The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (46 page)

That Roanoke was chosen as the first English foothold in America owed a good deal to Simão (or Simon) Fernandes, an 
Azorean pilot who had seen the North American coastline for himself while learning his trade in the service of Spain. Fernandes was based in England by the early 1570s, plundering shiploads of sugar and exotic woods returning from the Indies. When the seizure of a Portuguese caravel landed him in jail amidst a storm of diplomatic protest, Walsingham secured his release on condition that he came to work for him. Fernandes was little better than a pirate, but his knowledge of Spanish overseas territories and naval strength made him a prize asset. He was also a Protestant convert; another cause of his searing hatred of Philip of Spain, who had absorbed Portugal into his empire following the death of Cardinal King Henry in 1580.

Fernandes guided Raleigh’s two barques to Cape Hatteras in 1584, and it was he who piloted the colonists through an inlet, named Port Ferdinando in his honour, to Roanoke Island the following year. His determination to profit at Spanish expense helps to explain why the English ended up among the reefs and shoals of the Outer Banks, a good place to watch for the bullion ships making their way home from South America. For Raleigh too, laying permanent foundations for an English America was a secondary consideration; the glory, and the real money, lay with Philip II’s treasure fleet. Walsingham’s own hopes for Roanoke combined a tactical with a longer-term strategic approach. In the spring of 1585 he persuaded Elizabeth to authorise his ‘Plot for the annoying of the King of Spain’. Drake, Carleill and Frobisher were unleashed to wreak havoc in Galicia and the West Indies, while Sir Walter Raleigh’s brother Carew captured Spanish ships fishing off Newfoundland. Roanoke was one theatre within this undeclared naval war. And yet Walsingham’s support for English plantation in Ireland suggests that it was simultaneously part of another story, the creation of an English Protestant sphere of influence beyond the traditional geographical boundaries of the crown. His patronage of Hakluyt 
and friendship with Dee pinpoint Walsingham as a believer in colonisation for its own sake, a generation before such ideas became conventional in English government.
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Whether as a naval base or a place to settle, Raleigh’s colonists soon found that Roanoke had a major drawback. Sand-bars ran across both inlets to the island, impassable at high tide for any vessel of more than seventy tons. The hazards of taking a ship in too close were graphically illustrated when the
Tiger
ran aground at Wococon and nearly broke her back, an accident which the author of a shipboard journal blamed on the poor seamanship of pilot Fernandes. She was run onto the shore and saved, but only at the cost of ‘great spoil of our provisions’, sodden bags of wheat and rice which the colonists could ill afford to lose. Another casualty was their store of salt, essential for preserving meat over the winter months.

The
Tiger
was on loan from Queen Elizabeth, as was the first governor of Roanoke. Ralph Lane was a veteran of the war in Ireland, an experience which he shared with a number of the colonists under his command. Of the 109 men overwintering on Roanoke in 1585–6, more than half were soldiers in Raleigh’s pay. Gentlemen adventurers formed another component, roundly condemned by Harriot for their ‘nice bringing up’ and their unwillingness to submit to military discipline, the balance being made up by craftsmen, a baker, a brewer and a cook. Joachim Ganz was a Jewish metallurgist from Prague, employed to test Indian copper (surveys of the site have turned up melted copper and a fragment of a crucible, implying that a furnace was built at Roanoke) and to assess the likelihood of more precious metal being found. Thomas Luddington may have been a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, in which case the colony had a chaplain to celebrate communion and baptise any Indian converts; the post which Hakluyt had probably hoped to secure for himself. The glaring omission is
anyone skilled in farming. Soldiers could shoot game but would have been unwilling to till the land, even assuming that the rhythms of English agriculture could have adapted to suit different soil and seasons. Viable sugar cane and plantain had been transported from Hispaniola, but had suffered badly from the salt spray on deck.
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When Ralph Lane’s men dug the ground, they did so in the cause of defence. Within a month of their arrival Lane was writing a letter to Walsingham ‘from the new fort in Virginia’, revealed by modern archaeology to be an angular structure with bastions and ramparts protecting the little settlement of two-storey cottages by its side. That the fort was built so swiftly suggests that Raleigh may have taken Hakluyt’s advice to ship prefabricated gunnery platforms out to Virginia. Fort Raleigh, as its modern reconstruction is known, had symbolic as well as military significance. The English were announcing their lawful occupation of the land by constructing the means to defend it. Spanish raiders up from Florida would have been at the forefront of Lane’s mind, but his guns and palisades were all too soon offering protection from a hostile local population. A silver cup went missing during a reconnaissance expedition to the mainland, perhaps a communion chalice which the English were showing to the Secotan in hope of explaining the Christian faith. Its alleged theft sparked harsh reprisals against the Indian village of Aquascogoc: ‘we burnt, and spoiled their corn, and town, all the people being fled’. The phrase, all too sickeningly familiar, could have been taken from a report on the reduction of Ireland. John White, the next governor of Roanoke colony, was one of the company. If he spoke out against the destruction then his protests went unheard. The hasty actions of a handful of soldiers would have bitter consequences for the future of English settlement at Roanoke.
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Lane’s letters to Walsingham, Philip Sidney and Richard 
Hakluyt the elder, sent before the colony entered its winter isolation, show him clinging stubbornly to his preconceptions about the new world in defiance of the reality surrounding him. Virginia had ‘the goodliest soil under the cope of heaven’, supplying every commodity from flax to frankincense, maize which yielded both corn and sugar and sufficient drugs to satisfy any apothecary. Once horses and cattle had been sourced and the land inhabited by the English, ‘no realm in Christendom were comparable to it’. Lane was paid to be upbeat and was true to his commission, despite a catastrophic falling-out with Grenville. But the cheery assurances that he was happier with ‘fish for my daily food, and water for my daily drink’ than all the luxury which the court could provide, are a more accurate reflection of life on Roanoke Island. Happy in the knowledge that he was adding a kingdom to the queen’s dominions, Lane found further sustenance in his Protestant belief. He and his men were ‘in a vast country yet unmanured’, but the Lord would command the ravens to feed them. Faith in Christ would save them from the tyranny of Spain, ‘being the sword of the Antichrist of Rome and his sect’. Every day that dawned revealed another province waiting to be ‘civilly and Christianly inhabited’.
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Ralph Lane would willingly have remained in America. The account which he later gave to Raleigh describes the exploration of Virginia proper, skirmishes with the Algonquian and Iroquois of the Chesapeake Bay and the hunt for a gold or copper mine further up the Roanoke River. ‘The discovery of a good mine,’ as Lane was now prepared to admit, ‘by the goodness of God, or a passage to the Southsea, and nothing else can bring this country in request to be inhabited by our nation’. What persuaded him to leave with Drake was the deteriorating relationship with the local Indians, on whom the English were heavily dependent for their food. The supply ship expected in 
April 1586 had not arrived, and the colonists knew that they faced a thinner winter if they stayed. Angered by their repeated demands for corn and grief-stricken at the devastation which European disease had brought to his people, the ruler of the Secotan turned against the English and was killed during a parley. The appointed signal for Lane’s men to open fire was ‘Christ our victory’. The slaughter took place on 1 June, a week before Drake’s fleet appeared on the horizon. Drake was willing to offer the colonists a boat and provisions for four months, but a massive storm forced her to cut her cables and put to sea. Lane read the sequence of events as a sign: ‘the very hand of God as it seemed, stretched out to take us from thence’. Most of their books and papers were thrown overboard by the sailors rowing them through the reef. Grenville’s relief party arrived two weeks later to find the settlement abandoned.
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We will never know what was lost in the hasty retreat from Roanoke: maps of the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers, Ganz’s experiments in metallurgy, Harriot’s handwritten dictionaries of the local languages were all likely casualties. Fortunately there were also some extraordinary survivals. Through the turbulent seas and hailstones the size of hens’ eggs, John White clung onto his drawings of American flora and fauna and an Indian culture which could be civilised by the English. According to Theodor de Bry’s edition of Harriot’s
Report of the New Found Land of Virginia
, this was the reason that the queen had sent White to America: ‘only to draw the description of the place, lively to describe the shapes of the inhabitants their apparel, manners of living, and fashions’. In the absence of any more tangible evidence, White’s drawings made a compelling case for a return voyage to Virginia. He exploited their potential to the full, distributing copies to Hakluyt as well as Raleigh and Walsingham. The entomologist Thomas Penny received studies of a swallowtail butterfly and a cicada, and John Gerard incorporated
White’s Indian milkweed in his much-reprinted
Herball
. White also sold a set to de Bry, whose engravings opened them up to readers of German, French and Latin as well as English. The two men had been introduced by Hakluyt.
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White’s experience and commitment made him the clear choice to govern Raleigh’s second colony. In January 1587 the royal herald Garter King of Arms announced that he and twelve assistants had been incorporated to plant ‘the City of Ralegh in Virginia’. White’s Cornish gentry origins were sufficiently obscure to warrant a grant of arms in his own right. Among the others receiving arms were Ananias Dare, a tiler and bricklayer from London who had married White’s daughter Eleanor, and Simon Fernandes, enjoying the final stage in his transformation from Portuguese pirate to English gentleman. Given the allegations of incompetence levelled against Fernandes in 1585, the fact that he took such a prominent role in the expedition which departed Plymouth in May 1587 may indicate that he was still under Walsingham’s protection. As John White’s narrative makes clear, it wasn’t long before Fernandes returned to his old ways. One of the planters’ boats was left behind in the night under a master who hadn’t previously sailed to Virginia; a deliberate attempt to scupper the colony, or so White alleged. Valuable time was wasted in the West Indies while Fernandes waited for a Spanish prize.

Worse was to come when the little fleet reached the Outer Banks on 22 July. White had planned to lead the 116 men, women and children to the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, where (quoting Harriot’s survey of 1585–6) ‘we found the soil to be fatter, the trees greater and to grow thinner, the ground more firm and deeper mould, more and larger champions, finer grass and as good as any we saw ever in England’. But when they landed on Roanoke Island to search for survivors of Grenville’s holding party of 1586, Fernandes ordered his men not to let the
colonists back on board. His reason was ‘that the summer was far spent’ – in other words, he would soon miss his chance to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet. White had little option but to clear the cottages of the vines and pumpkins which had grown up since his departure the previous year, and to set to work repairing Ralph Lane’s fort.
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Fernandes’s maverick behaviour is difficult to explain. Having refused to land the settlers on the mainland, he then spent a leisurely four weeks scouring the bilges of his ships and felling timber to sell in England before setting sail. The second Roanoke colony was less fully provisioned than Governor White had intended, thanks again to the actions of Fernandes on the outward journey. White had wanted to put in at Puerto Rico at a place where oranges and plantains could be grubbed up for replanting in Virginia, ‘but our Simon denied it, saying that he would come to an anchor at Hispaniola’. When Hispaniola was sighted the pilot sailed straight on, depriving the colonists of the cattle which they had hoped to take on board. As White presents it, Fernandes was effectively guilty of sabotage.

The link between Fernandes and Walsingham has allowed a conspiracy story to be constructed, with Walsingham marooning the colonists of 1587 to take revenge against Raleigh for snatching the spoils of the Babington plot. There is no denying that Fernandes was out for his own gain. But in his defence, he did take the time to unload the colonists’ equipment and provisions, and he did leave them with a pinnace capable of sailing back to England. Roanoke could be fortified more quickly than a newly built town on the Chesapeake. Ralph Lane, who was a capable military commander, had nothing but praise for Fernandes in 1585. Ultimately the problem is one of evidence. As the only known survivor of the second Roanoke colony, John White was keen to preserve his reputation from slanderers and sceptics when he got back to London. Other than the report
which he passed on to Hakluyt, historians have little to go on; no equivalent, for instance, of Lane’s letters to Walsingham in 1585. Granted, Walsingham was not a friend of Raleigh. But his many positive connections with the sponsors of English expansion – Hakluyt and Dee, Peckham and the Gilberts, Davis and Carleill – make it difficult to believe that he would willingly have sent three boatloads of English Protestant families into the void, simply to settle a private grievance. In the long-anticipated war with Spain, it would be better to have Raleigh as an ally than an enemy.
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