“Sorry about that,” Jack said. He probably should have mentioned it to Daniel. There was no need to play his cards that close to his chest. Force of habit, he supposed, to tell no one anything that wasn’t essential.
Daniel looked mollified. “So do you want to know what I think?”
Jack tilted his head back and closed his eyes. “Ok, Daniel. What do you think?” If he really hadn’t wanted to know, he wouldn’t have agreed to let Daniel give him a ride home. The motorpool had cars.
“I think the Atlantis expedition is screwed.” There was the squeal of brakes somewhere behind, but Jack ignored it. It wasn’t as bad as Sam. Daniel drove absentmindedly. Sam drove suicidally. “There’s no will to put into it what it requires, either here or internationally.”
When Jack didn’t reply, Daniel went on, the sound of his window going down as he leaned out to swipe his card to get out of the parking lot. “Croatoan.”
There was a long pause, and it got the response he wanted. Jack opened his eyes and looked over. “What’s a Croatoan?”
“A Native American tribe related to the Pasquotank,” Daniel said. “But it’s also a mystery.”
Jack straightened up in his seat, fishing in his pocket for his sunglasses. The late afternoon sun was coming straight in through the windshield and his eyes were starting to water. They’d been photosensitive for a long time now. “Ok, I’ll bite. What about it, Daniel?”
“Let me tell you a story,” Daniel said, turning onto the expressway. “In 1587 a group of British settlers led by a man named John White, and financed by Sir Walter Raleigh, landed on the island of Roanoke just off the North Carolina coast. They were following up on a previous expedition, also led by White, which had established a temporary camp and begun friendships with the Native Americans who used the island as a summer hunting place. There were no permanent native settlements on the island, for good reasons, as the colonists would learn. These were not the kind of settlers who came later, not the adventurers of Jamestown or the fanatical religious separatists of Massachusetts Bay, looking for a place to practice their strict religion without the fetters of secular law. They were natural scientists, skilled craftsmen, skilled farmers, soldiers. Men and women too who were driven more by the relentless curiosity of the Elizabethan age. Some of White’s papers and drawings survive — beautiful sketches of plants and animals, carefully measured and catalogued according to the best data collection of the day. Translations from the Algonquin language, accurate and sympathetic portrayals of the people they met there, beautifully rendered pictures and stories.”
“You have a point?” Jack asked, more for form’s sake than anything else. Of course Daniel did, and he’d get to it in his own time.
“A few weeks later, White returned to England with the ship to get more provisions, but it was late in the year and they could not sail again until spring. And you know what happened then.”
“I do?”
“1588. The Spanish Armada. When spring came every ship was needed to defend England. The hundred and some members of the Roanoke expedition were not a priority, not when faced with invasion. White hounded the Queen and so did Raleigh, but to no avail. No ships could be spared. By the time the Spanish Armada was finished, the last ships wrecked in the gales of autumn off Scotland, it was too late to sail again. The next year it was the same story. The threat of war kept ships close in, fearing a repeat of the previous year’s battles. It was 1590 when John White and the resupply ship landed at Roanoke. To find the expedition gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone. The settlement had been abandoned. The absence of most of the goods the expedition had brought, as well as the dismantling of some of the buildings, suggested that the expedition had not been attacked, but had moved on for some unknown reason. No bodies, no spent musket balls, no signs of burning or violence. All the clue there was left was the word ‘Croatoan’ carved into a tree.”
Jack looked over at him sharply from behind his sunglasses. “Which means?”
“It was the name of a Native American tribe that lived about fifty miles away on the mainland. They’d had good relations with them in the past.” Daniel shrugged. “We don’t know why they left. We do know that the hurricane season of 1588 was exceptionally active, and that the entire island is very low lying. In recent decades it’s been ravaged by hurricanes several times, and structures near where the settlement was were badly damaged. We also know that the Spanish raided along the coast in 1589, searching for a British colony, and that they had already destroyed a French colony in South Carolina. In any event, the island was a very unsafe place to stay. It seems likely that it became untenable, and that they picked up and moved in with their allies.”
“So you’re saying that when we get Daedalus back to Atlantis, we’re going to find the whole place deserted with no clue except New Athos written on a pillar in lipstick?” Jack winced. “That’s comforting, Daniel.”
“I’m not saying that,” he replied tranquilly. “I’m saying that things well begun have been abandoned before because the nation that sponsored them lacked the national will to follow through. Because other things happened at home that made the well being of the expedition a minor priority. Because it simply wasn’t important enough.”
Jack twitched. “Some people would say it’s better that way,” he said. “That it would have been better if there had never been colonies in the New World.”
Daniel glanced at him sideways, a giant truck roaring past him in the outside lane. “Contact between the New World and the Old was going to happen. It was already happening. It had been nearly a century since Columbus, sixty years since the Aztecs fell. There’s no putting the cat back in the bag once it’s out, Jack. You can’t just sail away and forget about it. Do you think for a minute that if we turned off the Stargate and recalled our ships that we would be left alone? That we can ever go back to the way things were? We have to be realistic. We’re part of a wider universe, and you and I have been places that makes those old sea dogs’ adventures pale in comparison.” He looked back at the road. “And you know as well as I do that we’re not the biggest dogs out there. We’re technologically inferior, and our population is a tiny percentage of all sentient species we’ve encountered. We’d like to think we’re the conquistadors, but we’re not. Compared to the Wraith, or to the Jaffa or the Tok’ra here in the Milky Way, we’re some second rate power trying to act real big with a bunch of technology we kind of half understand that we got from the Asgard or dug up from the Ancients. We’re not the Spanish Empire. We’re more like…”
Daniel seemed to run down for a moment, out of an appropriate comparison. “Lichtenstein?” Jack supplied.
“I was going to say the Venetian Republic, or maybe Norway in this period, but that will do.”
“So your point is that we can’t give up.” Jack thought this was a pretty long winded way of getting there.
“My point is that contact is going to happen. The question is what the nature of that contact will be.”
Jack didn’t say anything, which Daniel seemed to take as encouragement.
“Do you think it makes a difference that the predominant strain in the founding of our country was Puritan separatism rather than the broadminded and curious attitudes of the Elizabethan age? Do you think that it’s irrelevant to our national pathologies that we were founded to be a haven for a bunch of nuts who wanted to opt out of secular law and society and create a theocratic state?”