Margaret Haddix: Sabotaged

I first became intrigued by the Roanoke Colony story when I was a kid. I can even remember reading a biography of Virginia Dare-Virginia Dare: Mystery Girl-in the Childhood of Famous Americans series. (You would think that that would have been a really, really short book, but it wasn’t.) When I first began thinking about The Missing series, I knew right away that I wanted to include Virginia Dare as one of the missing kids from history. But when I began doing research about the Roanoke Colony, I discovered a much more complicated story than the one I thought I knew.

As far as anyone can tell, Virginia Dare truly was the first English child born in the Western Hemisphere. But even the Roanoke Colony’s claim to being the first English settlement in the Americas is a little suspect. As early as 1583, a group of Englishmen tried to start a settlement in Newfoundland. But they gave up after just a few weeks because of a lack of supplies.

When I was a kid thinking about the early Europeans coming to the Americas, I pictured it as being comparable to people in the late twentieth century landing on the moon. But that really isn’t the best comparison. First of all, unlike the moon, the Americas already had people living there. Secondly, in a forty-year time span, humans have made exactly nine manned trips to the moon. During the 1500s, Europeans made hundreds of trips back and forth from the Americas. English fishermen, along with those of other nationalities, were routinely sailing to the waters off Newfoundland, fishing during the warmer months, and then taking their catch home to sell. The Spanish, who had gotten a huge head start and already had numerous settlements in the Western Hemisphere, were routinely crossing the Atlantic with ships full of treasure from Central and South America.

When the English looked at that imbalance-we’re getting fish; they’re getting gold-they didn’t like it. They considered the Spanish their enemies, anyhow, for a variety of reasons, including religion. (Spain was a Catholic country; by the late 1500s, England was Protestant.) Spain seemed to have all the power and was expanding its influence across Europe as well as in the Americas. One of England’s main ways of fighting back was to have English ships attack Spanish ships and steal everything they could. This sounds like piracy-or outright acts of war-but the English had another name for it: privateering. All that meant is that the English didn’t feel they were doing anything wrong. The English government and its leaders not only allowed the theft of Spanish treasure-they encouraged it. And Queen Elizabeth got a cut of the profits.

Sir Walter Raleigh, one of the queen’s favorite courtiers, was also one of the men most heavily involved with privateering. (You probably remember Raleigh’s name from some Social Studies class, if you were paying more attention than Jonah.) Raleigh thought that starting a colony in North America would be a way to counter Spain’s power in the Western Hemisphere-especially if it served as a base and hiding place for English privateers.

Raleigh himself didn’t plan to go to the new colony he envisioned; he stayed in England and sent others out on his behalf. It’s hard to know what motivated the actual Roanoke colonists to leave everything they knew and try to set up new homes in an unfamiliar place. Some historians think some or all of the colonists might have wanted to separate from the Church of England and practice their own religion, like the Pilgrims who settled in Massachusetts thirty-three years later. Other historians think the financial incentives might have been more important: Each male colonist was supposed to receive five hundred acres of land.

One of the things I didn’t remember about the Roanoke Colony-or had never known-was that there were a few trials runs before John White, the Dares, and more than a hundred other men, women, and children showed up on Roanoke Island at the end of July 1587. Various all-male groups of English explorers and soldiers inhabited the island on and off beginning in 1584. In many ways, these trial runs were disasters and planted the seeds of more disaster. The Englishmen expected the local people to supply them with food-never mind that there was a drought and the natives had barely enough food for themselves. And never mind that the English acted almost schizophrenic, alternately befriending and killing their new neighbors. When the English thought an Indian might have stolen a silver communion cup, they burned an entire Indian village and destroyed the villagers’ corn. Later, they stole and ate dogs belonging to other Indians. They also kidnapped a prominent Indian leader’s young son. None of this could have endeared the English to the natives. When Virginia Dare’s parents and their fellow Roanoke colonists arrived in the summer of 1587, they expected to find fifteen soldiers who had been left to guard an English fort. Instead, they found a skeleton, presumably belonging to a soldier who’d been killed by Indians. Nobody knows what happened to the other fourteen soldiers.

That first discovery must have been disheartening, but there was plenty of bad news to come. Six days after they arrived, one of the colonists, George Howe, was killed by Indians while he was out alone looking for crabs. He left behind his young son, now an orphan. When the colonists decided to retaliate for Howe’s murder and attack a nearby Indian village, they discovered partway into the attack that they’d made a huge mistake: The village was occupied by Native Americans who were friendly toward the English, not the enemies they expected to find.

Amazingly, those Indians seem to have been willing to look past that error. But the Roanoke colonists still had plenty of other problems. For a variety of reasons, they’d failed to load up on necessary supplies-including food-on their way to America. And because the captains of the ships bringing them to America had wanted to spend as much of the sailing season as they could privateering (a common theme in the history of the English on Roanoke Island), the colonists didn’t arrive until late summer, when it was too late to plant any crops. Finally, one of the things the English had learned from their previous trial runs was that Roanoke Island was actually a lousy place for the English to try to settle. This time around, the colonists intended to settle farther north, in the Chesapeake Bay area. But Simon Fernandez, the pilot leading their fleet of ships, reportedly refused to take them anywhere else. Much of the speculation about the Roanoke Colony’s fate has been directed at Simon Fernandez. Was he intentionally sabotaging the colony? If so, who told him to do that? And why? Was he secretly working for Spain? Or was he taking bribes from some enemy of Raleigh’s within the English court?

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.