The same day, across the ocean, Philip ordered the Spanish Armada to proceed against England. “Pressed as I am by financial and other difficulties,” he wrote, “I am resolute to overcome them all with God’s aid.” The immense convoy of 130 ships crowded with thirty thousand Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch as well as English soldiers soon headed out of Spanish waters and toward the English Channel, the flapping banners of Christ and the Virgin Mary heralding a crusade against the northern heretics. Their plan was to rendezvous with Philip’s forces in the Netherlands and land troops on the island’s southern coast.
But by the end of that month, bad weather and England’s more maneuverable vessels had inflicted a calamitous defeat on the multinational invasion force. Two out of three armada sailors and soldiers perished, and only half of the fleet’s ships made it back to Spain. Raleigh and Grenville remained on land during the battle, but Fernandes, returned from the Americas, served aboard the largest English warship.
With González’s lucky find, Philip now knew the location of the English settlement. But the virtual destruction of his armada delayed his intention to snuff out the pirate base. The following year, in response to reports by Spanish spies that the English planned to mass ships at their American base—likely English propaganda designed to divert enemy resources—he decided again to take action. The king ordered a third expedition to seek out the colonists. This time he wanted the English settlement destroyed once and for all.
In the flush of victory after the armada’s defeat, the English showed less interest in the Roanoke colony than their enemy did. The country remained on a war footing. The ban on shipping remained, and the luckless governor White could not persuade Raleigh or his Cittie of Raleigh associates to win a waiver and fund a relief mission to Roanoke. And so another year slipped by. All attention was on a 1589 English armada, led by Drake, designed to attack Spain and deliver a decisive blow. The effort foundered amid storms and illness, ensuring a long and drawn-out conflict.
It wasn’t until the following spring that White at last succeeded, after nearly three years, in joining a Caribbean-bound convoy. Raleigh twisted the arm of a major investor in a privateering syndicate, and two ships—the Moonlight and the Hopewell—were assigned to carry the governor to Virginia, but only after a summer spent cruising for Spanish loot in the Caribbean. At the last minute, the crew barred him from bringing supplies or additional settlers, or even, to White’s indignation, a single servant. He would return to Roanoke from his resupply mission empty-handed and alone. By then, despite his intervention, Raleigh was putting more distance between himself and the Virginia settlers; he had turned the Cittie of Raleigh over to another set of investors.
Meanwhile, in preparation for his assault on the English colony, Florida governor Pedro Menéndez Márquez went to Cuba to assemble a fleet of war galleys powered by convicts and enslaved Muslims from North and West Africa. These flat-bottomed boats, designed for the Mediterranean, were well suited to the shallow waters of the North Carolina sounds. The galleys would call at St. Augustine to take on a large complement of experienced soldiers and then move up the coast to destroy the Roanoke settlement pinpointed by González. Afterward, Philip would have Menéndez sail to the Chesapeake and build a new fort to accommodate three hundred men. The Spanish would send out teams to search and seize the mines of precious metals and diamonds that the English were rumored to have found. The bold strategy would secure Spanish control of the all-important shipping lanes as well as the potential resources inland. If successful, the effort would ward off all future trespassers, securing the North American east coast for Spain.
Yet the king’s plan was nothing more than an elaborate ruse, designed to fool the English spy network. The Florida governor’s secret mission was not to attack colonists but to guide the year’s treasure ships in the Caribbean up the North American coast and safely to Spain. Philip still wanted to extinguish the English colony, but more important was to transport safely the revenue to pay off his mounting debts. On July 20, 1590, the scheme succeeded as Menéndez triumphantly sailed into a Portuguese harbor with a fleet of vessels loaded with silver, gold, and other valuable goods for the depleted Spanish treasury.
That same day, White was sailing past St. Augustine on his way to what he hoped would be a happy reunion with his family and colonists. He had spent the long Caribbean summer with privateers itching to capture the very ships that Menéndez had already shepherded to Spain. As hurricane season approached, the English dispersed and White’s two ships sailed north for the Outer Banks. The race to find the Roanoke settlers, initiated by a sixteenth-century Spanish king and pursued well into the twenty-first century, was under way.
* * *
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August began stormily as the Moonlight and the Hopewell cruised north on the Gulf Stream through “much rain, thundering and great spouts, which fell round about us nigh unto our ships,” White reports. Two days later the vessels were in sight of the barrier island of Ocracoke, where Grenville’s flagship Tiger grounded five years before. But “the weather was so exceeding foul, that we could not come to an anchor near the coast” for nearly a week.
When the storm passed, the ships halted a mile or so off a barrier island south of Ocracoke, and the men went ashore to fish in the Pamlico and gather freshwater. They spent two full days there before resuming their journey, anchoring off the northeast end of Croatoan on August 12. The next morning, the ship’s boats were sent to measure the depth of a breach between the Atlantic and the Pamlico. This seems to be Chacandepeco Inlet, separating Croatoan from Hatteras and close to the site of a Croatoan town.
Just why the men spent so much time mapping depths when they were less than a day’s sail shy of their goal of Port Ferdinando is perplexing. Was White hoping to leave a clear trail for future rescue missions? Even more bizarrely, White doesn’t mention going ashore to look for someone. He records no sign of any human, European or Native American. Yet even before he found the “secret token,” this was the obvious place to seek out the colonists or information about their fate as he had done in 1587.
Two days pass before White resumes his account, noting that the ships anchored off the north end of Hatteras the evening of August 15. This would seem an unreasonably long time to travel less than fifty miles, but what happened in the intervening time we’re left to guess. Before the sun set, the crews spotted smoke rising from Roanoke Island, which White read as a sign the colonists had seen their arrival and awaited their visit. The next morning, the governor and the two captains diverted their two small boats on the way to the island when they spotted another “great smoke” to the south along Hatteras—the very area they had sailed past the day before. When they reached the spot, “we found no man nor sign any had been there lately.” Was it a natural brush fire? Again, White gives no indication, though he uses the same term—“great smoke”—that he does for the Roanoke column.
The second attempt to reach the colonists’ settlement was interrupted the next morning by the tragic mishap in which seven men in one of the boats, including the captain of the Moonlight, drowned in the inlet. White pleaded with the shocked survivors to press on, and they reached the island in the dark. Though they overshot the landing place by a quarter of a mile, they spotted “the light of a great fire through the woods, to which we presently rowed.”
Rather than risk going ashore in the dark, the men spent the night in the boats, sounding a trumpet and singing “many familiar English tunes of songs.” Only silence greeted their efforts. At dawn, they found “grass and sundry trees burning about the place,” but, again, White doesn’t specify if the blaze was natural or made by people. If it was made by lightning strikes, he doesn’t say as much.
The search party led by White hiked through the woods to the island’s west side, facing Wingina’s village of Dasemunkepeuc. Was he looking for more smoke or signs of life on the mainland shore? Or was ther
e an English fort or settlement here he wanted to investigate? In either event, the English then walked up the beach that curved around to the north shore. By then it was clear they were being watched. “In all this way we saw in the sand the print of the savages’ feet of two or three sorts trodden [during] the night,” White recorded. Perhaps, then, the fires were designed to alert the English or warn others of their approach.
While trudging along the beach of the north shore, the men once again climbed the sandy bank and saw a tree with the carved letters C R O. At the nearby settlement, where the houses were “taken down” and the site “very strongly enclosed with a high palisade of great trees,” was another carving. At eye height at the right entrance of this fortified complex, the governor saw “in fair capital letters was graven CROATOAN without any cross or sign of distress.”
White explains that this was an agreed-upon signal, “a secret token” that the settlers agreed to leave if they abandoned the settlement. A Greek cross would mean they were in distress, but neither carving showed such a sign. Grenville’s frustration in not finding Lane’s men on his return to Roanoke in 1586 might have prompted this plan. The place had clearly been deserted for a time; only a few heavy objects, such as small artillery guns and “two lead ingots,” were to be found. Everything easily portable was gone.
The party’s next route took them again along the shore, this time eastward, to look for the colony’s small boats at a landing site—presumably the one they overshot the night before. White found no signs of the vessels or the small cannon and ammunition that were there when he left. As the group doubled back to the settlement, a squadron of sailors—evidently the men had broken up into two groups, one likely to guard the boats—intercepted them with news that they found five looted trunks.
They had been dug out of a trench. Three were White’s, left behind when he returned to England, “and about the place many of my things spoiled and broken, and my books torn from the covers, the frames of some of my pictures and maps rotted and sailed with rain, and my armor almost eaten through with rust.” As with the thick brush growing in the settlement, the rusted armor suggested the colonists had been gone for some time.
The governor blamed “the savages our enemies” for the looting and speculated that hostile Indians had waited until the colonists left Roanoke to pillage what was left behind. “But although it grieved me to see such spoil of my goods, yet on the other side I greatly joyed that I had safely found a certain took of their safe being at Croatoan.” The statement, seeming to balance loss of his stuff with the fate of more than one hundred people, feels jarring. “The whole existence of the colony—its population, its habitation, its past, and its potential future—was concentrated into this ‘secret token,’ and yet John White believed that it was a history he could read,” note authors Margaret and Dwayne Pickett.
If he was certain the settlers were safe at Croatoan, why does the governor mention that they had planned to move “fifty miles into the main,” which likely meant to the head of the Albemarle Sound to the west? If he thought they might be there, he made no move in that direction. Instead, “when we had seen in this place so much as we could, we returned to our boats.” The sky, he reports, was overcast, and the crew feared a stormy night ahead. The entire party climbed into the two boats, and White left Roanoke forever.
The governor was no Sherlock Holmes. He seems to have felt the carvings on the tree told him all he needed to know. But why leave so abruptly without attempting to make contact with those he knew were shadowing him? As noted before, Grenville spent a full fourteen days looking for clues to the missing Lane colony, not knowing they were safe in the holds of Drake’s fleet. It is possible that the governor and his men feared ambush or that the sailors demanded to return to the ships to mourn their dead mates.
“The same evening, with much danger and labor, we got ourselves aboard, by which time the wind and seas were so greatly risen that we doubted our cables and anchors would scarcely hold until morning.” The next morning the ocean was still rough, but the captain of the Hopewell agreed to sail back to Croatoan—where both ships had been only days before. This was, White is explicit, “where our planters were.” Then disaster struck again when the men were hauling up the anchor and the cable snapped, sending the ship careening toward a sandbar. “If it had not chanced that we had fallen into a channel of deeper water, closer by the shore,” White recalls, then the ship would have been beaten apart by the waves.
With only one cable and anchor out of the original supply of four, they had to abandon the planned Croatoan visit. Without a spare anchor, the risk of shipwreck was too great. In addition, the weather seemed to be worsening, and this was hurricane season. Food supplies were running low and the sea was too rough to retrieve a cask of water still onshore. The crew of the Moonlight, complaining of a leak in their hull but also no doubt eager to be far from these treacherous waters that had killed seven of their men, headed home that same day.
Apparently moved by what the governor called “my earnest petitions,” the captain and crew of the Hopewell compromised with the distraught governor. They agreed to winter in the Caribbean and then come back in the spring fully stocked with provisions “with hope to make two rich voyages of one”—that is, to snag Spanish prizes—“and at our return to visit our countrymen in Virginia.”
The Hopewell made its way out to sea and then turned south, leaving Roanoke and Croatoan in its wake. It would be White’s last glimpse of the New World. Two days later, the wind swiveled to the west-northwest and blew hard, pushing the small ship deeper into the Atlantic. Unable to get back on course for the Caribbean, they set sail instead for the Azores Islands three thousand miles due east.
In that Portuguese archipelago controlled now by Spain, the ship found protection under the guns of an English fleet led by Admiral Sir John Hawkins, the pirate and slave trader. Unable to make landfall to replenish their food and water because of a contrary wind, the captain instead set sail for England. The governor landed at Plymouth on October 24, 1590, never, so far as we know, to venture across the Atlantic again. Tragedy struck again a few months later when Thomasine, his wife of a quarter century, died.
After writing up his account of the voyage, he summed up his misadventures in a letter to the pastor Hakluyt three years later, blaming bad weather and ill luck as well as “cross and unkind dealings” with ship commanders for his failure. The tone is touched with bitter irony. “Thus you may plainly perceive the success of my fifth and last voyage to Virginia, which was no less unfortunately ended than frowardly”—perversely—“begun, and as luckless to many, as sinister to myself.”
For White, the search was over. In the centuries to come, a slew of historians, archaeologists, genealogists, and amateur gumshoes would take up the hunt for traces of the missing settlers. But while the colonists might still have been alive, several rescue missions produced intriguing clues to the fate of the vanished Elizabethans. Their trail was not yet cold.
NO MATTER TO WHAT HAZARDOUS LENGTHS WE LET OUR LINE, THEY STILL WITHDRAW, AGAIN AND FURTHER INTO THE DEPTHS.
—Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers
| CHAPTER FIVE
A Whole Country of English
Governor John White’s account of his 1590 voyage remains our single best source for determining what happened on Roanoke. Yet the more I scrutinized the brief report, the more its inconsistencies and elisions made it feel as mysterious as the fate of the Lost Colony itself. The record White left behind has a hallucinatory quality unlike almost anything in early American literature. Bonfires ignite as if by ghosts. There are footprints in the sands of a silent forest. Hidden trunks are plundered, scattering rusty armor and torn maps. The only clue is a word carved on a tree. Men drown in the morning in a freak wave, the survivors made to sing songs that evening to their phantom countrymen.
There is an otherworldly detachment to his tale, as if
the governor were a disembodied witness rather than the main character in an emotionally wrenching journey. After three years fighting bureaucracy and pirates, he spends several precious days fishing south of Roanoke. After finally reaching his long-sought destination, White fusses over his looted possessions yet never mentions his daughter or granddaughter or any colonist by name. Then he abandons the search after a few hours because of a summer storm.
Strangest of all, the governor was actually in sight of the very place he came to believe the colonists to be, and a boatload of sailors from his two ships—perhaps accompanied by the governor—came within hailing distance of a Croatoan village. Yet he doesn’t mention stepping ashore on the island that was home to the only known allies of the English, the same island he sent a delegation to in 1587 in order to learn “the disposition of the people toward us.”
Nothing adds up in the governor’s cursory and contradictory telling, yet we have—so far—no other record of what took place those August days on the Outer Banks except for a short letter he wrote to Hakluyt in 1593. Until a long-lost ship’s log or Spanish deposition of some English sailor surfaces from a European archive, all that remains of this strange voyage are White’s words.
I began to wonder if the confusion was deliberate. It’s possible the governor was trying to throw off the Spanish, not wanting to give the enemy intelligence that could result in a massacre of the settlers, including his loved ones. He might have recast actual events to make himself appear a tragic figure rather than one culpable for the disastrous loss of the settlers for whom he was, after all, responsible. His patron Raleigh, fearful of losing the charter for his New World fiefdom if the colonists were declared dead, might have forbidden White to reveal the full truth in writing. Grief, age, and time might also have played tricks with the governor’s memory. After his missive to Hakluyt, written from a Raleigh estate in Ireland, he vanishes from history as completely as his colonists.
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