A Kingdom Strange

by James Horn

  Drake had learned something of Lane’s desperate situation on Roanoke Island from a pilot he had taken on board at Hatarask. After consulting with his captains, he offered the colonists as much help as he could. Lane explained that he needed a vessel to search for a harbor more suitable for shipping than the Outer Banks, as well as small boats for exploring rivers and shallow waters. In addition, he desperately needed provisions, arms, powder and shot, clothing, and men to replace the weak and unfit he proposed to send back to England. Drake obliged and gave Lane a bark of 70 tons, the Francis, two pinnaces, and four small boats, with equipment and supplies sufficient for a hundred men for four months. Lane had in mind sailing to the Chesapeake Bay to find a site on one of the deep water rivers discovered the previous winter, which would be a good location for a colony. He would then leave a small garrison behind and return with his men to England in August to report to Ralegh.

  Disaster struck even as preparations for Lane’s expedition began. Winds from the south began to strengthen, and lookouts on the larger ships could see storm clouds massing along the horizon. Within twenty-four hours a hurricane came roaring up the coast from the Caribbean, striking the fleet with such ferocity that anchor cables broke, masts snapped, and many of the smaller ships, including the Francis, were driven far out to sea or lost. The massive storm raged for three days, during which hailstones as big as hens eggs battered the fleet, lightning played continuously across the sky, and great water spouts were sucked up high into the air, “as though heaven & [earth] would have met.” For those men who had never witnessed a hurricane, the experience was terrifying and confirmed Lane’s opinion that the unprotected anchorage offshore was far too dangerous for shipping.17

  Lane’s plans were in disarray. Drake offered him another ship, the Bark Bonner, but she was much too large to pass through Port Ferdinando into the sounds for lading and possibly too large to enter Chesapeake Bay. In any case, the colonists were thoroughly disheartened by the storm and the loss of the Francis and their comrades onboard and would not countenance the voyage north. The “very hand of God as it seemed,” Lane wrote, “stretched out to take us from thence.” He did not expect another relief expedition to arrive until the following year, and given recent hostilities with the Secotans, he could not risk leaving a small garrison on Roanoke Island to wait for reinforcements, even if he could have persuaded a group of men to stay, which is doubtful. Lane therefore decided to abandon the settlement and return directly to England with Drake.

  A final setback occurred as the sailors sent to Roanoke Island to gather the colonists’ baggage and equipment struggled to navigate their boats through the shoals. Several boats ran aground in rough weather, and to refloat them the sailors threw most of the settlers’ possessions overboard. Into the choppy waters of the sound went papers, maps, books, a chain of black pearls given to Lane by Menatonon, and many of the samples of ore and specimens gathered by Thomas Hariot and Joachim Gans, an incalculable loss to Ralegh and posterity.

  Because the weather continued to be blustery in the wake of the hurricane, Drake was anxious to get away, and the colonists were quickly dispersed among the ships. Lane sailed with Drake on the flagship, along with Manteo and another Indian, named Towaye. The English weighed anchor on June 18 and with strong winds behind them quickly left the American shore behind, a little short of one year after they had arrived. Most of the colonists were probably glad to be going home. They had not made any spectacular discoveries of Indian wealth, and during the last few months they had been short of provisions and in continual danger of attack by local peoples.

  Lane may have shared some of his men’s frustrations. He had been disappointed by the region, which had few natural resources other than timber and had serious limitations as a privateering base. But he saw greater potential in a settlement farther north on the Chesapeake Bay and remained convinced that riches were to be found somewhere to the west in the mountains. As the coast passed out of view, Lane was likely already preparing to persuade Ralegh that it was essential to mount another expedition.18

  DRAKE’S RETURN was greeted with rejoicing in England. Shortly after the fleet docked in Portsmouth at the end of July 1586 a contemporary remarked that Drake had brought back great riches and honor and had so “inflamed the whole country with a desire to adventure unto the seas in hope of the like good success that a great number prepared ships mariners and soldiers and travelled every place at the seas where any profit might be had.” The sacking of Santo Domingo and Cartagena, it was said, had exposed the weakness of Philip II’s American empire, just as Richard Hakluyt the younger and Ralph Lane had predicted. An agent of Sir Francis Walsingham in Germany argued that one year of war in the West Indies “will cost the Spaniards more than two or three in the Low Countries.”

  Yet for all the public acclaim, Drake, as well as the queen and her ministers, had hoped for a better outcome. The plunder brought back to England amounted to only £67,000, which after expenses for the cost of the expedition were deducted represented a significant loss. More than 750 men had perished during the voyage, most from a pestilent fever that had dogged the fleet from the Cape Verde Islands to the Caribbean. But most important, the English had failed to deliver a decisive blow. They had not achieved their major objective of taking Panama, thereby disrupting the flow of treasure to Spain, or their secondary goal of maintaining a garrison in the region. Philip had been inconvenienced and would have to divert precious resources from Europe to strengthen fortifications in America, but he had not been appreciably weakened.19

  For Ralegh, the abandonment of Roanoke Island was infuriating. Drake was supposed to have reinforced the colony, not evacuated it. During the spring Ralegh had sent a ship with provisions to tide over the colonists while he fitted out a larger expedition that would bolster the colonists’ numbers. Little is known about the voyage other than that the ship reached Roanoke Island shortly after Lane had left. The second, larger expedition of six ships carrying approximately 200 colonists, once again commanded by Grenville, arrived off the Outer Banks in July. After making his way to Roanoke Island, Grenville was baffled to find no sign of the colonists or the earlier supply ship, and after a few weeks of exploration decided to return to England. “Unwilling to lose the possession of the Country, which,” Richard Hakluyt the younger wrote with a touch of exaggeration, “Englishmen had for so long held,” Grenville installed a small garrison of fifteen men with provisions for a year, then departed.20

  Given the highly optimistic reports about Roanoke of a year before, Ralegh was mystified by Lane’s decision to abandon the island. After everything the English had achieved by discovering the region and establishing a settlement, why had he given up?

  Lane explained that he was forced to leave because of the failure to supply the colony in a timely fashion. The fleet he had expected to arrive by Easter had not appeared, and his men could not endure on Roanoke Island any longer. More important than the rights or wrongs of his decision to return with Drake, Lane believed, was the discovery of information from his explorations and discussions with Indians that provided proof of the greater region’s potential. This information might well unlock the wealth of Virginia and eventually fulfill Ralegh’s dream of a prosperous and powerful English America. Lane had returned to England to deliver the good news in person.

  The key to Lane’s thinking, as he laid out in his explanations to Ralegh, was his conception of a Virginia that linked the Chesapeake Bay to the Roanoke region and beyond. There was no longer any doubt that the Outer Banks were ill-suited for large ships, but the “good harbor” found by Amadas and his men on the southern shore of the Chesapeake the previous winter was a different matter. Lane argued that a settlement established on the large river system (Elizabeth River) near Skicóak could easily accommodate the volume and size of ships that Ralegh had intended for Roanoke.

  From information provided by Menatonon, Lane had learned that the Chowanocs’ territories were just a few days to the sout
h of Skicóak and that an additional day’s travel overland would bring the English to the first town of the Mangoaks on the Roanoke River. This “river of Moratico [Roanoke] promises great things,” he wrote in his account, adding that Thomas Hariot had heard from local peoples that the head of the river rose from the Bay of Mexico, which opened into the South Sea. Somewhere beyond his own navigation of the Roanoke to the rapids, Lane believed the river turned south toward the Gulf of Mexico and a passage to the Pacific Ocean.

  The possibility that the Roanoke River’s headwaters were in mountains far to the south was a crucial piece of news. From a deep-water port on the Elizabeth River, Lane advised, sconces (light earthworks) could be raised to protect an overland route to the Roanoke River, and boats could be left along the way. By this means, he explained, “you shall gain within four days travel into the heart of the main 200 miles at the least, and so pass your discovery into that most notable and to the likeliest parts of the mainland.” Colonists would be able to travel easily along the Roanoke River far inland to the province of Chaunis Temoatan and perhaps find the passage to the South Sea nearby. The interior to the southwest, not the coastal area, offered the brightest prospects of a spectacular discovery, and he had found the most convenient way of getting there.21

  Lane had given Ralegh much to consider. But there was a further step to be taken. In the months following Lane’s return, Ralegh and his advisors at Durham House—principally Lane, Hariot, and possibly Jacques Le Moyne—pieced together a new theory of the geography of eastern North America. If the mines of Chaunis Temoatan were somewhere in the vicinity of the headwaters of the Roanoke River twenty days—perhaps 250-300 miles—from the lands of the Mangoaks, and if Lane and Hariot were correct in their assumption that the Roanoke River originated in the mountains far to the south, then perhaps Chaunis Temoatan was one and the same as the “Montes Apalatci” depicted by Le Moyne at the top of his Florida map. The fit was not perfect; Le Moyne’s Appalachian Mountains, where gold, silver, and copper were mined by local Indians, lay near the shore of a huge lake (or the South Sea) that was to the north rather than close to the Gulf of Mexico. Nevertheless, Ralegh believed that sufficient evidence existed to merit further investigation.

  Support for the theory that Chaunis Temoatan and the Montes Apalatci were the same came from an unexpected source. During Drake’s raid on St. Augustine the English had captured two men—Pedro Morales, a Spanish deserter, and Nicholas Burgoignon, a Frenchman seized by the Spanish on the coast of Florida six years before—who returned with the fleet to Portsmouth and were subsequently interrogated by Richard Hakluyt the younger and Hariot. Morales claimed that sixty leagues (about 150 miles) northwest of the Spanish garrison of Santa Elena were mountains full of gold and crystal mines, named “Apalatci.” He claimed to have seen a great diamond that was brought from the mountains to the west. These mountains, he believed, were possibly “the hills of Chaunis Temoatam, which Master Lane had advertisement of [learned of].”

  Burgoignon confirmed Morales’s story and embellished it with astonishing details. In the mountains, he said, there were great quantities of crystal, gold, rubies, and diamonds that gleamed so bright in places that during the day the Indians “cannot behold them, and therefore they travel to them by night.” Fifty leagues from Santa Elena, he continued, the Spanish had encountered Indians wearing gold rings in their nostrils and ears.22

  The hearsay that Morales and Burgoignon had picked up derived not from recent information but from a Spanish expedition of twenty years earlier. In 1566 Captain Juan Pardo had been instructed by the then governor of Florida, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, to journey inland from Santa Elena to search for precious minerals and a possible route to the great silver mines of Zacatecas, Mexico, which the governor supposed were no more than a few hundred leagues away. In two expeditions, in 1566-1567 and 1567-1568, Pardo and his men had headed northwest from Santa Elena as far as North Carolina (and possibly to the extreme southwestern tip of Virginia), then west across the Blue Ridge Mountains to the chiefdom of Chiaha in Tennessee, ending up on the western slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains. Sometime after the expedition, one of the principal officers reported that forty leagues (100 miles) from the coast they had discovered “a crystal mountain” made of diamonds. Another account stated that Pardo and his men had found gold and silver mines and also a river that they followed from the coast into the interior, which ultimately led to Canada and a passage through to the South Sea and China.23

  Putting all the information together, Ralegh now had three independent reports of riches in the Appalachian Mountains inland from the Florida coast—Le Moyne’s, Lane and Hariot’s, and the testimony of Morales and Burgoignon. The evidence he pored over for several months at Durham House all seemed to point in the same direction: gold, silver, copper, gems, and a passage to the Pacific all existed in the mountains several hundred miles to the southwest, and the Roanoke River was the key to getting there. The proximity of Spanish garrisons at Santa Elena and St. Augustine prevented him from planting a settlement on the Florida coast south of Cape Fear, but what if he could chart a route through the backcountry from the Chesapeake Bay to Chaunis Temoatan, the Montes Apalatci?

  To help him visualize the various regions, Ralegh instructed John White to draft two maps, one of the Roanoke area based on the discoveries of 1585-1586 and a second that combined Le Moyne’s rendering of Florida with the new Roanoke map. Drawing upon his own experiences as well as measurements made by Thomas Hariot and observations of other colonists, notably Ralph Lane, White began working first on the Roanoke map. He detailed the major natural features of the area—the sounds, Outer Banks, rivers, ports (or entrances), and shoals—together with major Indian towns such as Secotan, Dasemunkepeuc, several Weapemeoc communities, and Chowanoc. The progress of Grenville’s Tiger is shown rounding Cape Lookout, anchored off Wococon and near Port Ferdinando, while smaller boats and canoes ply the shallow waters of the Sounds and rivers. At the top of the map is the striking presence of the Chesapeake Bay, on the southern shore of which, inland upon a river, is the Chesapeake Indians’ capital town of Skicóak. White placed Roanoke Island prominently at the center of the map, which allowed him to clearly show Lane’s recommended route to the Chesapeake Bay: up the Albemarle Sound and Chowan River to Chowanoc and then overland about fifty or sixty miles to Skicóak.24

  3.6 John White, Roanoke, 1586.

  3.7 John White, Map of the East Coast of America, 1586.

  White then combined his Virginia map with Le Moyne’s Florida map. This was the first detailed map of the entire region from Florida to the Chesapeake Bay, but more important, it was the first English map to suggest the promise of the interior. White depicted a large river flowing from Port Royal to the shadowy outline of a great lake or the South Sea and showed Le Moyne’s Montes Apalatci inland from the St. Johns River. He made no attempt to link the Roanoke River to the gold- and silver-bearing mountains to the south by tracing its inland course. There may have been no need; a cursory glance at the map would have persuaded Ralegh that the English simply had to follow a southwesterly route from the Roanoke River (or from the southern shore of the Chesapeake Bay) to reach the mines and the Pacific.25

  At the same time that White was working on the maps, Thomas Hariot was busily writing up his notes for Ralegh about the natural products of the Roanoke region that might prove of interest to merchants and investors. The English had found silk grass like that grown in Persia, which could be cultivated to great profit because of the demand in England and abroad. They had discovered silkworms as large as walnuts, and if they introduced mulberry trees they would be able to develop a trade as great as that promoted by the Persians, Turks, Spanish, and Italians. There were all kinds of trees that could be used to produce pitch, tar, and turpentine; cedar for furniture and other timber products; sassafras “of most rare virtues in physic for the cure of many diseases”; flax and hemp; alum, used in various manufacturing processes; oils from nuts, berr
ies, and bear fat; dyestuffs; wine; furs; copper; iron ore; and pearls. The colonists’ efforts to grow sugar cane brought from the West Indies had been unsuccessful, but Hariot was optimistic that they would succeed eventually because cane was cultivated in southern Spain and Barbary, which were on the same latitude as Virginia.

  Explorations up the rivers had convinced Hariot that Virginia’s interior, which stretched westward hundreds of leagues, held even greater promise. Inland, the soil was richer, trees were larger, there was a greater variety of animals, and the country was more densely populated. Pasture was as good as any in England, and the mountains promised mineral wealth. Just as the Spanish had discovered riches on the mainland in the Indies, so the English could hope for greater plenty from the “inner parts” of the country. And because the climate of Virginia, Hariot believed, was similar to those of Japan, China, and countries of the Levant and Mediterranean, any number of commodities traded from those places might be produced in the English colony. Not only were precious minerals to be found in “the main,” as Lane speculated, but also a rich and fertile land ripe for development.26

  Only the discovery of a good mine or a passage to the South Sea, Lane had told Ralegh, could justify the expense of establishing a colony in America, and only then would the country’s natural produce “be worth the fetching.” Ralegh agreed. Despite Hariot’s enthusiastic account, Sir Walter was uninterested in establishing a colony devoted solely to harvesting the natural produce of the land. Cultivating natural products would encourage self-sufficiency and perhaps attract investment from merchants, but cultivation alone would not cover the costs of establishing a colony and did not conform to Ralegh’s expansive vision of an English America. Instead, he continued to favor the idea of a settlement that would serve as a harbor for English privateers and a base for explorations into the interior in search of gold, silver, and a route to the Orient. Virginia would play a major role in the war against Spain in America, and from discoveries inland might return treasures to rival those of Spanish conquests.27