The Secret Token Read online

  Before signing off to dig his dead Saxons, Horton added, “If you are going to come see me, then ask about Site X.” I quickly discovered that another band of researchers in 2012 spotted the image of a fort on a map drawn by John White that the artist had concealed under a patch. A team led by the archaeologist Nick Luccketti and organized by the First Colony Foundation set out to locate the putative fort fifty miles west of Roanoke, enticingly aligned with White’s account that said the settlers had intended to travel “fifty miles into the main.” Like Horton, Luccketti was reluctant to talk with me. “All those headlines—‘Lost Colony Found,’ ” he grumbled in a gravelly New York accent when I reached him. “How many times can you find the damn thing?” He eventually agreed to let me visit the site, adding confidently, “We think we have the goods on this.” He mumbled something about broken pottery.

  The two teams, I realized, were locked in a quiet but highly competitive race to find the first hard physical evidence that could determine what happened to the settlers after White’s departure. But I learned there was much more to the story than a couple of archaeological digs. Horton and Luccketti were members of a larger cast of modern characters mirroring the colorful Elizabethans they pursued with such passion. There was a gruff amateur sleuth in camouflage wandering in the eastern North Carolina swamps in search of Virginia Dare’s tombstone. A Pittsburgh nurse and opera buff had a compelling new theory on the voyages’ wicked foreign pilot. I quickly found myself trying to piece together a bevy of smaller puzzles, from tracking down a rumored trove of manuscripts in Portugal to pinpointing the owner of an Elizabethan gold ring found in the Outer Banks sand that lay forgotten in a library vault.

  Soon I was immersed in the immense literature that has built up around the Roanoke voyages. I set sail on a reproduction Elizabethan vessel to get a feel for life aboard ship and roamed Raleigh’s haunts in Devon as well as archives and libraries in Europe and North America with original maps and drawings. I kayaked the Carolina sounds, took part in Algonquian powwows, and accompanied geologists as they collected cores off Roanoke Island. I sought out those who have devoted much of their professional lives or spare time to solving the mystery. In short, my immunity compromised, I succumbed to the very obsession that afflicted the other modern-day seekers I encountered.

  In the first part of what follows, I track the history and characters central to the Roanoke missions. In the second, I explore new archaeological and archival clues to the settlers’ fate. When neither amateur nor professional could fully resolve the enigma of the Lost Colony to my satisfaction, I began to wonder just why we remain so haunted by “Virginia Dare and the poor lost white people,” as Lane derisively puts it. Their disappearance is, of course, a fascinating riddle that cries out for a solution. But on a planet with a surfeit of missing people and forgotten refugees, this search feels at best quixotic and at worst perverse.

  I discovered—in the book’s final section—that the settlers exert a disturbing and tenacious grip on our imaginations because they offer a window into two centuries of American angst, specifically about race and gender. Their tale, reshaped by each succeeding generation, tells us far more about us than historians can ever reveal about vanished Elizabethans—why, for example, Virginia Dare, that innocent grandchild of John White, has for well over a century been held up as a heroine to white supremacists.

  In the course of investigating this “terror within,” I stumbled onto the likeliest living descendants of the Lost Colonists in the unlikeliest place of all. Their remarkable four-century odyssey revealed a story largely hidden in standard histories of the country; another secret token waiting to be read.

  There is no way to know for sure what transpired on the North Carolina coast during Governor White’s three-year absence or after he watched with a sinking heart as the smudge of land receded from his eyes forever on a hot August afternoon in 1590. But if we want to harvest the wisdom that is the legacy of the long-lost settlers, we must begin with the first European encounters with North America’s Atlantic shore and its inhabitants. We must start by asking why an opening act of our national drama played out in the improbable place that it did, on a windswept sliver of swamp and sand.

  I PRITHEE, LET ME BRING THEE WHERE CRABS GROW.

  —Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest

  | CHAPTER ONE

  Some Delicate Garden

  First there was the smell, the fragrance of burning cedar on the west wind. Then there was the smoke rising from “great fires because of the numerous inhabitants.” As the Dauphine bobbed within sight of land on an April day in 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano saw “the sea along the coast was churned up by enormous waves because of the open beach.” In a letter to French king Francis I, he described a “seashore completely covered with fine sand fifteen feet deep, which arises in the forms of small hills about fifty paces high.” Then came a forest “clothed with palms, laurel, and cypress, and other varieties of tree unknown in our Europe.” They gave off a strong scent, he added, “not without some kind of narcotic or aromatic liquor.”

  After sailing from the port of Dieppe on the English Channel, Verrazano had arrived off the Outer Banks to give us our first description of a gentle Carolina spring day. “The sky is clear and cloudless, with infrequent rain, and if the south winds bring in clouds and murkiness, they are dispelled in an instant, and the sky is once again clear and bright; the sea is calm and unruffled.”

  Spotting people on the beach “making various friendly signs, and beckoning us ashore,” the Italian captain of the French ship sent a small boat, but the pounding breakers made it too dangerous to land. One of the sailors jumped into the water and bodysurfed to shore carrying “some trinkets, such as little bells, mirrors, and other trifles.” But when the locals tried to help him out of the water, he “was seized with terror.” They carried him to a sunny spot, took off his soaked clothes, and built a huge fire, “looking at the whiteness of his flesh and examining him head to foot.” The ship’s crew feared they would roast and eat him; instead, the group warmed him by the fire, hugged him, and retreated politely to the top of a sand dune until the sailor made it back to the boat.

  Coasting north after this hopeful and auspicious encounter, the Europeans followed a narrow strip, “an isthmus one mile wide and about two hundred miles long, in which we could see the eastern sea from the ship.” Verrazano tried without success to find a safe passage through the isthmus so “we could reach those blessed shores of Cathay.” He looked west across the islands of the Outer Banks and saw not the Pamlico Sound, as we now know it, but a vast sea that he proclaimed to be the Pacific Ocean. It was, after all, what he was looking for. “My intention on this voyage was to reach Cathay and the extreme eastern coast of Asia, but I did not expect to find such an obstacle of new land as I have encountered,” he explained to the king who had helped fund the voyage, adding, “I estimated there would be some strait to get through.” He surely had in mind Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who, a decade earlier, had crossed Panama and found the waters that led to China.

  A Florentine and contemporary of Machiavelli’s and Raphael’s, he named the isthmus Varazanio and sailed on toward the north, earning posthumous fame as the first European to record his entrance into New York Harbor. But his much larger contribution to world history was in making the geographic gaffe of the century. Belief in this Carolinian Panama played a central role in leading the English to the Outer Banks sixty years later. You could argue that the American colonies and the United States are based on a single cartographic blunder.

  Verrazano’s patron proved too busy fighting a losing war with Spain to authorize a follow-up voyage, so the Italian turned to King Henry VIII across the Channel. To entice the monarch, he either presented or sent a detailed map and globe showing his discoveries. Henry at the time was more interested in divorcing his first wife and marrying Anne Boleyn—soon to be mother of Queen Elizabeth I—than expe
nding scarce crown funds chasing shortcuts to China. He did, however, give the Italian’s gifts places of honor in his royal palace on London’s western outskirts. Verrazano was killed and eaten by Caribs on the less blessed shores of Guadeloupe before he could correct his error, but his imagined isthmus lived on within Westminster’s walls.

  As Henry plotted and Francis warred, a wealthy Spanish judge and landowner on the island of Hispaniola—in today’s Dominican Republic—quietly launched the first attempt to colonize the east coast of North America since the Vikings. In an eerie harbinger of the plantation culture to come, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón envisioned turning the Southeast into a feudal empire staffed by Native American workers and African slaves. The North American east coast in that day was seen much the same as the west coast of Africa, a ready source of slaves to work the proliferating sugar plantations of the Spanish Caribbean and Portuguese Brazil. Ayllón sponsored a reconnaissance mission along the Carolina coast that captured more than sixty Siouan-speaking Indians from a land they called Chicora, which lay just south of the Outer Banks in what is now South Carolina. “As for the Indians, they turned out to be useless,” Ayllón noted with regret. “For almost all of them died of fretfulness and grief.”

  One young survivor caught his eye. Dubbed Don Francisco Chicora—we don’t know his Siouan name—he was tall and strikingly handsome, and the Hispaniola judge took him to Spain, where he charmed the Castilian court with fantastic tales of the wealth and fertility of his native land. He told of giant kings, men with long tails, and fine cheese made from deer milk.

  These compelling stories were enough to win Ayllón a royal grant from King Charles V to settle Chicora. The judge was named governor and given a monopoly on trade in the area for six years, but he had to shoulder the enormous costs of sending and maintaining a colony. He pledged not to enslave the Indians but to “attract them to our service that they will be protected and not molested.” Taking along African slaves was, however, permitted. The king also encouraged the new governor to explore the area for a passage through North America to the Pacific.

  Two years after Verrazano’s voyage, in July 1526, a flotilla of six ships carrying six hundred people, including farmers, priests, women, Africans, two doctors, and a pharmacist, sailed from Hispaniola for Chicora. The exceptionally well-organized expedition carried seven dozen horses, beef cattle, tons of corn, and three thousand loaves of cassava bread. (By contrast, the first Puritans who arrived nearly a century later on the Mayflower counted just over one hundred passengers, and no livestock, on their single small vessel.)

  Enticing people to leave their familiar homes for an unknown land proved easy. “The entire Spanish nation is in fact so keen about novelties that people go eagerly anywhere they are called by a nod or a whistle,” wrote a court acquaintance of Ayllón’s, “in the hope of bettering their condition, and are ready to sacrifice what they have for what they hope.”

  After they sailed twelve hundred miles north from the Caribbean without incident, mishaps plagued the settlers’ arrival. The flagship grounded in shoal waters, ruining the bulk of the supplies. The settlement site proved swampy. Upon their arrival in Chicora, Don Francisco promptly defected, his tall tales no doubt designed to ensure his kidnappers would deliver him safely home; he was never seen by Europeans again. The anxious colonists soon moved south to a healthier location near today’s Savannah, Georgia. The local Native Americans, initially happy to trade food for valuable European goods, grew tired of feeding the foreigners. Illness and starvation quickly took a terrible toll on the colonists.

  “Many persons died of hunger for lack of bread and because in their infirmity they were unable to fish,” one account states. Protein from the plentiful seafood, however, was not enough. Without bread or corn, the settlers likely suffered from the lethargy and nausea that can come with eating insufficient carbohydrates. Indians used acorns and roots when maize supplies ran low, but the Spanish seem to have lacked this knowledge. As relations with the local tribe degenerated, the newcomers’ situation grew increasingly dire.

  Ayllón died in October, and the desperate and leaderless Spanish split into competing factions. Indians infuriated by harsh treatment attacked, and the African slaves rebelled. An unknown number, African as well as European, deserted to the Native Americans. This was only the start of more than two centuries of settlers along eastern North America melting into the indigenous population. The remaining ragged band set sail back home. Stormy seas forced the voyagers to dump Ayllón’s body, which they had hoped to bury in Hispaniola, over the side. Less than one-third of the settlers made it home.

  The debacle in Chicora presaged events at countless later European settlements along that coast, including Roanoke—grounded ships, inadequate supplies, dependence on and desertion to the locals, and a desperate cycle of hunger and violence. But the legend of a fruitful land akin to Eden woven by Don Francisco spread across Europe faster than the true tale of woe. When French Protestants called Huguenots sought to escape the religious turmoil in France in the 1560s, they looked to Chicora as a welcoming and fertile refuge. A first expedition sent to a South Carolina island collapsed when the governor returned to Europe for supplies in 1562, only to be captured and jailed by the English. The abandoned men made a harrowing journey in an open boat back to France, resorting to cannibalism along the way.

  Three years later, a second wave of French settlers led by Jean Ribault built a base a hundred miles or so to the south and fared even worse. Stalked by a Spanish convoy, they launched a preemptive attack, which failed. The Spanish subsequently attacked their fort, sparing only the women and children and a few who claimed to be Catholic. Pieces of the French leader’s beard and skin were sent to Spain’s new king, Philip II, as proof of the massacre, news of which stunned Europe, given that the two nations were not at war. The message was clear: trespassers on this North American territory, claimed by Spain, faced annihilation. To prevent further intrusions, the Spanish built St. Augustine on the Florida coast. Ribault’s head was split into quarters; one part was attached to each corner of the new settlement. On the ruins of the first French colony, they constructed a town called Santa Elena to mark the northern frontier of Spanish control.

  There was actually little in eastern North America to interest the Spanish, who focused instead on controlling the wealthy urban civilizations that had already been established in the New World, such as the Aztec and Incan Empires, and expanding sugar plantations across the Caribbean. The region to the north, what was called La Florida, had the wrong climate for growing sugar and held little promise of gold. The indigenous people lacked cities and showed little enthusiasm for Christianity. They also were capable of waging unnervingly effective guerrilla warfare against the slow-moving armored Iberians in the dense woods and swamps. The Spanish, recalling Ayllón’s failure, saw no profit in further colonization.

  But by the mid-sixteenth century, as a result of geography, the Spanish Empire’s jugular vein lay just offshore. In order to arrive in Europe, treasure ships carrying Chinese silks, Indonesian spices, and Bolivian silver first made port on the Pacific coast of Panama or Mexico. Their precious cargoes were then carried overland and stowed on vessels bound for Havana. There, along with ships carrying Mexican gold, South American hides, and the white gold of Caribbean sugar, armed galleons escorted convoys north through the narrow channel between Florida and the Bahamas on the powerful north-moving current called the Gulf Stream. Like an arrow shot from a bow, the convoys surged north on the ever-flowing river within a sea as far as the Outer Banks, where they could catch the prevailing westerly winds to carry them across the Atlantic to the Azores, where they could resupply, and from there to Spain.

  The handy Gulf Stream came at a price. Untold numbers of Spanish sailors and passengers drowned in shipwrecks on the treacherous coast, and Native Americans captured hundreds of survivors; St. Augustine was as much a safe haven for castaways as
a defense against European intruders. The remote waters were also ideal for pirates eager to seize Spanish treasure, because the course and schedule of the fleets were predictable. Both threats endangered the realm’s finances.

  The man overseeing this fast-expanding empire, Philip II, came to the Spanish throne shortly before the French made their ill-fated attempts to gain a foothold in the New World. Philip ran not a country but a complicated union of Catholic kingdoms scattered on the Iberian and Italian peninsulas and in what is now the Netherlands, along with the vast colonial domain stretching from the Philippines to Florida. He married a series of queens and princesses—Austrian, French, English, and Portuguese—to help hold it all together. A formidable intelligence network and well-organized bureaucracy kept this tall and brooding workaholic, who preferred to dress in simple black, apprised of the smallest disturbances in his far-flung domain. His greatest threat lay neither in the New World nor among his European neighbors. Philip most feared the formidable sultan Murad III, who oversaw the sprawling Ottoman Empire from the splendid Topkapi Palace on the Golden Horn in Istanbul. The Ottomans dominated the lands and seas between the Adriatic and the Persian Gulf.

  The two mammoth empires clashed in the Mediterranean. Murad used the growing religious rift among Europeans in an attempt to contain Philip’s growing power. He colluded with England’s Elizabeth, the unmarried apostate queen, adroitly suggesting that her nation’s new Protestant faith had more in common with Islam than Catholicism, because both rejected the worship of idols. The English gladly supplied ammunition, along with tin and lead, to the sultan as part of a 1579 commercial deal, scandalizing Catholic Europe. Little wonder that Spain’s pious leader saw himself as the only force preventing a Muslim empire from reaching the Continent’s Atlantic shores.