A Kingdom Strange

by James Horn

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1 - TO “ANNOY THE KING OF SPAIN”

  Chapter 2 - ROANOKE

  Chapter 3 - “CHAUNIS TEMOATAN”

  Chapter 4 - A CITY ON THE BAY

  Chapter 5 - THE BROKEN PROMISE

  Chapter 6 - “INTO THE MAIN”

  EPILOGUE

  Chronology

  The Settlers of 1587

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright Page

  For Sally, Ben, and Liz

  with love.

  To seek new worlds for gold, for praise, for glory.

  —SIR WALTER RALEGH

  PROLOGUE

  JOHN WHITE’S LAST LETTER

  On a cold winter’s day in 1593 in the small settlement of Newtown, County Cork, an old man stood at his window staring at the dark clouds gathered along the horizon. Sleet had begun to fall, washing the landscape a dreary gray and glazing the bare trees with a thin layer of ice. But John White did not notice the frozen rain or numbing chill that had seeped into the room; he had drifted to another time and place. He pictured himself onboard a ship, the wind filling the sails and the restless Atlantic stretching away as far as the eye could see. Once more, he tasted salt spray on his lips, felt the swell of the ocean beneath his feet, and heard the dull boom of breakers beating monotonously against a distant shore.

  He had gone over what happened countless times before, had thought of little else in the long years since he left his family and countrymen on Roanoke Island to return to England for help. He remembered the last hours as if they were yesterday: his efforts to convince the settlers that as their leader it was his duty to remain, and the hope in their eyes when he finally agreed to go. No one else, they said, would be able to persuade Sir Walter Ralegh, the venture’s sponsor, to send a relief expedition immediately. Reluctantly, with heartfelt farewells and a firm promise to be back within six months, he boarded his ship and sailed away.

  How had things gone so badly wrong? They had set out in April 1587 for Virginia (as the colony was called for the virgin queen, Elizabeth I) with high hopes—118 men, women, and children, many known to him personally, including his daughter, Eleanor, and her husband, Ananias—to plant a settlement in America. It had been a grand scheme, combining an ambition to exploit the natural bounty of the land with the imperial quest to stake a claim to the New World—an English America that would serve as a counter to the power of Spain. In time, a city would arise on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, they would build harbors from which their ships could plunder the Spanish in the Caribbean and along the Main and attack treasure fleets that carried the wealth of the New World to the Old.

  There were treasures, too, waiting to be found in the unexplored lands of the interior where no European had set foot. Rumors abounded of fabulous wealth in mountains known only to Indians. With the English firmly established in America, Spain’s influence in the Indies would gradually wane; England would grow strong and eventually supplant the Spanish as lords of the world.

  Perhaps, White pondered, he had allowed his enthusiasm for Virginia to get the better of his judgment. He recalled the exotic beauty of the land that had taken his breath away at first sight, the endless forests and wild profusion of trees, broad waterways and rivers teeming with life, strange animals and plants, and Indian peoples who had received the English in friendship and whose trust they had betrayed. The limitless potential of the New World that seemed within their grasp had somehow eluded them. Their attempt to found a great city had come to nothing. Perhaps the vision of an English America that he and Ralegh shared would never be more than a fantasy, a pipe dream.

  And yet the men and women he had led to America were real enough. What of them? Despite his tireless efforts, he had taken not six months but three years to get back to Roanoke Island. By then they were gone. Unable to reach them, he would go to his grave bearing the guilt of his failure. His only comfort (small though it was) was his belief that the settlers were still alive on Croatoan Island with his Indian friend Manteo, or possibly in the interior, where they may have found a home with other peoples.

  Sitting down to write a letter he had put off too long to his friend Richard Hakluyt, he reflected on his last voyage to Roanoke in 1590. He wrote about the hard-eyed mariners who cared nothing for him or the colony but only for profit, of months wasted in the West Indies while the privateers searched for valuable Spanish ships to plunder, and the foul weather that eventually forced his ship off the coast.

  The voyage had been “luckless” and his hopes crushed. He could conclude only with an appeal to God’s grace: “committing the relief of my . . . company the planters in Virginia, to the merciful help of the Almighty, whom I most humbly beseech to help & comfort them, according to his most holy will & their good desire.” It was his final good-bye, an admission to himself that, exhausted in body and purse, he could no longer continue the search for them. Others might succeed where he had failed, but he could do no more.1

  He laid down his pen and returned to the window, looked into the fading light, and asked himself for the thousandth time: Why had he listened to them? Why had he left? Why was he not with them still, wherever they were?

  1

  TO “ANNOY THE KING OF SPAIN”

  [W]hat an honorable thing

  Both to the realm and to the king

  To have had his dominion extending

  There into so far a ground.

  —JOHN RASTELL

  IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1583 two small ships battled through mountainous seas in the mid-Atlantic. They were all that remained of a fleet commanded by Sir Humphrey Gilbert that had set out three months earlier from Plymouth, England, to take possession of North America in the name of Queen Elizabeth.

  The storm had come on quickly: the ocean rising and falling, Edward Hayes, captain of the Golden Hind, later recalled, like “hills and dales upon the land.” But Gilbert, brave and reckless, paid little heed. Seated at the stern of the tiny frigate Squirrel, he read calmly from a book, as if to defy the elements raging around him. Sailing as close as he dared, Hayes called to Gilbert to join him on the Hind, the larger of the two ships, but Gilbert refused, saying he would not forsake his men, with whom he had endured so many perils.

  As the storm worsened the Squirrel was repeatedly swamped by huge waves. Several times Hayes thought her lost, yet somehow each time she recovered. Gilbert signaled that all was well and cried out repeatedly above the howling wind the old adage: “We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.” Then, about midnight on Monday September 9, the lights of the frigate suddenly went out. The lookout of the Hind, peering into the darkness ahead, shouted that the frigate was cast away, which Hayes in his account of the voyage remarked was true, for in that instant the Squirrel and her crew were “devoured and swallowed up of the Sea.” England’s first attempt to establish a colony in North America had ended in failure.1

  WALTER RALEGH was likely at Durham House, his magnificent London residence on the banks of the River Thames, when he learned of Gilbert’s death. The news was of more than passing interest. He had invested heavily in the venture, but of greater importance to him was the fact that Gilbert was his half-brother and close business partner.

  Ralegh was born in 1554 at Hayes Barton in the parish of East Budleigh, Devon, a small village in rolling countryside a few miles from the coast. His father (also named Walter) was a prosperous gentleman farmer who was related to a number of prominent merchant and seafaring families of the region, including the Drakes of Plymouth. In the late 1540s he wed Katherine Champernoun (
Walter’s mother), who had previously been married to Otho Gilbert and had three sons by him, John, Humphrey, and Adrian. The match was a step up the social ladder for the Raleghs and brought the family into the highest circles of county society. But more significant in the long run was the role the Gilberts would play in Walter’s life.2

  Humphrey Gilbert was a towering influence on the young Ralegh. Walter, who was seventeen years younger, had grown up hearing about his half-brother’s exploits at the dazzling court of the young Queen Elizabeth. While still in his teens, he had followed in Gilbert’s footsteps, fighting for Protestant Huguenots in France in the wars of religion and later in Munster (southern Ireland) against Irish rebels. He shared Gilbert’s fierce Protestant convictions, his hatred of Catholic Spain, his delight in learning, and his unquenchable thirst for knowledge of faraway lands.

  Ralegh’s fascination with America may also be attributed to his half-brother’s influence. Gilbert had been among the earliest and most vocal proponents of western voyaging and the expansion of England’s commercial empire. In 1566 he had written “A discourse of a discovery for a new passage to Cataia [Cathay],” which argued for the existence of a sea route to the Far East along the north coast of America and called upon the English to take the lead in finding it. A “General Map” attached to the “discourse,” adapted from a world map produced two years earlier by the expert Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius, showed the route clearly and how England was ideally placed to take advantage of it.

  According to Gilbert, not only was the distance to Cathay (China) via the Northwest Passage considerably shorter than a northeastern route to Asia around the top of the Russia, but much of the sea passage was below the Arctic Circle and therefore free of ice. Ships leaving London or Bristol would head to approximately 60 degrees north, around “Cape Fredo” on the easternmost extremity of Labrador and then continue westward along the northern edge of the North American continent to the broad straits of “Anian,” which opened into the Pacific Ocean. Once through the straits it would be only a short journey to Japan, China, the Moluccas, and the untold wealth to be found there in precious spices and silks. If England secured such a route, she would establish herself as a major commercial power and eventually come to rival Spain’s rapidly growing overseas empire.3

  1.1 Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s map was published in 1576 with his A discourse of a discovery for a new passage to Cataia. The map clearly shows a navigable Northwest Passage to the Orient along the top of America.

  Gilbert was unable to raise sufficient interest or money from merchants and wealthy gentry for a voyage to discover a Northwest Passage, but he remained enthusiastic about prospects for an expedition to the New World. In the mid-1570s, against the background of escalating raids on Spanish America by English privateers, he started to develop a daring new project that combined colonization with a large-scale assault on Spain’s possessions in the West Indies.4

  About this time Ralegh became involved in his half-brother’s plans. After returning to England from the battlefields of France and spending several years at Oriel College, Oxford, he had moved to London in 1575. The following year he registered at the Middle Temple, one of the prestigious Inns of Court, located in spacious grounds just to the west of the old walls of the City of London (that part of the capital within its ancient walls). The Inns of Court provided young gentlemen with an introduction to common law, which was considered an indispensable part of their education, and offered a respectable position in London society. Ralegh was not interested in a career in law and had already set his sights on finding preferment at Queen Elizabeth’s court.5

  It is probable that shortly after Ralegh arrived in the city, Gilbert introduced him to Richard Hakluyt, the lawyer and elder of two Richard Hakluyts (they were cousins). Both were among the foremost promoters in England of overseas ventures. Hakluyt the lawyer, also a resident of Middle Temple, was an expert on geography and in regular contact with other leading authorities of the age. One can easily imagine Gilbert, Ralegh, Hakluyt, and others of Gilbert’s circle gathered in the lawyer’s rooms, poring over maps and books, talking long into the night about prospects for discoveries in the New World.6

  In Hakluyt’s chambers Ralegh would have had ready access to books of cosmography (general descriptions of the world), including one of the most influential works of the period, Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia Universalis, a vast compendium of information about the world that had been republished many times since its appearance thirty years earlier.

  1.2 Abraham Ortelius, Typus Orbis Terrarum, 1570. Walter Ralegh may have studied this map at the lodgings of Richard Hakluyt, the lawyer, of the Middle Temple, London. The map reveals a sea passage to the East along the top of America and was the inspiration for Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s map.

  Yet it might have been Hakluyt’s sumptuously colored world map that depicted the Americas in detail that fired Ralegh’s imagination. Obvious to the eye above a detailed depiction of the Americas was a sea passage that ran from Greenland to the Bering Straits. Looking more closely, Ralegh may have picked out the course of the St. Lawrence River, shown as penetrating far into the heart of the continent and separated by a narrow mountain range from a great river flowing to the west coast. Was this a route through the landmass that might provide a means of reaching the Pacific, should the Northwest Passage prove impossible to navigate?

  Perhaps the most striking aspect of the map, however, which Ralegh could not have failed to notice, was that whereas New France and New Spain were prominently displayed, a “New England” was nowhere to be seen. As Ralegh and Gilbert were painfully aware, the English had fallen far behind Spain and France in exploring and colonizing the New World.7

  In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the English had been among the pioneers of Atlantic exploration, but during the long reign of Henry VIII (Queen Elizabeth’s father) merchants and mariners had turned away from distant horizons and focused instead on opportunities nearer to home, trading with Europe and countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. Other than the seasonal ebb and flow of shipping to the Newfoundland fishing banks and occasional illegal trading ventures to Brazil and the West Indies, the English showed little interest in America through the 1550s.

  Spanish possessions in the New World, by contrast, had expanded enormously. The colonization of major Caribbean islands in the first decade of the sixteenth century was followed by the conquest of Mexico and Peru in the 1520s and 1530s, during which vast lands and numberless people came under the jurisdiction of the Castilian crown. The increase in Spanish populations in the West Indies and Central and South America had led to an enormous growth in Atlantic trade, enriching Spain and bringing about a decisive shift in the balance of power in Europe. Gold and silver plundered from Indian peoples and extracted from American mines had financed the buildup of Spain’s formidable armies and expanding territories. When Elizabeth I ascended the throne in 1558 the Spanish king, Philip II, ruled an empire that stretched halfway across the globe, from the Mediterranean to the Americas. The English, on the other hand, had recently lost Calais to the French, the last vestige of once extensive lands in France, and their only overseas possession apart from some eastern counties of Ireland.8

  The New World had emerged as an important theater of war by the middle decades of the sixteenth century, not only because of deep-rooted dynastic rivalries among the major powers, but also owing to the hostilities between Catholics and Protestants that had split Europe in two. Spain’s claim to possess the Americas was based on discovery, conquest, and settlement, but even more important, it was founded on the sacred enterprise of extending the Catholic faith to (in Spanish eyes) “barbarous” native peoples. America was Spain’s by virtue of the responsibility placed on Spanish monarchs by successive popes to convert Indians to Christianity. Philip believed the Lord had reserved for him the holy work of creating a universal Catholic monarchy that would reunite Christendom and eventually all peoples under one
ruler, one faith, and one sword.9

  That Philip took his role seriously can be seen in his efforts to ensure that Protestants—“heretics”—were kept out of America. In the early 1560s the king was especially concerned about the efforts of French Huguenots to take possession of Florida. Jean Ribault, a veteran privateer, had set out from Le Havre, France, in February 1562 to reconnoiter the southeastern coast of North America, where he established a small garrison named Charlesfort, on the border of modern-day Georgia and South Carolina. He had then returned to France to plan a larger privateering base in the area, from which attacks on the Spanish shipping in the West Indies would be launched.

  Charlesfort did not last long; the men left behind soon abandoned their post. But a couple of years later Ribault and his lieutenant, René de Laudonnière, were back on the Florida coast with more than a thousand Huguenot settlers. This time they chose to establish a colony a hundred miles or so to the south of their first settlement, where they believed prospects were better, which they called Fort Caroline. The heavily armed warships, cannons, firearms, pikes, and lances they brought with them left little doubt in Philip’s mind that the French were intent on establishing a harbor for privateers.

  To counter the French threat, the king ordered Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the recently appointed governor of Tierra Florida, to destroy the new settlement and safeguard the region from Protestant interlopers by creating a line of forts along Florida’s coast. In the late summer of 1565 Menéndez led a large force of soldiers and Indian allies to Fort Caroline and in a surprise attack put the entire garrison to the sword, granting mercy only to some women and children. Hundreds of settlers perished at the fort and in subsequent reprisals, news of which sent shock waves reverberating throughout Europe.10