The Secret Token by Andrew Lawler

Author:Andrew Lawler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

| CHAPTER NINE

Rejoicing in Things Stark Naughty

Few people besides Quinn have thought so long and hard about the Roanoke voyages as Karen Kupperman, now a professor emerita at New York University and a leading authority on the venture. On a bitter winter afternoon in Manhattan, we met for the first time at a café, moving in silent agreement to find a table as far from the chill blasts emanating from the front door as possible. Kupperman wore green-framed glasses and short gray hair, and at first she seemed reserved. She patiently endured an hour or so of my questions about sources, Quinn, and her own theories about Roanoke. By the time we had ordered coffee, she appeared convinced that I was serious about the quest and also not seriously disturbed. “You can’t be too careful,” she explained later. As I would learn, the Lost Colony mystery draws more than its share of obsessives.

“Have you heard about the woman in Portugal who claimed to have found Simão Fernandes’s papers?” Kupperman asked me, leaning forward and slightly lowering her voice. “The whole story is crazy. I can send you her name.”

Fernandes was the Portuguese pilot on all three major Roanoke expeditions, as well as White’s archnemesis. More than any single person, he is blamed for the failure of the governor’s colony after refusing to carry the settlers north to the Chesapeake. But as far as I knew, he had left nothing behind in writing. In the late sixteenth century, very few seamen could read and write, and fewer still could do so in a foreign language. The idea that this pirate could put pen to paper—much less put together his memoirs—seemed a stretch. But I was excited by the prospect of an alternative view.

With the historian’s lead, I pieced together what was known about Fernandes’s alleged papers. In the spring of 2012, a person who identified herself as Marie Carvalho phoned Doug Stover, the park historian at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island. As he recalls it, she said in broken English that she was an engineering student in Portugal who had come across two storage cartons in an archive. Inside were old ship’s logs. A friend had told her they were written by a Portuguese pilot named Simão Fernandes, who she had heard was involved in the first English settlement attempt in North America. Carvalho wanted to know if Stover was interested in seeing the documents.

The news electrified the small community of Roanoke scholars. If true, the discovery could shed light on everything from the venture’s financial details to his thoughts on the missing colonists. Because Fernandes spent months on transatlantic crossings with all the players and knew Raleigh and Walsingham, any of his observations could provide a breakthrough in our understanding of the Roanoke voyages, which depends so heavily on White’s accounts.

Stover invited Carvalho to Fort Raleigh for a conference that October to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first performance of the outdoor drama The Lost Colony.

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