The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  “When your Simão Fernandes was born here, this was a fresh new capital city for the Portuguese empire,” said Francisco Maduro-Dias, a local historian who lives outside the main town of Angra do Heroísmo on Terceira, which is about the size of Long Island. With its stone walls and deep-green fields, the island looks more like Ireland than Portugal, while Angra could be a Caribbean town, with its pastel-colored houses clustered around a tiny harbor overlooked by a massive Spanish fort. “Try to see it as a refueling station on a major highway, a place for repairs and to get fresh food and water. This was really the first international service city in the world. You can’t speak about Angra without talking about the New World and Asia. Everything crossing the Atlantic stopped here. The world passed before his eyes.”

  Columbus anchored in the archipelago on his return from his first voyage to the Americas. I knew from reading about the Roanoke voyages that nearly every expedition halted in the Azores for provisions, as did Spanish treasure ships returning from the New World. Slavers from West Africa and vessels with Indonesian spices and Chinese silks also crowded the little harbor of Angra. The new global economy sparked by European domination of the oceans in the sixteenth century led right to Fernandes’s door.

  Terceira Island, with its prosperous port of Angra, was a bustling international crossroads in the sixteenth century and early home to Roanoke pilot Simão Fernandes.

  He inherited the straw-colored hair of his father, a prominent Catholic merchant nicknamed el Ruivo, or “the fair.” Recent archival sleuthing by Rocha, the Drexel historian, uncovered evidence that the father had extensive business connections with Lisbon but fell on financial hard times just as his son came of age. Simão set off to work on Spanish ships plying the North and South Atlantic, where Portuguese pilots, considered the best in the world, were in high demand. “They knew the world’s waters when no one else did,” East Carolina University historian Larry Tise told me later. “They were like NFL football players—‘What kind of contract can you give me this year?’ ” Technically, only citizens of the Spanish province of Castile could be licensed as pilots on vessels of the empire, but shipowners frequently ignored this requirement out of sheer necessity. Ferdinand Magellan, for example, was born outside Coimbra but was chosen to guide a Spanish ship on the first circumnavigation of the globe.

  Spain’s expanding control of much of the world’s oceans depended on accurate maps. As a pilot working for Spain, Fernandes would almost certainly have sworn the required oath “not to give or sell or lend the sea chart to a foreigner from outside of this kingdom.” The world of sixteenth-century charts was filled with intrigue, bribery, and spies. At Seville’s Casa de Contratación, or the House of Trade, a legendary master map called the Padrón Real was said to rest in a chest that could only be opened with two different keys held by two officials, both of whom had to be present to reveal its contents. These were the encrypted databases of their day.

  Fernandes might have taken part in a 1566 Spanish voyage to the Outer Banks piloted by Domingo and Baltasar Fernandes, two Portuguese pilots who were possibly older relatives. His common name makes his early voyages difficult to pin down, but he seems to have sailed along the coast of Brazil and in the Caribbean as well as along North America. Yet the young man abandoned Spanish service by 1570 to seek a new life and fortune, working the Bristol Channel that separates Wales from England. England had absorbed the smaller country half a century earlier, but London exerted little power over a land that lay 150 miles to the west. The channel served as one of Europe’s most notorious pirate havens. A stiff import tax imposed on French wine spurred a major smuggling ring. Merchants would secretly drop off casks in the Welsh port of Cardiff and then ship them across to Bristol, thereby avoiding the tax. The under-the-table business drew pirates, who built up networks that involved sheriffs, mayors, and even senior members of Elizabeth’s court.

  Fernandes might also have chosen this area because he had family ties with local merchants. Portugal and England boast Europe’s oldest alliance, and Bristol and the Azores were closely linked. In 1501, King Henry VII granted exploration patents to three Portuguese subjects, two of whom had the last name Fernandes. They made at least one successful voyage to the New World and seem to have returned with three Inuit who spent time in Westminster Palace. The Portuguese won pensions from the English king in thanks for their service. Though the name is common, the men might well have been our pilot’s ancestors, and his merchant family could easily have had long-standing English contacts.

  The Portuguese pirate settled across the channel from Bristol, in Cardiff, and found a patron in William Herbert, who was at the center of the Cardiff piracy ring and the brother of a powerful member of Elizabeth I’s Privy Council. Herbert bought quality goods from pirate merchants at bargain prices, and few locals had the interest or nerve to blow the whistle on his illegal activities. “He would do deals with them on ships, drink with them, invite them to his house, and assure them of safe-conduct,” said James Cowan, an amateur historian in Cardiff who has studied the era. “Imagine a sort of Sicilian mafia,” he told me as we stood next to Herbert’s tomb in a medieval church in the middle of town. “People were terrified of him. It was this wild and prosperous Barbary Coast sort of place.”

  Fernandes initially served as pilot on a vessel owned in part by the son of a wealthy Elizabethan courtier. He learned to handle the world’s second-largest tides that sweep in and out of the frequently stormy channel and make the area more challenging for sailors than even the Outer Banks. After I spent a harrowing day sailing as crew with Mark Horton from the English side to Cardiff and back—and on a fine May day with a motor as a backup—my respect for Fernandes’s skills as a seaman deepened.

  He quickly turned his profits as a pilot into a ship of his own, and he made friends with John Callice, one of Tudor England’s most notorious pirates. The two seized a Portuguese caravel and sold its cargo for the fantastic sum of twelve hundred pounds. The outraged Portuguese ambassador in London complained that Fernandes killed seven men on the ship with his bare hands. He was briefly thrown in a Cardiff jail, but Herbert managed to have him released on bail and the charges reduced to “suspicion of piracy.”

  The queen came under pressure from Portugal and other foreign governments to rein in the piratical trade in the rowdy world that was Wales. In March 1577, Fernandes was sent to London under guard and again jailed. The Portuguese ambassador wrote with satisfaction that there was evidence “enough to hang him.” Pirates in that day were executed from a London dock at low tide, their bodies left to dangle in the water for three successive tides. Callice, already imprisoned in the Tower of London, made a pathetic plea to Walsingham, undercutting his fearsome reputation. “I do bewail and lament my former woeful and wicked life.” He offered to inform on his former colleagues “to clear the coasts of other wicked pirates, as he knows their haunts, roads and creeks.”

  By November, both men were free. The queen pardoned Callice, though he had to repay the owners of the vessels he confiscated. A member of Middle Temple agreed to be responsible for Callice’s debts. Despite the outraged protests of the Portuguese ambassador, Fernandes was likewise released. Both pirates were too valuable to hang. Instead, they were given posts as senior officers on an English voyage to the New World.

  Fernandes seized the opportunity to climb England’s social ladder and was soon described by one contemporary as “Walsingham’s man.” The queen’s secretary of state was one of the realm’s most powerful men and the leader of an extensive spy ring. The Portuguese pilot was no doubt a walking gold mine of cartographic information, as well as intelligence about the routes and ports favored by Spain’s treasure fleets, information that King Philip II attempted at all times and by many means to conceal.

  Callice, meanwhile, slipped back into freelance pirating. Years later, as Fernandes was leading Grenville’s large fleet to Virginia, Walsi
ngham tried to placate the furious French ambassador after Callice captured three French ships in a single week “and ransomed and tortured the men and mariners with extraordinary cruelties.” The last heard of the pirate comes in a letter to Walsingham, reporting that the inveterate pirate sold a cargo of linen—no doubt stolen—in North Africa. “He is gone back again to sea, whither God knoweth.”

  Fernandes converted from Catholicism to the Church of England and married an Englishwoman. He became, despite his criminal past, a respectable gentleman. One document describes him as a London merchant. He likely became a naturalized citizen, which made it possible to acquire real estate. This was an era in which the line between entrepreneurs and pirates was blurry. A privateer was simply a pirate with a license from the government to steal the cargoes belonging to other nations.

  His rise in the ranks of English explorers was noted with alarm by the Spanish ambassador in London, who decried him to Philip II as “a thorough-paced scoundrel” but acknowledged him as deeply knowledgeable about Spain’s New World empire. The ambassador knew Fernandes was trading on state secrets learned while in the Spanish service. The navigator continued to take on a series of increasingly demanding and important missions for his adopted country, including his 1578–79 voyage with Raleigh and the quick reconnaissance of the North American coast for his half brother Gilbert the following year.

  On November 20, 1580, Fernandes met John Dee in his study on London’s outskirts, an area that held one of England’s largest libraries as well as a large collection of globes, charts, and navigational instruments. The gaunt and white-bearded scholar was England’s great Renaissance man. An accomplished legal expert, mathematician, and astrologer who determined the most auspicious date for Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation, he served as her informal science adviser. His Aztec obsidian mirror—“the black stone into which Dr. Dee used to call his spirits,” states its inscription—is in the British Museum, not far from White’s watercolors. In addition to regularly speaking with angels, he was obsessed with obtaining the most accurate maps possible. If he had had his way, America would have been named Atlantis.

  Raleigh, Walsingham, and the queen all spent time in his study. The Portuguese pilot presented Dee with a detailed map of the world that must have thrilled him. Weeks before, the scientist had made his case to the queen as to why the English had the legal right to settle North America (an ancient Welshman and King Arthur were cited as previous New World explorers). Dee, who was close to Adrian Gilbert and later corresponded with Harriot, was an eager investor in the search for a passage to Asia and is credited with being the first to make the case for a British empire.

  An inscription on the table-sized chart, which is now kept in the British Library, notes that “Fernando Simon” of Terceira lent Dee the map that shows the coastlines of Europe, the Amazon River snaking through South America, and the outline of what would later be called Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Compared with other maps from the era, it is remarkably detailed and accurate and includes a curious mix of Spanish, English, and Portuguese nomenclature. The mix makes it highly likely that Fernandes drew it himself or oversaw its production. The chart, a copy made by Dee’s servant, gave one of the most learned men in England vital geographic information that Spain desperately wanted to keep secret. Some historians believe Raleigh used the map in planning the 1584 reconnaissance mission to the Outer Banks.

  Soon after, Fernandes was tasked with piloting the first English trade mission to the spice islands of Indonesia led by Captain Edward Fenton and organized by the Earl of Leicester, a rival of Raleigh’s for the queen’s affections. It was a sign of the Portuguese pilot’s growing ties with leading courtiers. The Spanish ambassador in London, Bernardino de Mendoza, reported to Philip in April 1582, “The pilot of the principal ship is a Terceira Portuguese, called Simon Fernandez, a heretic who has lived here for some years, and is considered one of the best pilots in the country.” (By “heretic,” Mendoza meant Fernandes had converted to Protestantism.)

  Richard Madox, the Anglican chaplain on the voyage, left a wickedly gossipy journal detailing the 1582 mission that never made it out of the Atlantic because of the vicious shipboard disputes, bad weather, and inadequate provisions that plagued so many Tudor expeditions. Through the pastor, we get a fascinating glimpse of the Portuguese pilot in the close quarters. Like John White, he detested Fernandes, nicknaming him “the swine” and cursing him as “a ravenous thief with talons more rapacious than any vulture” who stands out as the “head and origin of all evil.” But then, Madox doesn’t seem to have liked anyone on board. He called the ship’s captain “the deceiver” and another senior officer “the buffoon.” Others were parasites, swellheads, or simply stupid.

  The pilot also offended a chaplain on a second vessel, who complains that he “rejoiced in things stark naughty”—a word then meaning “insolent”—“bragging in his sundry piracies.” He calls Fernandes’s sailor tongue “offensive to God, and nothing Christian-like.”

  Madox reports that Fernandes was far more than just a rough seaman. He claimed to have “a free pardon from five Privy Councilors”—referring to the queen’s leading advisers—“for carrying on war with Spain.” This stunned the cleric, who insisted naively that England and Spain were at peace. Fernandes’s home island was, in fact, at that moment under siege by Philip II, who had claimed the Portuguese throne; Elizabeth quietly supported a rival who was then in exile in London. This was a proxy war that led to the direct conflict between Spain and England. Fernandes’s boast suggests he was part of the growing anti-Spanish faction in England that included his patrons Raleigh and Walsingham. An undated Spanish deposition from the era mentions that during a visit to Brazil, Fernandes tried to drum up local support for Philip II’s challenger.

  Madox also reports that the pilot spoke “a swill of many languages.” Fernandes was no doubt fluent in Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin, as well as in English and Welsh. “Only a merchant with permanent trade connections with England would be able to do that,” said Pedro Cardim, a historian at Lisbon’s New University, when I met him in his concrete high-rise office. “Portuguese at that period were usually bilingual. They could speak Portuguese and Castilian, and if they had to learn a third language, they would turn to French or Italian, not to mention Latin. English would almost never be an option. That makes the case of your Fernandes unusual.”

  He explained that the pilot would have been well aware that his New World experience gave him extremely valuable knowledge that could be shared for profit and social advancement. Pirating, he added, was an ordinary activity in that era that meshed well with his family’s merchant background. And Portuguese pilots were far more than just hired drivers. They were also known for their ability to serve as mediators with Native Americans in the New World.

  “They had been doing it for eight decades or so,” Cardim said. “They knew how to communicate, and this kind of expertise ended up being important. It is not just about navigation. When you get there, you have to know how to establish contact with peoples from a different world.”

  Fernandes, I recalled, was present at the first meeting with the Native Americans on the Outer Banks beach in 1584, coaxing along Amadas and Barlowe, his juniors.

  The idea that this interesting character left behind his personal record of events began to seem plausible, even likely. After all, Madox recorded that the pilot “boasts of himself as a notable author.” The pastor scoffs at the idea, claiming that the Portuguese would better be called “a perverter of books.” He adds that “in these books nothing else is contained but trivialities and vulgarities and what the wit of a sailor would know.” His claim that Fernandes had written salty tales of his roving life, which might, perhaps, still survive, was exciting. We have, however, only a single letter in his hand, a dry request for supplies prior to the 1583 voyage. His English is solid, his hand confident, and his signature has flair.

&nb
sp; Fernandes was clearly an ambitious self-made man who skipped among faiths, countries, and cultures, from the Old World to the New, and was not beneath looting and murdering, all the while working his way up the treacherous Tudor social ladder. Why, I began to wonder, would he sabotage his patron’s colony and jeopardize everything? When I returned to the United States, I contacted a retired nurse practitioner in Pittsburgh for the answer.

  * * *

  —

  It is one of the Lost Colony’s most persistent myths. As early as 1812, an American historian declared that “the projects of a great man”—Raleigh—“the hopes of a nation, and the lives of many innocent people, were blasted together by the perfidy of that contemptible mariner…Every step he took, on that expedition, was marked with a design to defeat the colony.” Fernandes didn’t fare much better with Quinn, who criticized the pilot as “violent, quarrelsome and unattractive” and cursed with “instability of character.” Paul Green, author of The Lost Colony still performed at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, makes good use of him as a snarling cad impatient to give up the dull work of colonizing for plunder on the high seas. He is the bad egg in black, a suspected Spanish spy and fall guy for White’s colony.

  This colorful if extreme character drew the attention of Olivia Isil when she did a stint as a nurse on Roanoke Island in the 1990s. An opera lover far from the nearest professional company, she made do with the outdoor drama.

  “As a devotee of opera, I think villains are much more interesting and complex,” she said. While volunteering at the local historical association, Isil began to read up on the shadowy Fernandes. “I approach historical research somewhat cynically,” she added. “Like Voltaire, I believe that most history is the lie that people choose to believe.”