by James Horn
The settlement was deserted, the houses had been dismantled, and the colonists were gone. His first response was dismay. He had dreaded finding the settlement abandoned. What had forced the settlers to leave? But as he looked around he felt a gradual sense of relief. There was no sign that the settlement had been attacked. The palisade built by the settlers was intact, and he discovered the word “CROATOAN” carved on one of the main gateposts, without any cross or signs of distress that would have indicated the settlers had been in grave danger. As they continued to look around the site, Cocke’s men found iron bars, a couple of pigs of lead, four fowlers (cannon), saker shot, and other heavy gear scattered about, almost overgrown with grass and weeds.
Anxious to find further clues to what had happened to the colonists, White and Cocke searched the surrounding area. Picking their way down to the waterside and following the shore to the point of a creek nearby, they found the settlers’ boats and pinnace were gone, along with the cannon left with them. The absence of boats confirmed that the settlers had departed from the island in a planned move and had not been captured or killed by the Secotans or Spanish.
Returning to the fort, they found the sailors eager to show them the remains of five chests carefully hidden in a trench. Three of the chests belonged to White, who described the scene ruefully: “About the place many of my things [were] spoiled and broken, and my books torn from the covers, the frames of some of my pictures and Maps rotten and spoiled with rain, and my armor almost eaten through with rust.” The Secotans, he surmised, had waited for the settlers to leave and then ransacked the site.
Saddened by the loss of his possessions, White nevertheless returned to the Hopewell that evening in good heart, “greatly pleased” at finding “a certain [sure] token of their [the colonists] safe being at Croatoan, where Manteo was born, and the Savages of the Island our friends.” If he had initially been disappointed that he had not been reunited with the settlers that day, at least he knew where to find them. And above all, he knew they were safe.24
White was now eager to move on to Croatoan as soon as possible, especially as the weather was worsening. During the night conditions turned stormy, the wind and seas “so greatly risen,” White recounted, “that wee doubted our Cables and Anchors would scarcely hold until Morning.” Fortunately, he had made a friend in Captain Abraham Cocke. By transporting him to Roanoke, the captain had done all that was required according to the terms of his contract and could have insisted on returning to the Caribbean or sailing for the Azores, but instead he agreed the next morning to take White to Croatoan Island to find the colonists.
Disaster struck again as the Hopewell’s crew was hauling in the anchor. The cable broke and the ship quickly gathered way toward Hatarask Island. Cocke ordered the men to drop another anchor, but it came home so fast that they had to let it go to avoid running aground on Cape Kenrick. The chance discovery of a deep water channel along the shore saved them at the last moment from foundering.
The storm had caused them to lose three of their four anchors as well as valuable time, during which the weather had worsened. Concerned about dwindling food supplies and his lack of fresh water, Cocke decided to postpone efforts to reach the colonists and head either for St. John’s (Puerto Rico), Hispaniola, or some other island. In consultation with his men and White, they agreed to winter in the West Indies. After reprovisioning and repairing their ship during the winter months, they would return to plundering Spanish shipping in the spring and then sail to Croatoan Island in early summer. Cocke put the same suggestion to the men of the Moonlight, who had been waiting offshore. Claiming their ship was in no fit state to continue, they elected to go back to England.
Cocke set the Hopewell on a course for Trinidad, the most southerly of the Caribbean islands, off the Orinoco Delta. Uninhabited by the Spanish, it was a favorite haunt of privateers. Once again, bad weather intervened. After making good progress for a couple of days, strong northwesterly winds drove the ship far out to sea and persuaded Cocke to head for the Azores, where he joined a great squadron of English ships led by Sir John Hawkins that was lying in wait for the Spanish treasure fleet. Toward the end of September, realizing that the Spaniards had eluded them, Hawkins’s ships dispersed, and Cocke returned to England. For White, there was no joy in the homeward voyage, only a bitter sense of loss.25
By the time he arrived at Plymouth in late October, White knew it was unlikely he would ever see his family and the settlers again. Ralegh had seemingly lost interest in the colony, and there was little prospect of involving merchants and privateers, who had shown themselves to be far more interested in plundering Spanish ships than transporting White to America. So concluded, he wrote sorrowfully a few years later, “my fifth and last voyage to Virginia, which was no less unfortunately ended then forwardly begun, and as luckless to many, as sinister [unfortunate] to myself.”26
6
“INTO THE MAIN”
It is a spacious, and ample Tract of Land, from
North to South, upon a right line, it may be 700
miles; from East to west in the narrowest place,
supposed some 300 miles, and in other places
1000 a sufficient space, and ground enough.
—WILLIAM STRACHEY
IN THE SUMMER OF 1590, while John White was struggling to reach Roanoke Island, Ralegh’s life took an unexpected turn. He had met a pretty young woman, Elizabeth (Bess) Throckmorton, one of the queen’s maids-of-honor, and fallen in love. She was the daughter of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, a distinguished diplomat and former ambassador to France and Scotland. Following the death of Sir Nicholas, Bess was looked after by her elder brother, Sir Arthur Throckmorton, who arranged her introduction to the court in 1584, when she was twenty. A later portrait shows her as an attractive woman with an open countenance, hazel eyes, and a quizzical smile. Intelligent and experienced in the ways of the court, she must have known the likely consequences of entering into an affair with Ralegh. At Elizabeth’s court disloyalty was not tolerated, and in the queen’s view there could be no greater personal affront than clandestine affairs between her maids and male favorites.
Ralegh also knew the queen would be displeased, but believed she would soon reconcile herself to the relationship. He decided not to tell her about it and continued the affair in secret over the next year. By the summer of 1591 Bess was pregnant, and in November she and Ralegh were married. Again, he opted not to tell Elizabeth. But when Ralegh’s son was born the following spring, it was no longer possible to keep the relationship secret. The queen was outraged. Angered more by his dishonesty and callous attitude about breaking her trust than by his weakness in falling for a pretty maid, the queen first placed Ralegh under arrest at Durham House and then, as the city sweated in a sickly summer heat, consigned him and Bess to the Tower of London.1
There was no longer any hope that Ralegh would organize a fleet to locate the settlers in Virginia. Although Ralegh and his wife were released toward the end of 1592, they were banished from the queen’s presence. The two retired to his newly acquired estate at Sherborne, Dorset.
Yet even if he had not been in disgrace, it is unlikely that Ralegh would have taken up the colonists’ plight. He had shown little interest in White’s last voyage and was now focused instead on his privateering ventures and regaining the queen’s favor. One part of his strategy was to give her presents of rich prizes taken by his ships, and the other was to achieve a spectacular discovery in America that would bring wealth to the crown (and him) and cripple Spanish power in the Indies. In the 1580s his ambitions had centered on Roanoke and the Chesapeake Bay, but now, ten years later, he had set his sights instead on Guiana, in South America, and the lost city of El Dorado.
The legend of El Dorado had its origins in Peru in the early1540s. Spanish chroniclers and conquistadors reported stories by local Indians of a kingdom rich in gold mines across the mountains to the east, ruled, in the words of the historian Fernández de Oviedo, by a “G
olden Chief or King.” This chief wore no clothing but each morning was covered from head to toe in fine gold dust, looking “as resplendent as a gold object worked by the hand of a great artist.” During the next half century, the rumor was further embellished with incredible accounts by explorers who had braved the interior and heard news of the rich and populous realm of the golden Indian.2
Ralegh had become fascinated by the story of El Dorado in 1586. That spring he had dispatched two small pinnaces, the Mary Spark and the Serpent, on a voyage to the Azores, which turned out to be a remarkably profitable venture. In August the two ships brought home valuable merchandise including sugar, brasilwood, and ivory, and also a high-ranking Spaniard, Don Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, governor of Patagonia.
Sarmiento was an expert on Peru, and in the course of his many years in South America he had picked up a great deal of information about lands in the interior. During conversations at Durham House the Spaniard told Sir Walter about the flight of Incas led by their emperor, Manco Capac, into the surrounding mountain fastnesses in the 1530s to escape Spanish invaders. Sarmiento also passed on what he had heard about El Dorado. In particular, he told Ralegh about an elderly Spanish gentleman and soldier, Antonio de Berrio, who had led a recent exploration along the Orinoco River.
Berrio’s ideas about the location of El Dorado were highly influential in shaping Ralegh’s thinking. In 1579 Berrio had inherited valuable estates in New Granada (Colombia) and the governorship of a huge province that stretched hundreds of miles east of the Andes into the Orinoco River basin. Two years later Berrio moved with his family to New Granada to manage his estates and search for El Dorado, which he believed was somewhere in the jungle highlands of Guiana between the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers. He had heard rumors of a fabulous city called Manoa beside a great lake of the same name and had made an expedition along the Orinoco River in 1583-1584 to find it. Although he failed to find Manoa, Berrio did discover the highlands south of the Orinoco; he was convinced the city was located there.
Years later, as Ralegh pondered his reduced circumstances in exile at Sherborne, he turned to the idea of mounting an expedition to the Orinoco himself. Connecting what he had learned from Sarmiento about the flight of the Incas and Berrio’s ideas about the whereabouts of Manoa, he concluded that the golden city had probably been founded by Inca refugees. Manco Capac had established a new empire in the interior of South America that was even greater than that destroyed by the Spanish in Peru. Sir Walter was enough of a realist to appreciate that the likelihood of finding El Dorado was remote. But there was nonetheless a possibility of discovering information that might eventually lead him to the fabled city or to rich mines and other treasures.3
Roanoke, on the other hand, offered little prospect of profit. White had reluctantly admitted as much to his friend Richard Hakluyt in a letter in February 1593. The mariners who had sailed with White on his last voyage had ignored orders from Ralegh to take a small group of settlers recruited by White to Roanoke Island. Apart from Abraham Cocke and Edward Spicer, they had been interested only in privateering. In the years since his return to England, White had been unable to raise financial support for another voyage and did not have enough money of his own to fit out a ship. “I would to God my wealth was answerable to my will,” he wrote disconsolately. With no hope of returning to the Outer Banks to search for his family, he had moved to Ireland to live on Ralegh’s estate at Newtown in Kylmore, County Cork. He was to play no further part in efforts to establish a colony in North America and probably died in Ireland in the early years of the seventeenth century.
Over the next eighteen months Ralegh threw himself into preparations for a voyage to Guiana with all his old enthusiasm. He was convinced that staking a claim to Guiana would afford Elizabeth a glorious opportunity to acquire an empire that, as he wrote later in his account of the voyage, “has more quantity of Gold by manifold [many times], than the best parts of the Indies, or Peru.” Philip II’s Indian gold endangered all the nations of Europe, he argued, not his trade in wines and Seville oranges. If the English could possess an empire of riches greater than Spain’s, they would eventually surpass Spanish wealth in the New World and weaken Philip’s influence in Europe. It was a familiar argument, only in this version England’s empire would be founded in South, not North, America.
Sir Walter spent about a month in the summer of 1595 exploring the lower Orinoco and the mouth of the Caroni (Caroli) River, but despite his high hopes the adventure brought little tangible return. The ore and “precious” stones he brought back to London proved worthless, and he had failed to acquire definite knowledge of the whereabouts of El Dorado. Even so, he continued to believe that enormous riches would be discovered in Guiana and that the region would offer the queen a fortune that would surpass the wealth of Spanish America. Elizabeth and the investors remained skeptical, however, and any plans Ralegh might have had for a further voyage languished.4
Fortunately for Ralegh, the failure of the venture hardly mattered. Within eighteen months he was back in the queen’s favor following one of her notoriously capricious changes of heart, and he gradually regained much of his former influence at court. Reconciliation with Elizabeth did not incline Ralegh to take up large-scale colonizing projects, but his interest in Virginia did resurface briefly in the opening years of the new century. In 1602 and 1603 he dispatched two small-scale exploratory expeditions to the Outer Banks and Chesapeake Bay.
The reason for his renewed interest in Virginia and the lost colonists is unclear. Possibly he wished to underline his continuing claim to North America by virtue of his charter of 1583, or perhaps his decision to sell his estates in Munster in 1602 led him to consider once again profits to be had from exploiting the Roanoke region. He was probably thinking more of returns from natural commodities than from spectacular discoveries, but he may have wondered whether finding the colonists would lead him to the greater riches he had hoped to find in the interior.
Sir Walter sent Samuel Mace (who had sailed with Ralegh to Guiana) to the Outer Banks in March 1602. Mace spent about a month near Cape Fear (modern Cape Lookout), about sixty miles south of Croatoan Island, collecting sassafras and other medicinal plants. He was supposed to sail farther north to look for the settlers, but “extremity of weather” apparently made the journey up the coast impossible.
An attempt the following year met with even less success. In April 1603 Bartholomew Gilbert, a London goldsmith and explorer, sailed for the Chesapeake Bay “to seek out the people for Sir Walter Raleigh left near those parts in the year 1587.” The voyage ended in disaster. Running low on water and provisions, Gilbert put ashore somewhere along the Eastern Shore, where he and four of his companions were killed by Indians.5
Apart from these ill-fated attempts, however, Ralegh did little to promote Virginia after White’s return from Roanoke. The fate of the lost colonists remained a mystery; they had not been seen or heard of for more than a decade. Rumors circulated in London and Madrid about their survival and possible location, but no one could say for sure if they were still alive. Yet there could be little doubt that the longer it took to organize an expedition to search for them, the less likely it was that they would ever be found.6
RALEGH’S WORLD was turned upside down with the death of Queen Elizabeth on March 24, 1603. The queen was succeeded by her cousin and heir, James I, who had been king of Scotland since 1567, when his mother Mary, Queen of Scots, had been deposed. Before succeeding to the English throne James had been careful to win over many of the queen’s principal ministers and influential courtiers, but he detested Ralegh, whose position and influence he believed were wholly a consequence of Elizabeth’s unseemly infatuation with him. Ralegh was quickly shorn of his privileges, including his right to establish colonies in North America, and ejected from his beloved Durham House. By the summer he was once again in the Tower, this time charged with high treason on trumped-up charges of being involved in a Catholic plot to topple the king.7
Peace and the end of Ralegh’s American monopoly encouraged those who had long been on the fringes of colonizing ventures to play a more active role. West Country merchants were anxious to exploit fish, oil, furs, and timber in New England, while in London a group of leading merchants and statesmen who supported the settlement of the Chesapeake Bay formed the Virginia Company of London.8
After eighteen months of negotiations among various mercantile groups and their political supporters, North America was formally divided into two separate areas of interest by the royal charter of April 10, 1606. The Plymouth Company, dominated by merchants and financiers from the West Country, was permitted to settle an area between latitudes 38 degrees and 45 degrees north, stretching from the Chesapeake Bay to just above present-day Maine. The Virginia Company of London was allowed to establish a colony to the south between Cape Fear, North Carolina, and New York (latitudes 34 degrees and 41 degrees north). Neither group was granted exclusive rights to all the territory within the regions specified, but they were permitted to establish a settlement within those bounds and given jurisdiction over lands 50 miles north and south of the colony and 100 miles inland and out to sea.9