page_title: Simon Fernandes
section_title: The Lost Colony
hierarchical_section_title: Simon Fernandes / Career / The Lost Colony
context_page_description: Simon Fernandes was a 16th-century Portuguese-born navigator and sometime pirate who piloted the 1585 and 1587 English expeditions to found colonies on Roanoke island, part of modern-day North Carolina but then known as Virginia. Fernandes trained as a navigator in Spain at the famed Casa de Contratación in Seville, but later took up arms against the Spanish empire, preying upon Spanish shipping along with fellow pirate John Callis. Charged with piracy in 1577, he was saved from the hangman's noose by Sir Francis Walsingham, becoming a Protestant and a subject of the Queen of England. In 1578 Fernandes entered the service of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and later Sir Walter Raleigh, piloting the failed 1587 expedition to Roanoke, known to history as the "Lost Colony".
  Fernandes disappears from the records after 1590, when he sailed with an English fleet to the Azores, a journey from which he most likely did not return alive. However, a copy of one of his charts of the East coast of North America still survives in the Cotton Collection, and was probably one of the chief sources used by John Dee for his 1580 map justifying English claims to North America.
context_section_description: In May 1587 Fernandes piloted a new expedition, a group of colonists led by governor John White which sailed for Virginia in The Lion. This time White and his fellow settlers included women and children, with a view to establishing a permanent colony in Virginia. White and Fernandes evidently disliked one another, and White's journal reveals his arguments with his pilot, accusing the Portuguese of many outrages against the interests of the settlers, including "lewdly" abandoning the expedition's flyboat in the course of the voyage.
  In 1587 the settlers' chosen destination was not Roanoke but the Chesapeake Bay but, on reaching Roanoake in late July, and allowing the colonists to disembark, Fernandes refused to let White's men re-board ship. According to White's journal, Fernandes' deputy "called to the sailors in the pinesse, charging them not to bring any of the planters back againe, but leave them on the island". Faced with what amounted to a mutiny by his navigator, White appears to have backed down and acquiesced in this sudden change of plan. Despite the governor's protests, Fernandes held that "summer was farre spent, wherefore hee would land all the planters in no other place.". Fernandes's motive for landing the colonists in the wrong spot is not clear, but it may be that he was prompted by his desire (and that of his crew) to return to the West Indies to pursue opportunities for privateering against Spanish shipping.
  If Governor White's journal is to be believed, Fernandes' actions appear to have contributed to the poor outcome of the settlement, known to history as the "Lost Colony". Indeed, some modern historians (notably Lee Miller) have suggested that he may have deliberately intended to sabotage the entire enterprise. However, if this was the case then (as Miller herself concedes) his motives for doing so remain unclear.
  Miller does however suggest a motive, not for Fernandes himself, but for Walsingham. In somewhat oblique language Miller suggests that the colony may have become a victim of court politics; Walsingham's jealousy at Raleigh's spectacular rise led him to sabotage the colony. In this analysis, Fernandes appears as Walsingham's tool, willing and able to defeat the plans of his master's rival.
  Whatever the truth of this, the fiasco of 1587 appears to have ended Fernandes' relationship with Raleigh. He participated in no further ventures across the Atlantic, though he did take part in the battle against the Spanish Armada. He disappears from the records after 1590, when he sailed with an English fleet to the Azores, a journey which he most likely did not survive.
caption: Fernandes' patron, Sir Walter Raleigh
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