The Secret Token Page 5
Three months after Hakluyt pressed Walsingham to move forward on a New World settlement, the queen split the deceased Gilbert’s charter between his younger brother, Adrian Gilbert, and his half brother, Raleigh. Adrian won authority to explore and settle the coast from the rich fishing grounds of Newfoundland to the north, where, despite Frobisher and Gilbert’s failures, geographers still presumed there was a passage over North America to Asia yet to be found.
In the grant issued March 16, 1584, the queen’s favorite seemed to get the short end of the stick. Raleigh received what lay to the south, much of it in land Spain considered its own. He had until 1591 to build and maintain a colony in North America to retain the patent. Elizabeth insisted the colonists “shall be of the allegiance to us our heirs and successors” and enjoy the same rights as other Englishmen so long as they were good Protestants. Raleigh, however, could rule as a feudal lord—much as Ayllón had dreamed for himself six decades earlier—and make all laws as long as they were similar to those in England. The queen was to receive one-fifth of any gold or silver that he found.
There was no mention of the non-Christian inhabitants and what rights they would retain under the new regime. This strange omission, as with Gilbert’s charter, reflected English ignorance of the peoples they would encounter. By this time, Spain had undergone a wrenching debate over its early genocidal practices in the New World, and Native Americans had been granted—on paper at least—status as “free vassals of the crown” with rights to land and protection from slavery. (Tragically, this increased the trade in African slaves instead.) The English, quick to criticize Spanish cruelties in the New World, failed from the start to consider the effect of their own policies.
With the queen’s patent in hand, Raleigh swiftly organized a reconnaissance mission, one that cost some three-quarters of a million dollars in today’s currency. In April, just weeks after receiving his grant, he boarded the larger of two ships docked in the Thames River to deliver instructions to the captains, because he himself was still forbidden to leave the queen’s side. His old shipmate Fernandes would serve as navigator, responsible for landing the men successfully in America and bringing them home. They agreed to scout out the promising region visited by Verrazano, which Fernandes likely knew firsthand from his previous voyages. Along with the possibility of a Pacific passage, this area marked the spot where Spanish ships cruising up the Gulf Stream turned away from the North American coast for the Atlantic leg of their journey—and therefore a prime location for English privateering.
The two vessels set sail. By June they reached the Caribbean and caught the warm current north, coasting just out of sight of Spanish eyes at St. Augustine and Santa Elena. This five-thousand-mile journey was to be the course followed by all of the outgoing Roanoke voyages. In words oddly reminiscent of Verrazano’s account, one of the captains smelled an odor “so sweet, and so strong…as if we had been in the midst of some delicate garden abounding with all kind of odiferous flowers.” Two days later, on July 4, 1584, the men caught their first glimpse of the sandy shores that the Florentine spotted six decades before from the Dauphine.
| CHAPTER TWO
All Signs of Joy
On a midsummer morning, a Native American paddled with two companions across a broad lagoon. They pulled their sleek log canoe onto the sand of the barrier island. Clad only in a leather breechcloth, the man boldly strode to the shore of the nearby inlet where the lagoon met the Atlantic. Just offshore lay two enormous winged ships that dwarfed his tiny craft.
The two English captains, nineteen-year-old Philip Amadas and thirty-four-year-old Arthur Barlowe, hesitated at first. This was their first visit to the New World, and they likely had never seen a Native American. More than twice Amadas’s age and well versed in encounters with strange peoples, their pilot Fernandes likely offered words of encouragement because he had a boat prepared to row the three of them to shore. The entire time, Barlowe marveled, the Indian watched calmly, “never making any show of fear, or doubt.”
Simple acts of hospitality quickly overcame the language barrier. “After he had spoken of many things not understood by us, we brought him with his own good liking, aboard the ships, and gave him a shirt, a hat, and some other things, and made him taste of our wine, and our meat, which he liked very well.”
Then the visitor climbed back into his canoe. Rather than departing, though, he began to fish in the placid waters of the Pamlico Sound. “In less than half an hour, he had laden his boat as deep as it could swim, with which he came again to the point of the land, and there he divided his fish into two parts, pointing one part to the ship, and the other to the pinnace”—the smaller vessel—as a thank-you for the English hospitality. Then he and his friends paddled away. This amicable encounter between the confident Indian and the nervous Europeans marked the start of a contentious and complicated relationship between the English and the inhabitants of North America that continues to play out today.
Thomas Harriot says this engraving shows “the arrival of the Englishmen in Virginia” in 1585. “The sea coasts of Virginia are full of islands, whereby the entrance into the main island is hard to find.” The Outer Banks are the narrow islands at bottom; Roanoke is center left.
The next day, a formal delegation of forty Indians led by an elder named Granganimeo, the brother of the local leader Wingina, arrived on the barrier island. As had the man on the previous day, the elder carefully demonstrated peaceable intentions as if sensing the wariness.
“When he came to the place, his servants spread a long mat upon the ground, on which he sat down, and at the other end of the mat, four others of his company did the like; the rest of his men stood round about him, somewhat afar off,” Barlowe recalled. “When we came to the shore to him with our weapons, he never moved from his place, nor any of the other four, nor never mistrusted any harm to be offered from us, but sitting still, he beckoned us to come and sit by him.”
Granganimeo’s tranquillity as strangers approached carrying swords and guns was a remarkable expression of trust, particularly given the European proclivity to snatch Native Americans for Caribbean slavery. As the two captains warily sat down on the reed mat, the Indian then made “all signs of joy, and welcome, striking on his head, and his breast, and afterwards on ours, to show we were all one, smiling, and making show the best he could, of all love, and familiarity.”
The English presented gifts to Granganimeo, and within a couple of days serious trading commenced. Barlowe described the men as “very handsome and goodly people, and in their behavior as mannerly and civil as any of Europe.” The chief’s brother insisted on dominating the Indian side of the exchange; other Native Americans were not allowed to barter directly with the newcomers. A bright tin dish prompted Granganimeo to “clap it before his breast” with joy. He explained through pantomime that it would serve as a talisman against a rival group with whom they “maintain a deadly and terrible war.” Metal was so rare that the Indian leader said they had extracted nails and spikes from a washed-up European vessel, twenty years before, the first reference to a shipwreck along a coast that would claim more than six hundred vessels in the centuries to come and earn the fearsome sobriquet of Graveyard of the Atlantic. Fish teeth commonly sufficed as arrowheads on reed arrows launched with willow bows, while fire-hardened wood made swords and breastplates.
Granganimeo was an elder among a people living in small communities strung along the seafood-rich shores of this watery land of rivers, lagoons, and marshes. Centuries before, as Germanic tribes speaking Anglo-Saxon began to migrate into the British Isles, his ancestors had drifted south from the northeastern coast of North America. They spoke a variation of Algonquian, a language group like the Romance or Germanic tongues of Europe. The women brought particular methods for growing corn, squash, beans, and other cultivated plants, such as the sunflower first domesticated in eastern North America, as well as in-depth knowledge
of wild plants and roots for culinary and medicinal uses. The men, trained from boyhood to seek game, roamed the woods for turkeys, squirrels, rabbits, deer, and bear and fished the broad waters in narrow canoes artfully crafted out of single logs.
We get a mouth-watering glimpse of their midsummer diet from Barlowe, who records that Granganimeo provided daily food rations for the visitors that included “fat bucks” and hares as well as plenty of fish. Also on the menu were “melons, walnuts, cucumbers, gourds, peas,” and “fruits very excellent good.”
As Granganimeo intimated to Amadas and Barlowe, relations among the tribes presented a complex and shifting set of alliances and rivalries. The search for game and fish could spark territorial conflict, and warfare was frequent, but more on the level of skirmishes than European-style slaughters. Hunters doubled as warriors when needed, and the captured women and children of rivals might be incorporated into a community. Like that of Jews and Danes, the Algonquian culture is matrilineal, with kinship passing from the mother to the child. Women hold considerable political power.
Because the Carolina Algonquians of the sixteenth century left no written records of their own, we can only see their world through the cloudy lens of the visiting Elizabethans. For nearly a year, the English mistakenly thought the Indians called their land Wingandacoia; it turned out this was a polite phrase meaning “you wear great clothes.” The real name, they discovered later, was Ossomocomuck. The newcomers were not even clear about the nomenclature of the tribe that Granganimeo’s brother led; he might have called himself a Secotan or Roanoke.
The Native Americans lived on the swampy mainland fronting the western side of the vast oval of the Pamlico Sound. Most of the barrier islands were not permanently inhabited, except leg-bone-shaped Croatoan Island, where the tribe of the same name lived. “Their towns are but small, near the sea coast but few, some containing but 10 or 12 houses; some 20, the greatest that we have seen have been but of 30 houses,” a later settler noted. More populous groups clustered to the west, on fertile lands alongside the freshwater rivers like the Chowan and the Roanoke that flowed into the brackish lagoons.
Once the English and the Indians were at ease with each other, the English set off to investigate the region, in what was more guided tour than bold exploration. Their larger ship couldn’t sail through the shallow waters, so the two-masted pinnace carried Barlowe and seven other English for twenty miles across the lagoon “to an island which they call Roanoke.” Wedged between the mainland to the west and the barrier islands to the east, it acts like a cork between the broad Albemarle Sound to the north and the Pamlico to the south. The Albemarle, smaller than the Pamlico but still vast, stretched fifty miles into the Carolina interior.
The strategically located island was the home of Granganimeo. “At the north end thereof was a village of nine houses, built of cedar, and fortified round about with sharp trees, to keep out their enemies,” writes Barlowe, who had a keen eye for detail. Awaiting them was Granganimeo’s wife, the chief’s sister-in-law, who had visited the ships with her retainers. Her husband was away, but she ran out “to meet us very cheerfully and friendly.”
The warm welcome that the unnamed matriarch gave to a boatful of armed foreigners reflects the powerful role of women among the Carolina Algonquians, as well as the culture’s natural hospitality. She ordered villagers to pull the boat close to shore and had the strangely clad men carried to dry ground. She led the Europeans to her spacious five-room house and had their oars stowed inside to prevent theft.
The matriarch ushered them into the central chamber and “caused us to sit down by a great fire.” Nearby was a wooden image of their chief deity, “of whom they speak incredible things.” The Europeans no doubt gave off a rank odor after months at sea, because she had her attendants immediately remove at least their outer clothes to be washed and dried. Meanwhile, “some of the women plucked off our stockings and washed them, some washed our feet in warm water, and she herself took great pains to see all things ordered in the best manner she could, making great haste to dress some meat for us to eat.”
After feasting on wooden platters filled with venison, roasted and boiled fish, melons, various fruits, and what sounds like corn pudding, the men drank wine mulled with ginger, sassafras, and what Barlowe calls black cinnamon as well as “other wholesome, and medicinal herbs.” He was impressed by her warmth and solicitude. “We were entertained with all love and kindness, and with much bounty, after their manner, as they could possibly devise.”
There was one tense moment during the meal when armed Native men returned from hunting. The alarmed Englishmen reached for their weapons, but the woman ordered the intruders away after having their bows and arrows broken “and with all beat the poor fellows out of the gate.” Still fearful of ambush, Barlowe insisted that the English sleep that night in their boat. The distraught hostess sent the English leftovers as well as tightly woven reed mats to protect them from rain. Thirty men and women remained close by throughout the night to keep watch and to entreat them in vain to return to the village.
The courtesy offered to Barlowe by Granganimeo’s wife might have been motivated by more than simply hospitality. The island of Roanoke supported only a single village, and a Spanish prisoner later told authorities in Havana that “the land produces little to eat. There is only maize and of that little and poor in quality.” It might have been a hunting and fishing preserve for the royal family—Wingina’s principal town, Dasemunkepeuc, lay just a couple of miles across the shallow water on the mainland.
The tribal leader himself was said to be at a distant inland town at the time, recovering from a thigh wound incurred during battle, so the English didn’t meet him on their first visit. In his absence, though, these strangers handed his tribe a potential political, economic, and military windfall. Wingina was in frequent conflict with tribes to the south, likely made up of Siouan speakers, and his relations with his larger and more powerful Algonquian-speaking neighbors to the north and west were, from what can be gleaned, sometimes fraught. Wingina’s people laboriously made shell beads (called roanoke; the island may have served as a kind of royal mint), exported inland in exchange for copper and stone, but the many middlemen made such goods expensive. The wealth of material brought by European newcomers promised to alter the regional balance in his favor. To Wingina, Roanoke would seem an ideal place for a new English settlement: a marginal piece of territory under his firm control, one that placed the leader advantageously between the foreigners and his rivals.
Amadas and Barlowe spent six weeks much like modern tourists to the Outer Banks, making excursions and enjoying the sea breezes and shellfish. As summer faded, they set sail for England, with Barlowe praising the locals for a life “after the manner of the golden age.” The men had not yet discovered a shortcut to Asia or gold mines, but the mission seemed to confirm the old Chicora legends of a land of plenty.
As a postscript to his report to Raleigh, he says, “We brought home also two of the savages being lusty men, whose names were Wanchese and Manteo.”
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As a reconnaissance mission, Raleigh’s venture was a resounding success, whetting English appetites for a colony in the Americas. But organizing a proper transatlantic settlement demanded teams of experts, not to mention deep pockets. Raleigh’s predecessors had had considerable means. Ayllón was a rich planter and well-connected judge, while the Huguenots had the backing of the wealthy French Protestant establishment. Having just turned thirty, the man from Devon didn’t even have the funds to buy back his modest family farm. But Raleigh knew how to wield his looks and wits to win royal favor, and in the wake of Amadas and Barlowe’s encouraging findings, he went on a charm offensive.
“Fain would I climb, yet I fear to fall,” he allegedly scratched on a window in Elizabeth’s palace, to which she scratched back, “If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all.” It’s
probably a fable, but the queen gave him a very real boost. In 1583 she granted Raleigh the right to license every one of the thousand wine shops in the country; each had to pay him a pound annually, in an era in which a male servant might earn two pounds in yearly wages. The first English attempt to colonize the New World was paid in large part by a liquor tax. She also let him license exports of wool cloth and lent him a gloomy medieval manor on the Thames called Durham House. Almost instantly Raleigh became one of the realm’s wealthiest and most powerful men, suddenly capable of fulfilling his dream of New World glory. But this would-be Tudor conquistador still required additional investors, as well as skilled seamen, navigators, soldiers, and settlers, to pull off his complicated project.
To drum up support, he turned to an ancient institution called Middle Temple—what its present-day archivist, Lesley Whitelaw, described as “a combination of a boy’s finishing school and a men’s club”—that would serve as a hub for planning English ventures in the Americas for more than a century to come. Middle Temple was named for the Knights Templar, an order of warrior monks founded in Jerusalem during the Crusades. In medieval London, these knights guarded the king’s treasury and handled much of his finances. After the pope disbanded the order in the fourteenth century, lawyers rented out the buildings that clustered around the Temple Church, modeled on the Islamic Dome of the Rock. The surrounding buildings, called Inner Temple and Middle Temple, are today in the heart of the British capital, and the Inns of Court that inhabit them still train many of Britain’s future top barristers and judges.