what else history had gotten wrong about this intriguing man and what bearing that might have on what unfolded on the North Carolina coast in the summer of 1587. Perhaps the glaring inaccuracies in our understanding of Fernandes could point me to just-as-glaring omissions in the historical record of the Lost Colony. So I set out to investigate more carefully this mysterious figure who played such a critical role in the Roanoke voyages. What I found turned my understanding of the entire effort on its head.

  * * *

  —

  Fernandes was born around 1538 on the island of Terceira in the island chain of the Azores. If you drained the oceans, each would mark the summit of some of the world’s highest mountains. Portuguese explorers encountered the islands in the early fifteenth century a thousand miles west of Lisbon. Settlement of this chain, long before Columbus’s time, marked the real start of the European march to the New World.