Cate of the Lost Colony (26 page)

“Sir Walter, you never once said to me ‘I love you.’ ”

His eyes widened. Light brown they were; I had forgotten. They flickered away from mine for an instant, then returned. “But of course I do! Even as you are now, despite everything,” he protested. “Haven’t I come for you at last?”

I felt my eyes fill up with tears. They rolled down my cheeks and into the corners of my mouth. They were salty like the enormous, endless sea.

Through the blur I saw Sir Walter take something from his pocket. It was a handkerchief edged with lace, once white but now worn and stained. At once I recognized that token of such conflicted sentiment.

“Let me wipe your tears, my dear,” he said.

I stood perfectly still while he came to within an arm’s length of me. His face was dark and lined from the sun. In place of his usual pearl, he wore a wide silver ring in one ear. The faint but familiar scent of civet tickled my nose. He reached out with the handkerchief and wiped my left cheek, then my right. With his thumb he wiped another tear from my chin. The fingers seemed those of a well-meaning stranger, and their touch did not stir me. I turned my head aside.

“Now live with me and be my love,” he said softly.

These words were still no pledge of love. I heard a sweetly phrased demand that would tempt many a maid. But it did not move me. If Sir Walter had declared “I love you” on his knees and produced a priest to marry us, it would not have made a difference now. For I had made my decision, not on the spur of that moment, but over the course of many long months.

Taking a deep breath, I looked into his eyes. “I will not come and live with you, Sir Walter, for I do not love you.”

He froze. On his face was a look of pure astonishment, as if a deer or a bird had suddenly spoken to him. Slowly he withdrew his hand and dropped the handkerchief. It fell to the sand and neither of us stooped to pick it up.

“And so, farewell,” I said with a faint smile, beginning to walk backward and away from him. The sand was wet but firm beneath my feet.

“But I love you, Lady Catherine!”

At last he had said it. Spoken out of sorrow, it was a forgiveable lie.

I shook my head, still backing away. “No, Sir Walter, you do not love me. You love your queen.” I had to shout to raise my small voice over the crying of gulls and the crash of waves. “You love favor, wealth, and glory. May they be yours! You love success.”

“And you—,” he cried, something between a protest and a question.

“And I?” My next words spilled out without a moment’s forethought. “I love Manteo!”

I clapped my hands over my mouth, then threw my arms open. “I love you, Manteo!” I cried again, laughing to hear those words dancing in the air.
This
was the truth I sought. I turned and began to run just out of reach of the waves, until I came to the base of the sandy cliff.

Manteo had always taken the hero’s way, regardless of its dangers. Had he not crossed the sea four times? Borne the hatred and distrust of colonists and Indians alike, yet sought to reconcile them because he promised friendship to the English? Sir Walter had let others chance their lives and fortunes for his colony, while Manteo let himself be taken captive and risked his life to free us. And when we were perishing for lack of the aid Sir Walter promised, Manteo offered refuge. The pieces fell together in my mind like a broken pot mended. I saw how many of Manteo’s actions were motivated by his regard for me. I realized his demeanor toward me signified a love not accustomed to poetic phrases and outward passion. I decided I would be Manteo’s, if he would have me. But I would not be like the Moon Maiden, hungering for a lost homeland. Not a minute longer.

The roaring sea and far-off England lay behind me. I had a new home now. It was not paradise, but it was more interesting by far. I thought about our first mother, Eve, sent from Eden for eating an apple, her eyes opened to suffering but also knowing hope. Beyond Croatoan lay an unknown continent, wide as an ocean itself and surely full of unimaginable wonders. The sun crossed it every day in its journey from east to west. How much of it might I see in the rest of my life?

I climbed the cliff, unhindered by the sands shifting beneath my feet, fairly leaping with sudden strength. Before I reached the top, he was there with his hand outstretched.
Manteo!
The wind blew his hair back from his forehead, and his whole face, even his black eyes, were lit up by a smile. I grasped his hand with both of mine, and he pulled me to him. We tumbled backward onto the sand and lay beside each other.

“I love you, too, Ladi-cate,” he said.

I touched my fingers to his lips as I had longed to do since the night we danced together. They were smooth and warm and still parted in a smile. Gently Manteo kissed my fingers, then nudged them aside and with his hands tangled in my hair, brought me close and pressed his lips to mine.
Mine at last
. All my insides stirred and shivered, and I felt I would faint with happiness. Manteo tasted like salt, like tears, like the sea, like the very air that sustained my life.

In him I was lost; in him I found myself.

Epilogue

From the Papers of Sir Walter Ralegh

The Conclusion of the Narrative of a Voyage to Virginia

Returning to the Croatoan village, I informed John White I had found the Lady Catherine in a primitive state, not amenable to reason. We departed from the island that evening.

How appalling it was to see my countrymen living like savages! How humiliating to be refused and rebuked by one who has so forgotten her own nature that she fancies herself in love with Manteo. For his part, White bore his griefs like one of the ancients, satisfied merely to know the fate of his colonists, shameful though it was.

When we returned to the ship, I told the captain we had found no Englishmen on the island and no sign of their recent habitation. I decided we would give the same report to the queen, reasoning that because the colonists would not return to England, they should be considered as lost.

“They do not wish to be found. That is not the same as being lost,” White said. He maintained Her Majesty would want to know the fate of her colonists; that was the reason she permitted the voyage.

“How, then, will I explain why they were not brought to justice for abandoning Fort Ralegh?” I asked. “She will hold me accountable and send me back to hang them all. No, I will give no one cause to seek them. I am done with this Virginia enterprise.”

Finally White agreed that to save ourselves and his colonists further trouble, we would say we found no English settlers on the island. Moreover, due to the loss of the anchor, we could not risk a further search of the mainland or sail for Chesapeake.

Alas, Lady Catherine is right: I love success and hate my failures. It is bad enough there is no city of Ralegh to boast of. I will not have Her Majesty discover that her subjects have chosen to live like heathens under a foreign queen. No one must ever know that she whom I sought as my reward has rejected me for a tawny-skinned Indian. This would make me the laughingstock of all England.

If I had gone to Virginia at the very outset and ruled the colonists myself, would my city now be flourishing? Or would my decisions have brought more suffering and a worse fate for everyone?

If I had said “I love you” to Lady Catherine even once, would she have consented to be mine?

Vain are all regrets, for they change not the truth: I have lost what I most desired to possess.

Hopewell
. The very name of this ship mocks me.

On the 24
th
of August we made our rendezvous with the
Moonlight
and
El Buen Jesus
by the inlet south of Croatoan Island. Thereafter the weather turned foul, forcing us to alter course for the Azores. On the 19
th
of September we came upon several of the queen’s ships and private men-of-war. Capt. Cooke lingered, hoping to waylay the Spanish fleet. I had no heart for prize taking, so I was not dismayed when we missed the fleet. Cooke resumed course for England, and without further misadventure we came safely to Plymouth harbor on the 24
th
of October.

I have had enough of the sea, and I forswear love. For now. My papers from this voyage, the evidence of my failure, must be destroyed. Shall I throw them into the sea or burn them and commit the ashes of my ambition to the cold ground?

Alas, I am brought low, but not quite to despair. For there are willing maids galore, and new rumors of gold in far Guiana. And there is always England, and my queen, and poetry.

Poem

Sir W. R. to himself:

Away my thoughts; give no more rein to mem’ry;

Be silent, voice of woe and sorrow’s sound!

Complaints cure not, and tears do but allay

Griefs for a time, which after more abound.

Cate’s gone, she is lost, she is found, she is ever fair!

Sorrow draws naught, where love draws not too.

Woe’s cries sound nothing in her closed ear.

Do then by leaving, what loving cannot do.

Behold her standing on that distant strand

My thoughts, and nobler mercy take your part;

Sorrow, complaints, griefs—thee I reprimand:

Mar not what true love seeks: her content heart.

Author’s Note

The fate of the 117 men, women, and children who landed on Roanoke Island in 1587 is perhaps the greatest unsolved mystery in American history. Before Plymouth, before Jamestown, was Roanoke Island, now known as the “Lost Colony.” It takes up a few paragraphs in history books, but stays in the imagination long after school lets out. Stories about the struggle to survive in a hostile and unfamiliar wilderness deeply appeal to us, a nation of immigrants and pioneers. Witness the popularity of shows like
Lost
and
Survivor.
The Roanoke colony was our first reality show. But it was
real
. And no one knows what happened to its inhabitants.

Cate of the Lost Colony
is fiction intertwined with history. With a few exceptions I follow the historical record, as far as it goes. No records survive from the colony itself. The voyages of 1584, 1585, 1587, and 1590 are extensively chronicled, and there is even a list of those who made the voyage in 1587. All my characters who go to Virginia are given the names of actual colonists, but their backgrounds are wholly invented. My protagonist is an exception, for Elizabeth never had a maid named Catherine Archer, nor did any of the colonists bear that name.

If you like your history to come alive, visit Roanoke Island, which is now part of North Carolina. There you can see a performance of an outdoor pageant,
The Lost Colony,
written by Paul Green in 1937. It sacrifices historical nuance for high drama but is still fun. Go to Festival Park and see the replica of the sixteenth-century ship and the settlement site. There I met Dr. Jack Jones, in the role of Darby the Irish seaman, and Lindsay Kitchen, who answered all my questions and gave me new ones to pursue. Sarah Downing and Tama Creef of the Outer Banks History Center pulled books off their shelves I couldn’t find anywhere else. Alicia McGraw of the National Park Service, whom I found with Oberg’s book in her hands, was a fount of information about Fort Raleigh. And closer to home, Clare Simmons helped me get titles and forms of address right. Archaeologist Paul Gardner shared his knowledge of native culture and helped me to think about the practical details of life on Roanoke Island. A visit to Jamestown is also a must, for its Powhatan village, the museum, and especially the ships; the
Susan Constant
is the same size as the
Lion
that bore my Catherine to Roanoke Island. No wonder everyone was seasick!

In doing research I relied primarily on David Beers Quinn’s comprehensive
Set Fair for Roanoke.
An excellent, and shorter, narrative is the one by David Stick. Lee Miller’s
Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony
is nonfiction but reads like fiction, with first-person narration and (unattributed) quotations woven in. In it I found the suggestion that Sir Francis Walsingham tried to sabotage Ralegh’s colony.

The Library of America edition of the writings of John Smith, soldier and Jamestown founder, is a valuable resource. It contains Barlowe’s
Discourse of the First Voyage
(1584) and all the existing writings of Ralph Lane, John White, and Thomas Harriot regarding the Roanoke voyages, reproductions of John White’s drawings, and William Strachey’s account of the Virginia Indians (1612). These were my main sources for the customs of Virginia’s native inhabitants. Accurate or not, the writings do represent how the English saw the Indians. The terms “Indian” and “savage” (though they might offend modern readers) were the ones used at the time. “Savage” meant wild and uncivilized. The English saw the natives as human and capable of being civilized (as
they
understood civilization, of course). Manteo, as he learned English and became a lord, was proof of that. Harriot and White were surprisingly without prejudice in their observations of the natives and their customs. Most of those who came to the New World were not so objective.

Nothing is known about the particular customs of Manteo’s people, the inhabitants of Croatoan (known as Hatteras Island today). They did have a female chief who was Manteo’s mother. They probably spoke an Algonkian language like the Powhatan and other tribes of tidewater Virginia and northern New England, and possessed similar religious beliefs. Knowing no other way to craft a character so remote from my own experience, I have adapted Algonkian legends in order to convey how Manteo might have understood himself and his world before and after the English came into it. An immense help in this regard was Michael Leroy Oberg’s book. He analyzes the colonization effort from the Native American perspective, showing how the English failed to understand the native’s society and upset its balance. His title,
The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand
, refers to the killing of Wingina and its consequences.

Now, about my treatment of Sir Walter Ralegh. I have opted to spell his name “Ralegh” rather than the more familiar “Raleigh,” because the first was more common in his time. (Spoiler alert! Skip the rest of this paragraph if you haven’t read the book yet.) Despite his association with the Virginia colony and its most famous export, tobacco, Ralegh never went there. At least not officially. No biographers are specific about what Ralegh was up to from March to October of 1590 (the time of John White’s final voyage). They assume he was in London serving the queen. There is only one extant letter from this period with Ralegh’s signature: a recommendation for an unemployed vicar, written in a clerk’s hand. I am pretending it was signed by a deputy to conceal that Ralegh had secretly left the country. It is not impossible that Ralegh sailed to Roanoke Island with John White, but there is no historical evidence to support my fiction. This is the one occasion where I stretched the truth for the sake of a good story.

I do take considerable license with Ralegh’s poetry, selecting verses that seem to illuminate his fortunes in love and politics, then editing and rewriting them for a modern reader. (His poetry is known for its obscurity.) His poetic works were not published until years later, but like most poets of his time, he shared his poems among friends. So consider the poetic fragments here to be his works in progress, or early drafts. The letters and papers of Ralegh are fictitious but based on historical sources.

What happened to Ralegh after the failure of his Roanoke colony? In 1592 he seduced and married one of Queen Elizabeth’s ladies, Elizabeth Throckmorton. The queen threw them both in the Tower for a time, and he was banished for five years. During that time he sailed to South America, pursuing a dream of gold, and published
The Discoverie of Guiana.
In 1602 he made another effort to locate the colonists; some said that this was an effort to keep his Virginia patent from expiring by claiming English planters still lived there. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and under King James Ralegh was imprisoned on suspicion of treason, where he wrote
The History of the World,
only getting as far as 168 BC. He made a voyage to Guiana in hopes of finding gold, but it was unsuccessful, and in 1618 he was finally executed on the old treason charges.

The 1590 voyage was not the end of attempts to locate the Roanoke colonists. The Jamestown settlers tried to find them. On an expedition inland in 1607, one of their leaders, George Percy, reported: “We saw a Savage Boy about the age of ten yeeres, which had a head of haire of a perfect yellow and a reasonable white skinne.” John Smith spoke to two Indian chiefs who described men clothed like Smith who lived in English-style houses. There was also a report the colonists were slain by Powhatan, but a few survived. Powhatan, the chief of an alliance of tribes in the Chesapeake region, also claimed that he killed them. The explorations by Smith’s men turned up no one, and they concluded by 1612 that all of Ralegh’s colonists were dead. There was no proof either way. In 1660 a Welshman reported preaching to light-colored Indians along the Neuse River. In 1709 John Lawson surveyed the Carolinas and encountered Hatteras Indians who told him that “several of their Ancestors were white People, and could talk in a Book, as we do; the Truth of which is confirm’d by gray Eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians.” After this point legends take over, including an elaborate hoax involving stones with Eleanor Dare’s initials, reflecting an intense desire to know the fate of America’s first-born English child, Virginia Dare. Today the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, the descendants of the Hatteras Indians who migrated from Croatoan Island, also claim to be descendants of the “lost” colonists. This is likely, but impossible to prove. There were other lost Englishmen—the three left behind by Lane and Drake in 1586 and the fifteen left by Grenville—who may have survived and intermingled with the natives also.

John White, by the way, gave up his search for the colonists after the voyage of 1590, declaring himself contented. From Ireland he wrote to his friend Richard Hakluyt that he was “committing the relief of my discomfortable company the planters in Virginia to the merciful help of the Almighty, whom I most humbly beseech to help and comfort them, according to his most holy will and their good desire.” He certainly sounds as if he believed the colonists were still alive.

In the 1605 comedy
Eastward Ho,
which predates the sightings by the Jamestown settlers, Captain Seagull says of Virginia: “A whole country of English is there, man, bred of those that were left there in ’87; they have married with the Indians, and make ’em bring forth as beautiful faces as any we have in England.”

Seagull is joking with another character, but he has hit upon a truth that lies at the heart of the Roanoke mystery. No one can migrate to a new land without being changed by it and leaving a mark on it. Sometimes this happens by violence, and sometimes it happens quietly and no one writes about it. Probably there were colonists still alive in 1590, and in 1605, and even forty years after that. They had children with beautiful faces who gave birth to more children with beautiful faces, and on and on. In that way, they are still among us.