The Secret Token Read online

  ALSO BY ANDREW LAWLER

  Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird That Powers Civilization

  Copyright © 2018 by Andrew Lawler

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Maps in text designed by Jeffrey L. Ward

  Cover design by Nicholas Alguire

  Cover images: (top) Rebecca Wynn/USFWS; (bottom): Americae pars, nunc Virginia, 1590 by Theodore de Bry, courtesy of The Mariners’ Museum and Park

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lawler, Andrew, author.

  Title: The secret token : myth, obsession, and the search for the lost colony of Roanoke / by Andrew Lawler.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017045395 | ISBN 9780385542012 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385542029 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Roanoke Colony. | Roanoke Island (N.C.)—History—16th century.

  Classification: LCC F229 L39 2018 | DDC 975.6/175—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017045395

  Ebook ISBN 9780385542029

  Map: This de Bry engraving of Virginia, published in 1590, likely was based on detailed cartographic data gleaned by Harriot’s travels in the region in 1585 and 1586.

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  For Bear

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Andrew Lawler

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map: The Atlantic World, 1580s

  Cast of Characters

  Prelude

  Introduction: The Terror Within

  PART ONE: THE PLANTING

  CHAPTER ONE: Some Delicate Garden

  CHAPTER TWO: All Signs of Joy

  CHAPTER THREE: Firing Invisible Bullets

  CHAPTER FOUR: Small Things Flourish by Concord

  PART TWO: THE SEARCH

  CHAPTER FIVE: A Whole Country of English

  CHAPTER SIX: Child of Science and Slow Time

  CHAPTER SEVEN: A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Cover-Up

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Pot of Brass

  CHAPTER NINE: Rejoicing in Things Stark Naughty

  CHAPTER TEN: We Dare Anything

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Heap Plenty Wampum

  PART THREE: THE REVELATION

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Dare?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Swamp Saints and Renegades

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Return to Roanoke

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: An Old Buck Christmas

  Coda: A Brave Kingdom

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Cast of Characters

  PART ONE: THE PLANTING

  JOHN WHITE: London artist and Lost Colony governor

  SIR WALTER RALEIGH: Brash English knight in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, who sponsored the Roanoke effort

  RICHARD HAKLUYT THE ELDER: London lawyer, map collector, and Raleigh mentor

  RICHARD HAKLUYT THE YOUNGER: Priest, spy, and colonization visionary

  SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM: Elizabeth I’s secretary of state, renowned spymaster, and Roanoke investor

  THOMAS HARRIOT: Oxford-trained scientist, explorer, and the first Englishman fluent in Carolina Algonquian

  SIMÃO FERNANDES: Portuguese-born pirate, experienced navigator, and Roanoke pilot

  RALPH LANE: Military commander appointed by Elizabeth I to govern the first Roanoke colony

  JOACHIM GANS: Jewish metallurgist, member of first Roanoke colony and first documented Jew in North America

  MANTEO: Croatoan Indian and key English ally

  WANCHESE: Secotan Indian who opposed English rule

  SIR RICHARD GRENVILLE: Feudal lord, admiral, and cousin to Raleigh

  GRANGANIMEO: Brother of King Wingina and Secotan elder who lived with his wife on Roanoke Island

  KING WINGINA: Secotan leader who controlled coastal mainland of North Carolina

  SIR FRANCIS DRAKE: English privateer who brought Africans to the Carolina coast and rescued the first colony

  PART TWO: THE SEARCH

  JOHN SMITH: Jamestown captain who gathered Lost Colony intelligence

  POWHATAN: Virginia Algonquian leader at Jamestown’s founding, accused of massacring Lost Colonists

  DAVID BEERS QUINN: Twentieth-century Irish historian and dean of Roanoke researchers

  IVOR NOËL HUME: London-born archaeologist and colonial America specialist who excavated Fort Raleigh in the 1990s

  PHIL EVANS: Founder of First Colony Foundation

  NICK LUCCKETTI: First Colony Foundation archaeologist

  BRENT LANE: University of North Carolina heritage economist

  FRED WILLARD: Former race car driver, wrestling coach, and maverick Lost Colony seeker

  DAVID PHELPS: East Carolina University archaeologist who first excavated Hatteras’s Cape Creek site

  SCOTT DAWSON: Hatteras native who co-founded the Croatoan Archaeological Society with his wife, Maggie

  MARK HORTON: Croatoan Archaeological Society archaeologist from the University of Bristol

  LOUIS HAMMOND: Purported California retiree and finder of the Dare Stone in the 1930s

  HAYWOOD PEARCE: Emory University and Brenau College historian who led the analysis of the Dare Stone

  ED SCHRADER: Current Brenau president, geologist, and keeper of the Dare Stone

  PART THREE: THE REVELATION

  VIRGINIA DARE: Daughter of Eleanor and Ananias Dare and first English child born in the New World

  GEORGE BANCROFT: Harvard professor and father of American history who gave Roanoke a romantic twist in the 1830s

  ELIZA LANESFORD CUSHING: Boston-born author and later a Canadian who coined the term “Lost Colony” in the 1830s

  MARIA LOUISA LANDER: Salem-born sculptor in Rome who created the Virginia Dare “National Statue” in the 1850s

  SALLIE SOUTHALL COTTEN: Doeskin-wearing North Carolina author of a popular 1901 Roanoke poem

  REVEREND DONALD LOWERY: Present-day Episcopal priest and Lumbee Indian who helped make Virginia Dare and Manteo saints

  ROBERTA ESTES: Midwestern computer scientist attempting to trace the Lost Colonists using genealogy and DNA

  MARILYN BERRY MORRISON: Current chief of the Roanoke-Hatteras tribe who claims descent from the Lost Colonists and Native and African Americans

  Prelude

  On August 15, 1590, two English ships, the Moonlight and the Hopewell, dropped anchor off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Beyond the slender strip of sand and dense forest, a hazy sun descended over the Pamlico Sound, its calm waters seeming to stretc
h as far to the west as the Atlantic did to the east. Gripping the rail of the Hopewell, as the ship rose and fell on the gentle ocean swells, Governor John White watched with growing elation as a great plume of smoke climbed into the sticky air of the late afternoon sky.

  The source of the fire was Roanoke Island, which lay a dozen miles to the northwest in the shallow sound. The signal “put us in good hope that some of the colony were there expecting my return out of England,” he recalled later. White had left more than one hundred settlers there, including his only child and her newly born daughter, before embarking on a six-month mission to gather supplies and new colonists. Those six months had become three nightmarish years, comprising a series of mishaps that would have tested Job.

  Until spotting the smoke, the middle-aged Londoner had had no way of knowing what had become of his settlers who made up the first English colony in the New World, which Walter Raleigh, an influential knight in Queen Elizabeth I’s court, had appointed him to lead. They might have died from disease or starvation or fallen victim to Spanish or Native American enemies. They could have moved to another location or, in desperation, tried to sail back to England in their small boats, only to drown. The rising column seemed a sure sign that the colonists had spotted his ship. He anticipated a happy homecoming.

  The governor had already made at least two round-trip journeys to the land that the people who lived there called Ossomocomuck and that the newcomers dubbed Virginia, after their unmarried queen. His return to England in 1587, after landing the colonists at Roanoke, had proved an ordeal. Illness and hunger killed many of his crew on the stormy trip east; only by luck did the ship drift into an Irish harbor. Just weeks before he reached London to organize the resupply effort, Elizabeth I had forbidden any vessel to leave the kingdom without royal permission. Word had just reached the queen that her onetime beau and now bitter foe, the Spanish king, Philip II, intended to launch a vast armada to invade the country and remove the heretic Protestant monarch from her throne.

  When White did manage to charter a ship to carry supplies and settlers to Virginia the following spring in a military convoy, unfavorable winds delayed the fleet that was then diverted instead to protect the home coast. Undaunted, he found a privateer—a government-sanctioned pirate—heading for the Caribbean Sea and willing to stop by Virginia on the way back, but he never made it across the Atlantic. French pirates attacked the ship and wounded the governor in a fierce and bloody deck fight off the coast of Morocco. He was lucky to make it back to England alive with a laceration to his head and lead in his buttocks.

  Two more excruciating years passed as the armada arrived and was defeated, but the country remained on a war footing with little time to bother about abandoned colonists in a faraway land. The best White could do was obtain a single berth on a vessel that joined a convoy to rob Spanish ships in the Caribbean Sea. After a long hot summer patrolling for plunder, White’s ship, the Hopewell, accompanied by the Moonlight, glided on the Gulf Stream, the warm current that carried them north between Florida and the Bahamas, past the Spanish towns of St. Augustine and Santa Elena that marked the edge of the Spanish Empire, and up the coast to the narrow barrier islands called the Outer Banks. As the land he had departed three years prior came into view, his tribulations finally seemed over. White didn’t know they had only begun.

  The next morning, the governor and the two ships’ captains climbed into two smaller boats to row through the narrow inlet between the barrier islands that would take them from the ocean into the Pamlico and from there “to the place at Roanoke where our countrymen were left.”

  As they pushed off, the master gunner fired three cannon “with a reasonable space between every shot, to the end that their reports might be heard to the place where we hoped to find some of our people.” The ships’ guns boomed in the pallid summer sky as the sailors leaned on their oars.

  Halfway into their journey another smoke plume blossomed a few miles to the south, along the long thin island called Hatteras that separated the Atlantic and the Pamlico. Because this signal seemed a direct response to the artillery barrage, White and the captains changed course to investigate. The crew pulled the boats up on the marshy western shore of the island, and the men set off on foot to find the bonfire’s source.

  Distances in the flat landscape of sea and sand proved deceiving. “It was much further from the harbor where we landed, then we supposed it to be, so that we were sore tired before we came to the smoke,” White recounts. When they finally found the spot, “we found no man nor sign any had been there lately.”

  There was also no freshwater. By the time the men returned to the boats after a long midday summer trek without provisions, they were exhausted and desperately thirsty. Digging into the sand beside the shore, a trick White had learned on a previous visit, they were able to procure a drink. The sun had already set into the Pamlico by the time they made their way back through the inlet and climbed back aboard the ships. The governor spent another restless night just shy of his goal.

  A boat was sent ashore early the next morning to collect more freshwater, and it was ten in the morning before White could launch a second attempt to reach Roanoke. By now, the ocean had turned rough. The governor set off again with the captain of the Hopewell. As they neared the inlet into the Pamlico, “we had a sea break into our boat which filled us half with water,” White reports. The soaked crew landed safely on the Hatteras shore, though all their provisions were spoiled and the gunpowder wet. Worse was to follow. As the men made it to land, “the wind blew at northeast and direct into the harbor so great a gale, that the sea broke extremely on the bar, and the tide went very forcibly at the entrance.”

  The surge caught the second boat carrying a crew from the Moonlight just as it entered the inlet. The men on the beach watched helplessly as a wave overturned the vessel on a submerged sandbar, tossing the sailors into the foaming water. The surf pounded those who clung to the gunwales. Some tried to wade to safety, but the water “beat them down, so that they could neither stand nor swim, and the boat twice or thrice was turned the keel upward.”

  White watched helplessly as the captain and master’s mate of the Moonlight clutched the boat “until they sunk and were seen no more.” Several of the crew members of the first boat stripped and dashed into the treacherous seas but were able to rescue only four of the eleven. “The mischance did so much discomfort the sailors, that they were all of one mind not to go any further to seek the planters,” according to the governor. Only an impassioned plea by White and the stern command of the Hopewell captain persuaded the men to continue the quest.

  The sun was low by the time the two boats could be readied and provisioned anew, but White couldn’t bear to wait another night. The expedition set off across the Pamlico Sound toward Roanoke. “Before we could get to the place where our planters were left, it was so exceeding dark, that we overshot the place a quarter of a mile,” he reports. As they cruised along the island’s north end, the men saw “the light of a great fire through the woods, to which we presently rowed.” It seemed another sign the colonists were awaiting White’s return.

  The men, still shaken from the tragedy earlier in the day, dropped anchor close to the conflagration but decided against landing in the dark. Instead, they sounded a trumpet and sang “many familiar English tunes of songs, and called to them friendly, but we had no answer.” It is an unsettling scene: sailors mourning their dead friends commanded to make merry as White peers anxiously into the woods, hoping to spot loved ones after a three-year absence. They spent a restless night in the boats below the slim crescent of a waning moon.

  At dawn, White and some of the party climbed up the steep bank. It was the third birthday of his granddaughter Virginia Dare, named for the new land and the first English child born in the Americas. No one appeared, but they were not alone. The men spotted fresh tracks of Native Americans in the sand. Soon after, along the
sandy bank on the north shore, White saw the letters C R O carved into a tree.

  This was a prearranged code, “a secret token agreed upon between them and me at my last departure from them,” White explained in his account. If the settlers were to leave the island, he says, they “should not fail to write or carve upon the trees or posts of the doors the name of the place where they should be seated.” A cross over the name of their destination would mean that they left in an emergency, but none here was to be found.

  Hurrying to the site of the town he’d left, White found the houses dismantled and the settlement enclosed with “a high palisade of great trees.” At eye height on one of these posts, the governor saw “in fair capital letters was graven CROATOAN without any cross or sign of distress.”

  White professed relief. The word, as well as the three letters, referred to the island fifty miles to the south as well as the Algonquian-speaking tribe allied with the English who lived there. One of their number, a young man named Manteo, had visited London twice and had been made an English lord. The lack of a carved cross and the absence of European graves or scattered skeletons seemed to confirm all was well. “I greatly joyed that I had safely found a certain token of their safe being at Croatoan,” he wrote. Yet he also added that at his 1587 departure the colonists had planned to move “fifty miles into the main.” That meant west, or inland, rather than in the direction of the barrier island of Croatoan to the south.