During the voyage from England to Roanoke with the Lost Colonists in 1587, White continually blames Fernandes for undermining the mission. The governor accused him of “lewdly forsaking” the fly boat during a storm off Portugal as well as for failing to secure adequate supplies during their sojourn through the Caribbean. He even implies that while the colonists were busy gathering provisions on a Caribbean island, Fernandes went off to enjoy sex with a colonist or fellow sailor.
When the flagship arrived off Port Ferdinando on July 22, 1587, White and his assistants prepared to go ashore to check on the small company of men Grenville had left behind. Then they would sail on to the Chesapeake to found the Cittie of Raleigh. As we’ve seen, the governor reports that as they settled into the boat, “a gentleman by the means of Fernandes called to the sailors in the pinnace” and told them all the colonists would have to disembark on Roanoke. There would be no voyage to the Chesapeake. The sole excuse given was that “the summer was far spent.”
It is perhaps the most dramatic moment in the 1587 voyage, a Judas-like betrayal of Raleigh’s orders by a foreign mercenary that would doom the settlers to death among vengeful Indians. Rather than argue, White turned the other cheek. “Wherefore it booted not the governor to contend with them, but passed to Roanoke.”
Isil’s curiosity settled on the mysterious “gentleman by the means of Fernandes” who announced the decision. She suspected that this person was the real decision maker rather than a go-between simply conveying the message. “The gentleman in question was obviously so influential that ‘it booted not the governor’ to contend with him,” she says. “White apparently lacked the authority or the means to dissuade him.” In that day, “gentleman” was not today’s polite if fusty term. It applied solely to someone of rank. White noted that this person did not plan to stay in Virginia. Isil believes he could have been Raleigh’s representative, who outranked both the governor and the pilot and was sent to ensure the voyage’s success.
The mysterious man and Fernandes might have had any number of reasons not to proceed to the Chesapeake. They might have picked up intelligence in the Caribbean that the Spanish expected them to settle in the great bay, demanding a change of plans. (Fernandes was fluent in Spanish; it is unlikely that White was.) The pilot might have counseled against sailing into its unknown waters with women and children in hurricane season. There is even an elegantly simple possibility proffered by Warren McMaster, a former sailor who works on the Elizabeth II at Roanoke Island Festival Park. “Fernandes wanted the two pregnant women off his ship before they gave birth,” he told me over beers one night at a local bar. Mariners, he explained, feared such a disruptive event. It’s also possible the two women, including White’s daughter, Eleanor, demanded to go ashore after their horrendous journey, and the governor chose to credit Fernandes and the obscure gentleman with the decision, to cover up that embarrassing detail.
Whatever his reasoning, Fernandes had no obvious motive to sabotage the colony, given that he was an assistant in the Cittie of Raleigh corporation and therefore almost certainly an investor. This status gave him his own coat of arms, a major milestone for any social climber in Elizabethan England. “He had as much—if not more—to lose than anyone if the colony failed,” Isil noted. And if the Jane Pierce who was among the colonists was, in fact, Fernandes’s sister or niece, then he had an additional incentive to ensure the colony’s safety and survival. Nor is there evidence that Raleigh censured him on his return to England in late 1587. In fact, he fought with distinction against the Spanish Armada aboard the queen’s galleon the following year. No one suspected of treason, particularly not a foreigner in xenophobic England, would have gained such a commission.
Isil also examined the old assumption by historians that the pirate yearned to abandon the settlers in order to attack Spain’s treasure fleet before it reached the Azores, prompting the excuse that “the summer was far spent.” Those ships would typically travel up the Gulf Stream and across the Atlantic before late summer, when hurricane season commenced. Yet Isil points out that the three vessels remained anchored off Port Ferdinando for more than a month; when a storm forced them to put to sea in August, they dutifully returned. “Such a delay hardly reflects an over eagerness to get on about the business of privateering,” she added in a 2012 paper—one submitted for the same conference that Marie Carvalho was to attend.
Isil concludes that Fernandes was “no better or worse a man than Raleigh or Hawkins or Drake…They were pirates all, ambitious and self-serving,” she says. “But being foreign born, Fernandes had a lot more to prove.” That overseas origin made him a suspicious figure in later centuries as well, when British and American scholars were only too happy to make the Azorean pilot a villain; his name alone sounded Spanish enough to convict him in the court of Anglo-American history. The irony, of course, is that Fernandes hated the Spanish more than most English did. They had conquered his homeland and made it impossible for him to return long before Spain attacked England.
Her creative research exposes the fact that Fernandes has served as a scapegoat for centuries, blamed for Roanoke’s failure. But I discovered there was more to the story than rehabilitating a villain.
When I left Portugal after my fruitless quest for his missing logs, I stopped in Seville to visit the General Archive of the Indies, home to the largest collections of documents relating to the Spanish Empire. I also wanted to see the metropolis that Fernandes almost certainly visited when it was the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan city of Europe. Every ship of the Spanish crown arriving from the New World was required to unload here so the government could keep careful tabs on Philip’s revenues.
It was only April but already hot. The archive sits between the extravagantly crenellated cathedral, the world’s largest, and the lavish Moorish palace where the empire’s maps were kept under lock and key. I wanted to see a document—of course, Quinn long ago beat me to it—containing a curious deposition made by an experienced Spanish pilot named Pedro Diaz. Captured by the English, he sailed with Grenville’s 1586 resupply mission. Carefully interrogated by Spanish officials after his release, much of his information is corroborated in English reports. No common sailor, he seems an educated and reliable source who gathered valuable intelligence.
Diaz relates that Fernandes was not simply “a skillful pilot” but “the author and promoter” of the Roanoke venture. He seemed to be saying that Fernandes, rather than Raleigh, was the mastermind behind the effort, or at least the person who helped conceive and launch it. His intriguing use of the word “author” reminded me of what Madox mentioned about his literary pretensions. In an echo of Diaz, the cleric calls Fernandes the “persuader and originator” of a campaign to persuade Captain Fenton to abandon the long mission to East Asia in favor of Atlantic pirating.
Quinn is quick to dismiss Diaz’s claim as exaggeration; he even relegates the information to a footnote. I was about to do the same when I met David Wheat, a young historian from Michigan State University. He was working at the archive on the early Atlantic slave trade, and he suggested we cross the river to eat dinner in the quarter once frequented by mariners like Fernandes. Over tapas, I mentioned Diaz’s claim and asked whether it was plausible that a Portuguese pilot might exert considerable influence on an English endeavor.
“For the last couple of weeks I’ve been looking at documents relating to this little tiny town near Cartagena,” said Wheat, after thinking for a moment. The port on the Caribbean coast of Colombia was the one Drake burned and looted in 1586, carrying off the hundreds of slaves who might have ended up on Roanoke.
“Ships would go ‘off course’ and end up in this town instead of Cartagena,” he continued. “The records show captains claiming that the town officials forced them to unload their cargoes and paid less than they would have received at the bigger port. But we think there is something else going on.” The captains’ claims, he explained, a
ppeared to be a ruse to sell illegal goods or avoid customs duties by landing in a smaller town eager to participate in trade at the expense of its bigger rival. I told Wheat that Fernandes and his fellow pirates used Cardiff in precisely this way, as a small port largely free from government control, to fence their stolen merchandise. The historian suggested that Roanoke offered a similar opportunity, and it lay just off the route that led from the Caribbean to the Azores, a strategic location.
“Setting up a little port town in an out-of-the-way place would be a great way to turn a profit,” he added. “And he had connections to make this happen. So Roanoke would be another Azores. It would create regional commerce and provide a chance to subvert the Spanish.” Fernandes, in other words, could have envisioned the Cittie of Raleigh as a new Azores. After all, he could never go home again, because it was under Spanish control and he was an avowed enemy of the king of Spain.
I recalled that Walsingham, Fernandes’s first patron, had long backed a network of English trading centers abroad. The pilot was in a position to persuade Raleigh and Walsingham, two of England’s most powerful figures, to turn a mere privateering base into a lucrative entrepôt. He grasped that real wealth in the new world order was to be had not in the occasional grand theft but in controlling a port where merchandise could be turned into cash.
I walked back to my hotel through the empty streets, past the cathedral where Christopher Columbus—the son of a wool merchant—lay in his tomb. I began to see Fernandes and the entire Roanoke venture in a new light. He had introduced the young Raleigh to the wider world of privateering and was an instrumental player in Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s plan to settle America. He passed on critical intelligence to John Dee and worked directly for—and therefore, at some level, knew—other key stars in the Elizabethan firmament. More than any of them, he had valuable firsthand experience on how the new global economy, driven by ruthless pirate-merchants, worked in practice.
Neither saboteur nor just another sea dog, Fernandes was just the man to pull England out of its self-contained stupor and fashion a kind of metaphorical grappling hook to link England with North America—all with an eye, of course, to his own personal gain. He made the right contacts and got the right jobs, and at sea he ruled supreme over navigational matters. Without his expertise, it is questionable whether Raleigh could have launched his colonization scheme in the first place. Of course the pilot vetoed, or was part of a team that vetoed, moving to the Chesapeake. Yet William Strachey saw an old chart in 1611 drawn by an unnamed Portuguese that marked the James River as the region’s choicest settlement spot. Long after he vanished off the Azores aboard an English fleet in 1590, Fernandes may have played a critical role in founding Jamestown and ensuring his adopted country’s foothold in the New World.
If Raleigh was “perhaps the supreme example in England of a gentleman not born, but made,” as one historian put it, then the pilot was a precursor to those later New World immigrants who mastered a strange tongue and navigated a sometimes hostile culture to become successful Americans. Consider how he arrived as a foreigner in a piratical gang, barely escaped execution, and rose to win the trust of the queen’s inner circle. He switched religions, found an English wife, and quickly became indispensable. Two azure waves emblazon his coat of arms granted just before he left for Roanoke in 1587, recalling his Azorean heritage while underscoring just how far he had come up the social ladder.
When I confided my thoughts to Isil, she thought I was going too far in giving Fernandes a leading role in Raleigh’s venture. But in some archival folder or attic missed by Quinn, we both still hope, is the literary work of this self-described “notable author” waiting to set the record straight. “What did Simon write?” she mused. “A ship’s log? An account of the 1587 voyage? Perhaps a will? It’s all out there!”
* * *
—
By now, however, I had exhausted my most promising leads. The excavations at Site X and Cape Creek seemed, like the 1590 account penned by White, full of frustrating discrepancies and contradictions. “Because so much archaeology is rooted in trying to prove what one wants to prove, we frequently are guilty of clinging to untenable flotsam as though our reputations were in danger of drowning,” Noël Hume once wrote.
One summer afternoon, I maneuvered Horton and Luccketti into Noël Hume’s elegant living room in a tony suburb of Williamsburg to sort out flotsam from solid proof. Nearly ninety, the archaeologist sat ramrod straight in a chintz wing chair with a view of the broad James River. He listened closely as the two younger archaeologists took turns deferentially laying out their findings. Horton and Luccketti had only met the day before. Beneath their veneer of polite academic detachment, I sensed mutual disdain.
It was as though two lawyers stood before a judge, each making his case. Noël Hume asked the occasional question, his palms pressed together. When they were done, the only man to have successfully broken the Roanoke curse shook his head, unconvinced that either of the excavators had nailed the case of the Lost Colony. “You both have a lot of work to do,” he said.
The possibility remained open that both Luccketti and Horton were right. Governor White seemed convinced the settlers went to Croatoan, but made a point of mentioning twice the plan to move fifty miles inland. Luccketti didn’t claim that all the settlers went to Site X, only some fraction of the group, perhaps a half dozen colonists. On that, he and Horton agreed.
“There are arguments about where to go and what to do,” Horton speculated, after we left. “The council condemns someone; another is exiled. I think internal discipline broke down. Some were starving. The clever ones say, ‘Bugger this! We’re going to move in with the local Indians here.’ They took wives and had a lot of skills and material culture to share with Manteo’s people. But this is where they would be welcomed and supported. Even if you were going inland, you would want to have someone who stayed here on Croatoan. I suspect they would have sent the women and children here; it’s almost certainly where Virginia Dare turns up.”
Just as Lane split up his group in order to forage for food, the White settlers might have headed off in at least two different directions. One might have moved inland to live with the Indians at the head of the Albemarle Sound, while the other went south to keep watch for the governor’s return amid their allies the Croatoan. Settlers in both places could have initially built English-style cottages and insisted on English-style burials before eventually assimilating with the Indians, though they may have merged with the locals so quickly that they had left few distinguishing European traces behind.
Neither research team could claim indisputable physical evidence of the colonists’ fate. “We do not have the proverbial smoking gun,” Luccketti later acknowledged. When pressed, Horton also admitted his finds were, at best, ambiguous. Though he has uncovered a long-lost Portuguese church on the East African island of Zanzibar and recovered tiny grains of thousand-year-old rice in the jungle of Madagascar, the conclusive answer to the Roanoke puzzle eluded him as much as it had Talcott Williams more than a century before.
There is one artifact, however, that says precisely what happened after White’s departure. It presents a far darker picture of the colonists’ fate than the tale of gentle assimilation assumed by Horton and Luccketti. If authentic, it is nothing less than a mother’s piercing cry of woe echoing down the centuries, pointing to an appalling massacre, to the colony’s luckless and violent end.
“Don’t go there!” Luccketti told me bluntly when I asked his opinion about this controversial object. He warned that straying into this particular slice of the Roanoke vortex would destroy my credibility. Several historians rolled their eyes when I brought up the subject. Yet Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard scholar who did for early American history in the twentieth century what George Bancroft did in the nineteenth, proclaimed it “either one of the most stupendous discoveries or stupendous hoaxes in American history.” Either
way, what’s known as the Dare Stone was too enticing a clue to be ignored.
| CHAPTER TEN
We Dare Anything
At 11:00 on the morning of Monday, November 8, 1937, Emory University geologist James Lester went to the school’s alumni building to make a phone call. When he hung up, he saw a middle-aged man cradling a bundle. The alumni secretary explained that the man, who introduced himself as Louis Hammond, wanted someone to examine markings on a rock.
“We went out in the hall with Mr. Hammond, the finder, where he removed the stone from within a large piece of coarse cloth and showed it to us,” Lester said later. The geologist set the irregular dark gray stone, which was a little more than a foot long and a little less than a foot wide and two inches thick, on a nearby radiator to get a better look. There were incisions, but they were difficult to make out.
Hammond explained that he had found the twenty-one-pound stone near the Virginia–North Carolina border, about six hundred miles northeast of the Atlanta college. An English professor and a physics professor walking down the hall were drawn into the examination. The academics could make out a rough cross and the word “Ananias.” Soon a crowd of students gathered “and pushed forward, snatching at phrases spoken concerning the Lost Colony,” the geologist recalled.
At that moment, Lost Colony fever pervaded the country. That spring, President Franklin Roosevelt sketched out on a piece of White House stationery the design for a commemorative stamp featuring Eleanor Dare cradling her baby among tall trees. The caption read, “In Memory of Virginia Dare.” Below the sketch and above his signature, Roosevelt wrote, “Square stamp, 5 cents, Baby Blue.” The final design commemorating her 350th birthday followed his directions.
In August, on the day marking Virginia Dare’s birthday, Roosevelt attended a performance of the Lost Colony production that had just opened on Roanoke Island and gave a stirring speech before several thousand people on the rising threats to democracy at home and abroad. “Perhaps even it is not too much to hope,” he mused, “that documents in the old country and excavations in the new may throw some further light, however dim, on the fate of the Lost Colony and Roanoke and Virginia Dare.”
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