The Secret Token Read online

  In the sixteenth century, the campus lay on the western edge of London, outside the city walls between the Thames and the suburban road leading past Durham House to the sprawling royal palace of Westminster. “The point wasn’t always to graduate, like law schools today,” according to Whitelaw. “It was just part of general education.” In Raleigh’s day, “everyone was being sued and suing everyone else. It was also useful for gentry to pick up a background in law since they would be the local justice back on their country estates.” Nevertheless, Middle Temple, with about two hundred members at the time, was more a place for elite men to socialize than a formal academic institution. At his later trial for treason, Raleigh claimed never to have read a word of law.

  Each inn of court had its own flavor, and the elder Richard Hakluyt, guardian of the young pastor of the same name, helped add the spice of a global perspective to Middle Temple. The bachelor lawyer’s rooms there were cluttered with charts and globes that were exceedingly rare in that day, when only one in three English could read and few had ever seen a map. It was here that the younger Hakluyt had his conversion experience, and here that Raleigh and Adrian Gilbert—both of whom kept rooms nearby—talked over their exploration plans.

  At mealtimes, the men gathered in the newly constructed Middle Temple Hall, a jaw-dropping piece of Tudor architecture and one of the few extant remnants of Elizabethan London. One hundred feet long and forty feet wide under an arched oak-beamed ceiling and lit by stained-glass windows of heraldic arms, the hall hosted elaborate banquets and long drinking sessions. “You had this convivial social mixing of city money, ambitious lawyers, and people interested in exploration and navigation,” Whitelaw said. “It was an important space to be used for all sorts of schemes and ventures.”

  Today the hall has an antique and hallowed feel, but the scene four centuries ago resembled a raucous frat house. “The members had to be restrained from dining in their hats, and from scrambling for their food,” the historical record of one inn notes. “Occasionally they came to fisticuffs, [and] in the hall furniture generally required mending after revels.” No laundress or “female victualler” under the age of forty was allowed to enter temple chambers. There was a constant worry that the residents would wreck the place and not pay their bills. “You needed a bond—that is, if you owed money, someone would stand security—for any debts, like rent or damages,” Whitelaw explained. Nor was absence from the hemisphere an accepted excuse for late payments. Temple administrators fined the young Amadas for falling behind in his dues while he was on the Outer Banks in the summer of 1584.

  Manteo and Wanchese, the Carolina Algonquians who accompanied Amadas and Barlowe to London, likely sat at Middle Temple’s long oaken tables, living proof to Raleigh’s friends and potential investors of a fruitful land that produced strapping young men. Though Native American visitors were by then a familiar site in Spain and France (writer Michel de Montaigne was impressed with the dignity of the Brazilian Indians he met in 1562 and declared Europeans to be the real savages), they were as foreign as extraterrestrials in England and were probably treated as such.

  By then the two men had traded their usual garb of a “mantle of rudely tanned skins of wild animals, no shirts, and a pelt before their privy parts” for fashionable brown taffeta. The elder Hakluyt must be describing them when he writes that Native Americans of the region were “well proportioned in their limbs, well favored, gentle, of a mild and tractable disposition.” Not everyone was impressed. “No one was able to understand them and they made a most childish and silly figure,” sniffed a German aristocrat who met them shortly after their arrival in October 1584 when they were no doubt still struggling to learn the new language. He added they were “in countenance and stature like white Moors,” a reference to North African Arabs.

  In November, Raleigh took Manteo and Wanchese to a meeting of Parliament to witness “good government” in operation and testify to their country’s wealth. It was the first session in a dozen years, called by an authoritarian monarch who did so only when she was in dire need of additional revenues from taxes. Legislative minutes from the House of Commons mention “some of the people are brought into this realm, and thereby singular great commodities of that land are revealed.” Those commodities included pearls and furs obtained by Amadas and Barlowe and possibly pharmaceuticals like sassafras and tobacco thought to cure any number of illnesses.

  Of course, the two men might have exaggerated the riches of the New World, like Don Francisco Chicora before them, to ensure themselves a ride home. Raleigh might have encouraged that exaggeration. He had his own agenda, because he wanted Parliament to give its stamp of approval to the charter granted him by the queen. The House did so on December 14, but the House of Lords refused on the grounds that it was not in the members’ jurisdiction. No matter. Raleigh’s real goal was to drum up publicity and investors to launch a full colony. The legislation highlighted his desire to convert the Indians to Christianity and find “merchantable commodities.”

  Two weeks later, Elizabeth called Raleigh to her Greenwich palace, downstream from London, to attend her at dinner. She had recently been briefed by the young pastor Hakluyt on the advantages of English colonization of the Americas. Another gossipy German noble noted the courtier’s presence along with a dozen other leading courtiers. The fifty-one-year-old queen at one point called the dashing Raleigh over as she sat on a beanbag-sized cushion on the floor watching others dance.

  “Pointing with a finger at his face,” she noted a smudge and moved to wipe it with her own handkerchief, the nobleman remarked, but Raleigh rubbed it away first. “She was said to love this gentleman above all the others; and this may be true, because two years ago he could scarcely keep a servant, and now with her bounty he can keep five hundred.” Many of them wore liveries adorned with chains of gold, and he lavishly appointed the dark rooms of Durham House, the home he’d been lent, with silver-laced tablecloths and a massive four-poster bed covered in green velvet with white feather plumes and spangles set into each corner.

  Ten days after the dinner, on the last day of the twelve days of Christmas, Elizabeth knighted Raleigh in a ceremony that Manteo and Wanchese likely attended; almost certainly they were presented at least once to the monarch, whose gender might have given them less pause than it did many of her own subjects. We don’t know if it was the brainstorm of Raleigh or the queen, but she announced that the new land would be called Virginia, after the Virgin Queen. Raleigh’s new grand seal stated proudly, “Arms of Walter Raleigh, Knight Lord and Governor of Virginia.” If Raleigh’s idea, it was a canny way to entice the queen to support the venture.

  The queen’s infatuation with the man she delighted to call “Water,” in reference to his thick Devon accent, didn’t interfere with her practical judgment. Frobisher’s fiasco no doubt still on her mind, she refused to help finance another New World gamble that might also inflame tensions with Spain; for Philip, the Outer Banks was part of La Florida and not Virginia. Elizabeth did, however, provide Raleigh with gunpowder and use of a ship and gave him the right to seize idle men for a crew. She also appointed a Middle Temple member and former parliamentarian, who also was cousin to the lord chancellor, as the colony’s governor (its first, though not the last). Ralph Lane was a professional soldier then fighting in Ireland, and he would cast the venture in a military mold that would prove its undoing.

  Raleigh lobbied to persuade influential figures at Middle Temple and the court to contribute money to the venture. The recent rise of cloth and mining magnates created an eager pool of investors. Secretary of State Walsingham signed on; he had backed efforts by English merchants to expand their reach in Spain, Russia, Venice, and Turkey and liked the idea of developing a global network of English trading centers that would allow him, in turn, to expand his formidable spy network. William Sanderson, a wealthy financier who had just married Raleigh’s niece, helped cover the mission’s remaining
up-front costs. A fellow Middle Temple member, Sanderson proved a critical partner for the courtier. By the spring of 1585, Raleigh had raised the equivalent of nearly four million dollars in today’s money to launch the Virginia colony across the Atlantic.

  When he wasn’t cornering courtiers in Westminster’s halls, he was assembling one of the most formidable and influential scientific exploration teams of the era. He seemed to follow Hakluyt’s advice to hire a geographer, a painter, and an alchemist. After Frobisher’s folly, Raleigh knew that he needed a competent metallurgist on-site. Walsingham, who governed the royal mines, likely recommended Joachim Gans.

  A Jew from Prague famed for a novel method for using the waste from copper processing for dyeing textiles, Gans had won the equivalent of an H-1B visa to work in England, which had banned Jews since 1290. He appears to have been the close relative of a famous Jewish historian, a man who befriended the German astronomer Johannes Kepler and the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Gans would be the first acknowledged Jew to set foot in America, because the Spanish excluded all practicing Jews from their New World domain.

  Raleigh also needed an expert in the art of instrument navigation to train his captains, as well as a competent mapmaker and a person capable of analyzing potential New World products. In addition, he wanted to know as much as possible about the Native Americans of his future fiefdom, including their language, traditions, and beliefs. He found a twenty-four-year-old scholar fresh out of Oxford named Thomas Harriot who could do all of that and more.

  From a working-class family—his father might have been a blacksmith—Harriot became Raleigh’s intellectual muse and one of England’s first and most accomplished scientists. Unlike his handsome and fashionable patron, the young man was a perpetual bachelor in black, with a pointed red goatee accentuating a bony face and thin lips. His list of accomplishments by the time he reached middle age is mind-boggling. He made major advances in algebra. Harriot pioneered binary notation instrumental in the later development of computers. He solved the problem of how to match compass readings as a ship changes direction and location, and his resulting rhumb line charts were in use by the Royal Navy well into the twentieth century. He wrote an entire textbook on navigation, now lost; one chapter title was “Effect of Longitude on Declination.” Some scholars believe he invented the < and > symbols (for “less than” and “greater than”), now standard on all keyboards.

  Dressed as an English conquistador, Sir Walter Raleigh was at the height of his influence when this portrait was painted in 1590, as John White sought the Lost Colonists.

  Oxford graduate Thomas Harriot was barely twenty-five and already fluent in Carolina Algonquian when he left for the Outer Banks in 1585.

  The man from Oxford also revived the atomic theory posed by the ancient Greeks. He was the first Englishman to own and use a telescope. He mapped the moon and saw sunspots before Galileo (Gans might have facilitated his later correspondence with Kepler). He was the first to figure out the sun’s rotation rate. The careful observations he made of Halley’s comet allowed later astronomers to calculate its path. His surprising obscurity is due to his failure to publish; because he always had a patron, he didn’t make a public show of his achievements. He also feared potentially lethal accusations of witchcraft and atheism in a nation that was, he complained to Kepler, “stuck in the mud.”

  The voyage to Roanoke would open Harriot’s eyes to the wider world in the same way that the trip on the Beagle changed the life of the young Charles Darwin. Like the nineteenth-century biologist, Harriot encountered a bewildering array of exotic plants and animals, as well as stunningly different people and challenging beliefs. But while Darwin weathered charges of heresy, Harriot lived in a day when the death penalty awaited those guilty of “invocations or conjurations of evil spirits.”

  The third senior member of Raleigh’s scientific team was a middle-class Londoner and minor gentleman artist with the forgettable name of John White. In an era before photography, an artist was essential for any serious exploration venture. White, who might have been aboard the 1584 expedition, was tasked with recording the people, plants, animals, and landscape of Virginia. The son of the famous Dutch painter Cornelius Kettel appears to have served as his apprentice. The mission included a surprising number of other foreign nationals besides Gans and the Dutchman; there were also several French, Irish, Welsh, and Flemish participants, as well as the Portuguese-born Fernandes. A Danish officer also came along to train in naval warfare at the personal request of King Frederick II. Though an English-funded mission, the colony was by necessity a multinational venture; the country lacked the homegrown talent required to transport the settlers to the New World and conduct credible scientific experiments.

  With his experts and financing now in place, Raleigh chose a distant cousin as the expedition’s admiral. Sir Richard Grenville, a forty-two-year-old merchant, was the feudal lord of the western Devon port town of Bideford and a man of “intolerable pride and insatiable ambition,” according to Governor Lane, who would become his nemesis. Grenville (who later threatened to imprison Lane) was known for a prickly temperament and strong stomach; he was said to take “glasses between his teeth and crash them in pieces and swallow them” for the amusement of his fellow drinkers.

  Raleigh’s precise purpose for the colony remains opaque; he might have avoided a paper trail to keep from alerting the Spanish. But the knight seemed to favor a multipurpose settlement that could prey on passing Spanish ships while extracting resources from the land. Given that he was in touch with Hakluyt and chose the Outer Banks as his destination, a desire to control a northern Panama was also likely a factor (years later, he told the queen that by controlling the Panama Isthmus, “you will wrest the keys of the world from Spain”). A Spanish pilot captured by Grenville and held prisoner off Roanoke in 1586 later told authorities in Havana that the English chose this location “because on the mainland there is much gold and so they can pass from the North to the South Sea”—that is, from the Atlantic to the Pacific—“which they say and understand is nearby; thus making themselves strong.”

  Beneath the personal animosity pitting Lane against Grenville, some scholars perceive two rival camps that collaborated in the Roanoke voyages. The Devon cousins Raleigh and Grenville sought quick wealth by extracting gold and raiding Spanish ships, while a second group made up of Walsingham, Lane, and the pilot Fernandes seem to have favored a trading center that could provide long-term profits. The two factions formed an uneasy alliance.

  Unlike the colonies planted by Ayllón and the Huguenots, however, there would be no women or children, and there doesn’t seem to have been a focus on cultivating subsistence crops, both of which were critical for establishing a permanent settlement. These would prove the same mistakes that nearly destroyed the later attempt at Jamestown. This was nevertheless the largest colonization attempt on the Atlantic coast of North America since Ayllón’s voyage to Chicora six decades earlier. The ships carried provisions for a year, including six thousand loaves of bread, three thousand dried fish from Newfoundland, and two tons of strong wines. A virtual apothecary shop of drugs and dyes were stowed away, as well as pikes, longbows, guns, and personal armor to fight off a Spanish attack. Stevedores loaded Gans’s mining and metallurgical equipment and Harriot’s navigational instruments on board the flagship, the Tiger. “This was really a science team with a big security detail,” said Brent Lane of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

  At last, on April 9, 1585, five vessels crowded with at least four hundred and possibly as many as eight hundred men set sail from Plymouth on England’s southern coast. The destination was kept a strict secret except among those with a need to know; the Spanish ambassador in London promptly reported the departure to Philip, though he believed the fleet was heading for lands in New England or Newfoundland.

  The flagship was rated at between 160 and
180 tons, which meant it could carry that many casks, each of which had a capacity of 252 gallons of wine. About the same size as the Mayflower that would later carry the Puritans to Plymouth, it was a typical Elizabethan merchant ship. The length of a good-sized modern yacht, the vessel was much taller and wider, with its rear or stern rising thirty feet or so out of the water.

  With two full decks below for storage and accommodations, the ship could carry two hundred passengers or so, though in tight and squalid conditions. “Betwixt the decks there can hardly a man fetch his breath by reason there arises such a funk in the night that it causes putrefaction of blood and breeds disease much like the plague,” wrote Jamestown colonist William Capps four decades later, when conditions were much the same. The sole latrine projected from the bow, where a wood lattice let human waste fall into the sea. The only place to wash was in the ocean itself, but this wasn’t a popular practice. One man doing so on the voyage lost his leg to a shark.

  Though designed to haul cargo, the Tiger was outfitted to fight; five guns lined each side and a cannon faced fore and aft, with nearly ten thousand pounds of the queen’s gunpowder stored below. The three-masted ship was square-rigged, which meant it sailed most effectively with the wind from behind, though its ability to maneuver was limited. Fernandes, as chief pilot, was in charge of getting the vessels safely to and from the Outer Banks, while Admiral Grenville oversaw the mission at sea, and Lane would be in charge once the colony was situated on land. A Spanish gentleman later held captive aboard the fleet reported that the admiral dined on plates of gold while serenaded by musicians. The instruments, he added, were also designed to please the Native Americans they would encounter, because “they said the Indians were lovers of music.” The Spaniard also noted the presence of Manteo and Wanchese, returning home after eight months in London, and remarked that they were well treated and “already spoke English.” The two had taught Harriot Carolina Algonquian, and the lessons likely continued on board, with White and Gans possibly taking part as well. Ten days out, the Native Americans as well as the crew likely watched with curiosity as Harriot observed a solar eclipse from the rolling deck as the ship sped south to catch the current and winds off Africa that would then carry them west.