Sabotaged (33 page)

Or have Fernandez’s intentions simply been misinterpreted because his side of the story is lost to history?

Regardless, Simon Fernandez did agree to let one person go back to England to plead for more supplies: John White. According to his own account, White was very reluctant to leave Roanoke, but the other colonists persuaded him that his word would carry the most clout—he would be the one most likely to be able to get help.

Once he got back to England, White faced obstacle after obstacle. The English were worried about a naval attack from Spain, so Queen Elizabeth ordered English ships to stay in port, to be ready to defend their country. At one point, White had permission to sail, but then the permission was revoked before he could actually leave. Another time, White managed to leave in a small ship with supplies and fifteen new colonists, but they never made it to America. Instead, the ship did a lot of privateering and then came under attack by French privateers. White himself was injured twice during the ensuing fight, and the ship was so badly damaged that it had to return to England. A few months later, the Spanish Armada attacked. But even after England defeated Spain in that epic battle, the Roanoke Colony investors were apparently too distracted to put together another rescue attempt
right away.

White finally set sail for America on March 20, 1590, nearly three years after he’d left his colony behind. And he was able to sail then only because he agreed not to take any new colonists. He complained in his writings that he wasn’t even allowed to take a boy to act as his servant during the trip. The ship’s captain wanted as much room as possible to store the treasures he expected to gain through privateering. And he took a very leisurely path toward Roanoke, detouring to help capture a Spanish ship. As White himself described the situation, “both Governors, Masters, and sailers, regard(ed) very smally the good of their countreymen” in the Roanoke Colony.

The ship White was on, the
Hopewell
, finally neared Roanoke Island in mid-August 1590. The first evening, White was encouraged when he saw smoke rising from the area where he’d left the colony. The next morning, seeing smoke rising from another island nearby, White and others from the
Hopewell
decided to search there first. But this turned out to be a wild goose chase: No humans were in sight, and the fire evidently had natural causes. The second morning, two boats rowed toward Roanoke, but one capsized in the dangerous waters, and seven men drowned. By the time the survivors had dealt with this disaster, they decided it was too late and getting
too dark to go to Roanoke. Anchored nearby, in sight of a fire on Roanoke Island, White and the others called out and played the trumpet and sang familiar English songs, in an effort to get the colonists’ attention. White heard no reply, and in the morning when he and the sailors were able to land on Roanoke, they discovered that the fire was only from dry grass and dead trees. On their way to the colony site, they saw footprints in the sand that White concluded belonged to Indians, but they met no one.

The rest of the story is as Andrea and Katherine told it: White and the men with him found the colony site deserted and mostly destroyed, but with
CRO
carved on an nearby tree and
CROATOAN
carved on a post of the wooden fort (which the kids in this book refer to as a fence, though White would have called it a palisade). White was upset to find that some of his own possessions—including a suit of armor—had been dug up from their hiding places in trunks and left to rot and rust and spoil. He blamed enemy natives for this. But he was overjoyed by the carved
CROATOAN
, especially since there was no cross carved along with the word. A cross was the sign he and the other colonists had agreed upon to mean that they had left the island in distress. White concluded that his colonists were safe with the friendly Croatoan tribe on nearby Croatoan Island (probably the island now known as Hatteras).

White intended to go to Croatoan Island the very next day. But a storm blew up in the night, and a series of disasters caused the
Hopewell
to lose three of its four anchors. At first, the plan was to go to Trinidad to make repairs and get supplies before coming back to search for the colonists on Croatoan. But continued violent weather blew the
Hopewell
far off course, and it ended up in the Azores, in the mid-Atlantic. From there, the ship’s captain decided to return to England.

And that was the end of the
Hopewell
’s efforts to find the Roanoke colonists.

In 1593, White wrote a letter to a man named Richard Hakluyt describing his 1590 voyage. By then—six years after he’d last seen his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter; three years after he’d made it back across the ocean to search for them—he seemed to have a philosophical attitude toward his losses. But he was still praying for the safety of those he had left behind at Roanoke.

After that 1593 letter, John White vanished from history almost as completely as the rest of his family. Some believe that, since he wrote that last letter from Ireland, he must have lived out his days there, on land belonging to Sir Walter Raleigh. Others point to records of a Brigit White appointed to administer the estate of her late brother, John White, in 1606. They say this means
Governor John White must have died that year—even though it’s impossible to know if this is the right John White. Still others believe that White might have returned to America yet again to look for his family, just on a voyage that wasn’t very well documented. (This is the theory that I would want to believe, even if it didn’t help the plot of my book.)

Regardless of what happens to them in life, artists can hope to live on through their work after they die. Woodcuts of White’s drawings were published in 1590, but for many years his original work was lost. Some of his drawings showed up in 1788, and they were eventually purchased by the British Museum. Because of growing interest in his work,
The American Drawings of John White
was published in 1964, as a joint project between the museum and the University of North Carolina Press. As Andrea boasts, White’s work really is praised for his sensitivity and his depiction of Native Americans as human beings, not completely alien creatures.

For the past four hundred years, Virginia Dare and the other people John White left behind on Roanoke Island have been referred to as the Lost Colonists. What constantly amazed me, researching this book, was how poorly that term fits. It’s not exactly that the colonists were lost; it’s more that looking for them just wasn’t a very high
priority for anyone besides John White. In more modern times, if we’d been forced to leave astronauts behind on the moon, I’m sure we would have done everything we could to rescue them. But again, I’m making the mistake of trying to look at the past as if it’s the same as the present.

After Roanoke, the English waited twenty years before they tried again to start a settlement in the Americas. This time they targeted a site a little farther north, on the James River in Virginia. The Jamestown settlers heard rumors about sightings of people nearby who had fair skin and blond hair—or people who wore English clothing or spoke English or lived in English-style houses. And there were suggestions that some of those people might have been the remnants of the Roanoke Colony. But the Jamestown residents put very little effort into searching for them. This is frustrating for historians, but understandable. The Jamestown settlers were struggling just to survive. In their first year, all but 38 of the 104 original Jamestown settlers died.

So what really happened to Virginia Dare and the rest of the Roanoke Colony in “original” history? The most depressing possibility is that everyone died not long after John White left. Maybe some of their Indian enemies killed them all. Maybe a Spanish raiding party murdered them. Maybe everyone starved to death.

What John White found in 1590—particularly the lack of a cross alongside the word
CROATOAN
—would seem to indicate that, if nothing else, the colonists did manage to get safely off Roanoke Island. Some historians theorize that the colonists might have split into two groups: One group could have gone to the Chesapeake area as originally planned, while a smaller group stayed with the Croatoans, close enough to Roanoke to watch for White’s return. A modern Indian tribe in North Carolina known as the Lumbee claims that the Roanoke colonists intermarried with Native Americans and became their ancestors. One study of these Indians in the late nineteenth century found that 41 of the 95 surnames represented among the Roanoke colonists were carried by members of this tribe.

Others tell different stories about the colonists. Captain John Smith said that Powhatan, the powerful Indian leader near Jamestown, claimed at one point that
he
had killed all the Roanoke colonists. (Powhatan was also Pocahantas’s father, as you might remember if you were paying attention in Social Studies and/or watched the Disney movie.) Another sad possibility is that some of the Roanoke colonists might have become slaves of a rather cruel tribe farther inland from the coast. There were reports of unusually light-skinned people working for that tribe, along with the reports of light-skinned people living more happily alongside other natives.

Of course, the Roanoke colonists of 1587 weren’t the only ones with light skin who might have been wandering around North America in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Besides the Spanish and the English, other Europeans such as the French and the Dutch were exploring North America. And the history Antonio describes really did occur: European sea captains did leave behind cabin boys to learn native languages, so they could eventually serve as translators. If the European ships then sank or just didn’t bother coming back, the European kids who managed to survive would have blended in with the native cultures. Or maybe, like Antonio, some of them might have decided they liked life as adopted Indians better than life as lowly cabin boys. Apparently, many of the Native Americans were quite open-minded about welcoming outsiders into their tribes.

Even before the official “Lost Colonists,” the trial-run settlements on Roanoke Island provided several missing persons who might also have accounted for some of the reports of people who looked or acted like Europeans, residing in various places along the Atlantic coast. Virginia Dare may be the most famous person to have vanished from Roanoke Island, but she had a lot of company. There were the fourteen soldiers who vanished from the island sometime between the summer of 1586 and August 1587. There were also three men abandoned in June 1586 when their fellow soldier/explorers took Sir Francis Drake’s offer of a free ride back to England.

I had never known the story of Drake’s rescue effort before, and, like Brendan, I was horrified by his choices. Drake really did abandon hundreds of slaves (both of Indian and African origin) on Roanoke Island to make room to rescue the English soldiers. And he undoubtedly thought he was being heroic and generous, doing this. The slaves immediately vanish from the historical record—nobody knows what happened to them.

It is hard to read the history of this time period without feeling appalled: by how slaves were treated, by how Native Americans were treated, by how the common (nonnoble) English people were treated. And so many of their stories are lost to history because their voices weren’t considered important either. I do think time travel would show us many, many fascinating individuals and perspectives and events that have been completely overlooked by history.

Even without time travel, history is constantly re-evaluated. Historians have a much better understanding now of how devastating it was for Native Americans to be exposed to European diseases. It is true that entire villages vanished; entire tribes were reduced to a handful of survivors. It’s impossible to know exactly how many people died, but early European accounts of travel to the Americas tell again and again of explorers meeting teeming communities of natives at first contact and then, when Europeans came back later, finding nothing but a vast empty wilderness.

If I were a time traveler, I would want very badly to sneak vaccines into the past.

In the absence of any verifiable accounts of what really happened to Virginia Dare and the other Roanoke colonists, numerous stories and fables and myths have grown up during the past four hundred years. Sometimes the stories are passed off as truth: In the late 1930s, people across Georgia and the Carolinas found 48 carved stones allegedly left by Eleanor Dare to tell her family’s story. A 1941 magazine article discredited the stones and revealed them as elaborate hoaxes. But as recently as 1991 a book called
A Witness for Eleanor Dare
argued that the stones were authentic.

Even more fancifully, a woman named Sallie Southall Cotten wrote a book in 1901 claiming to retell an “Indian fable” in a long narrative poem: Virginia Dare spurns the advances of an evil Indian magician so, in revenge, he turns her into a white doe. Her true love, an Indian warrior, tries to rescue her by shooting her with a magic arrow, but a rival is hunting her as well. Struck by two arrows at once, she turns back into a human just in time to die.

Maybe if we’d known what really happened to Virginia Dare from the beginning, nobody would remember her or care. Maybe it’s just the mystery that makes her so interesting.

Or maybe the truth is an even better story than anyone can imagine. We just don’t know what it is.