The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (47 page)

White’s vision as governor had been to create a civil society rather than a military encampment, a deep-rooted colony which was capable of sustaining and reproducing itself. But this could not be achieved at Roanoke. Tragedy struck in their first week when George Howe, one of the nine assistants who had sailed with White, was felled by Indian arrows and beaten to death while catching crabs. A reprisal raid went disastrously wrong when the English attacked a friendly group from Croatoan Island to the south, including women and children who were gleaning in the fields. The settlers had been expecting to farm a rich soil, but found that it was already too late in the year to plant. Someone would have to sail back with Fernandes to requisition more supplies, and the word of the governor would carry most weight. According to White’s account, the ‘whole company’ of assistants and planters petitioned him to go in person. White was reluctant, for oddly ignoble reasons: he feared his ‘great discredit’ in London, and he was worried that his possessions might be ‘spoiled and pilfered’ during the planned trek to a better site on the mainland. In the end he was persuaded, though only once the colonists had given him a sealed affidavit that they had full confidence in his leadership. Addressed to ‘you, her majesty’s subjects of England’ from ‘your friends and countrymen, the planters in Virginia’, this document offers a
fascinating glimpse into the self-perception of the very first English colonists: an identity which was linked and yet distinct, as if being in America had already changed them. White sailed for England on 27 August 1587, three days after the baptism of his granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first English child to be born in America. It was less than five weeks since he had led the first colonists ashore at Roanoke. No European would see any of them again.
⁴⁷

In the preface to the 1589 edition of his
Principal Navigations
, Richard Hakluyt triumphantly placed before Walsingham everything that had been achieved since he had been forced to listen to the sneers of the French while serving as a Protestant chaplain in Paris. English consuls and traders could now be found in Constantinople and Tripoli, in Persia and in Goa. English ships had braved the Strait of Magellan and the Cape of Good Hope, trafficked with the Moluccas and Java and returned home ‘most richly laden with the commodities of China’. Commerce with the Philippines and Japan would one day bring their people ‘the incomparable treasure of the truth of Christianity’. If Henry VIII had been King David, laying the foundations of the temple of God, then Elizabeth had proved herself another Solomon by constructing it. No one could deny the ambition and the courage of the English:

they have been men full of activity, stirrers abroad, and searchers of the remote parts of the world; so in this most famous and peerless government of her excellent majesty, her subjects through the special assistance and blessi.ng of God, in searching the most opposite corners and quarters of the world, and to speak plainly, in compassing the vast globe of the earth more than once, have excelled all the nations and people of the earth.
⁴⁸

Hakluyt’s sermon was a shrewd piece of propaganda, defending England from the baseless taunts of foreigners while exhorting its people to aspire to greatness. The same combination of patriotism and godliness can be caught in the writings of Christopher Carleill and the letters of Ralph Lane. Like his client Hakluyt, Francis Walsingham could find comfort in the fact that the English crown and nation had woken up at last to the dangers of their ‘sluggish security’. But there was a nagging absence from Hakluyt’s litany of successes by sea. Where were the settlers who had sailed to Roanoke with John White and Simon Fernandes? By the time that
Principal Navigations
was published, nothing had been heard from them for more than two years. The supplies which they had entreated their governor to bring them had never reached the colony, despite White’s frantic efforts to find a way around the general prohibition on English ships putting to sea which the privy council had imposed in October 1587 to preserve the nation’s defences against an armada from Spain.

It was March 1590 by the time that White was able to negotiate a place on a privateer crossing the Atlantic, and another five months before he stepped ashore on Roanoke Island. The search party found a fire burning and fresh footprints left by the Indians, but there was no reply to their shouts or the English tunes played by their bugler. Scrambling up the sand dunes, they made a discovery which set their hearts racing and has been a source of mystery ever since. Carved on a tree were the letters ‘CRO’ in Roman script, though without the accompanying Maltese cross which White had agreed would be the colonists’ signal that they were in imminent danger. Its meaning became clear when they reached the English village, recently refortified but emptied of everything that could be carried. A post at the entrance had been stripped of its bark, ‘and 5 foot from the ground in fair capital letters was graven
CROATOAN without any cross or sign of distress’. Croatoan Island was the home of Manteo, one of the two Indians who had sailed to England, who had been baptised at Roanoke a few days before Virginia Dare. A shout from the sailors directed White to where his sea-chests had been buried in a trench before the planters had left. The contents had been dug out and scattered, ‘my books torn from the covers, the frames of some of my pictures and maps rotten and spoiled with rain, and my armour almost eaten through with rust’. Four artillery pieces and some shot were found ‘thrown here and there, almost overgrown with weeds’, evidently too heavy to transport to wherever the colonists had gone.
⁴⁹

The marker trees were clear enough, though their message was very strange. Croatoan, or Hatteras Island as it is now known, was less suitable even than Roanoke if the English wanted to settle to farming. The planters had agreed with White that they would move the colony to a better site fifty miles inland while their governor brought help from England, leaving him a ‘secret token’ carved into a tree or a door-jamb to let him know where to seek them. Croatoan made no sense unless they had divided into two groups, the main party heading towards the Chesapeake while a smaller group waited for White at Roanoke and then left with Manteo in 1588 or 1589 when the relief ships did not come. ‘Greatly joyed’ at this proof that the settlers were at least alive, White persuaded his captain to set course for Croatoan only for a storm to snap their anchor cable and sweep them out to sea. Contrary winds meant that the plan to winter in Trinidad before trying again had to be abandoned, and the ships were forced to head for home. It was White’s last chance to rejoin his family and the colonists in his care.

Wherever the lost colonists lived out the rest of their lives, it was not on Roanoke Island. Perhaps their boat was wrecked on the way towards their new Eden, pitching them into the water.
If they did manage to found their ‘City of Ralegh’ on the mainland, they could easily have been wiped out by Indians resentful of their need for food and their competition for land. But there is another possibility, pure speculation unless archaeology turns up some trace of an Elizabethan English village, but still regarded as the most likely scenario by David Beers Quinn, who did more than anyone to ensure that their story is told from the evidence. He imagines the settlers finding a new home somewhere in Norfolk County in Virginia, clinging onto their language and religion while learning a new kind of agriculture from the Indians, marrying within the colony when they could but looking to the local population to find wives for their many young men. Years later, when the colony at Jamestown was well established, the Indian leader Powhatan confessed to Captain John Smith that he had had the English settlers killed after they had intermingled with his people for twenty years, producing a brass gun and a musket-barrel as evidence. Intriguingly, later generations of Croatoans believed that they had white ancestors. Writing his last letter to Hakluyt from Raleigh’s plantation in County Cork in 1593, John White could only commit ‘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’.
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NOTES

1
Dee and empire: John Dee,
General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation
(1577), STC 6459, ‘An advertisement to the reader’; William H. Sherman,
John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance
(Amherst, 1995), 148–70; Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown,
The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550–1660
(London, 1979), 49–56. Philosopher’s stone: Glyn Parry, ‘John Dee and the Elizabethan British Empire in its European Context’,
HJ
49 (2006), 663. Inuit man: James McDermott,
Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer
(New Haven and London, 2001), 149.

2
Globes: Roy Strong,
Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I
(London, 1987), 90–107.

3
Muscovy Company and licences to export: Conyers Read,
Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth
(Oxford, 1925), III, 371–2, 380–2.

4
Hakluyt on Ireland: ‘Discourse of Western Planting, 1584’, in E. G. R. Taylor (ed.),
The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts
(London, 1935), II, 212. Carleill: Rachel Lloyd,
Elizabethan Adventurer: A Life of Captain Christopher Carleill
(London, 1974), 95–6, 121–5, 136–7. Reduce: Huntington Library Bridgewater and Ellesmere, EL 1701, fol. 2r; David Harris Sacks, ‘Discourses of Western Planting: Richard Hakluyt and the Making of the Atlantic World’, in Peter Mancall (ed.),
The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624
(Chapel Hill, 2007), 436–7, 444–6.

5
Walsingham’s Irish archive: BL Stowe 162, fol. 2–3, 46–65. King James in the State Paper Office: TNA SP 14/107, fol. 24. 

6
Edmund Tremayne and his discourse: Huntington Library Bridgewater and Ellesmere, EL 1701; ‘Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham from Dec. 1570 to April 1583’, ed. C. T. Martin,
Camden Miscellany
6 (London, 1870–1), 15–16; History of Parliament,
The House of Commons 1558–1603
, ed. P. W. Hasler (London, 1981), III, 526; Jon G. Crawford,
Anglicizing the Government of Ireland: The Irish Privy Council and the Expansion of Tudor Rule, 1556–1578
(Dublin, 1993), 10–11, 389–93; S. J. Connolly,
Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630
(Oxford, 2007), 165.

7
Sovereignty: Huntington Library Bridgewater and Ellesmere, EL 1701, fol. 3r;
The Walsingham Letter-Book or Register of Ireland May 1578 to December 1579
, ed. James Hogan and N. McNeill O’Farrell (Dublin, 1959), 89–90. Surrender and re-grant: Connolly,
Contested Island
, 105–10.

8
Agarde: TNA SP 63/55/169; Crawford,
Anglicizing the Government of Ireland
, 163–9. Gerard: TNA SP 63/56/108; TNA SP 63/57/62–3, 66–8; Penry Williams, ‘Sir William Gerard’ in
Oxford DNB
.

9
Agriculture and diet: David Beers Quinn,
The Elizabethans and the Irish
(Ithaca, NY, 1966), 14–15, 63–6. Royal soil: John Derricke,
The Image of Irelande with a Discoverie of Woodkarne
(1581), STC 6734, sig. E3r. Bryskett: TNA SP 63/81/12; Nicholas Canny,
Making Ireland British, 1580–1650
(Oxford, 2001), 1–10, 36.

10
Walsingham’s affinity in Ireland: Rory Rapple,
Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: Military Men in England and Ireland, 1558–1594
(Cambridge, 2009), 150–1, 157–61, 253. Ireland and Calais: ibid., 208. Her majesty had a country: Pelham to Walsingham 6 Sep. 1579, TNA SP 63/69, fol. 18. Elizabeth’s instructions to Essex: Nicholas Canny, ‘The Ideology of Colonization: From Ireland to America’,
WMQ
3rd series 30 (1973), 580.