Fantastic Metropolis

Approving of his ambitions at sea she teasingly called him ‘the Shepherd of the Ocean’. Damnably proud, high-spirited and impetuous, he would be a sea-dog with a difference; he had no desire ‘to run from cape to cape, and from place to place, for the pillage of ordinary prizes’. He was highly critical of Drake’s plans to raid Spanish settlements, for Phillip II, he wrote, ‘is not so impoverished by taking three or four port town in America as we may suppose, neither are the riches of Peru or Nueva España so left by the seaside as it can be easily washed away with a great flood, or spring tide, or left dry upon the sand in a low ebb’. Raleigh, it was noted, had been ‘trained in martial discipline, both by land and sea, and well inclined to all virtuous and honourable adventures’. He would regard the name ‘corsair’ as an insult, yet he still had a zest for visiting distant places and used to say ‘there are stranger things to be seen in the world than are between London and Staines’.

—Neville Williams, The Sea Dogs

By the end of 1992, Balabanova and her colleagues had examined eleven Egyptian mummies, finding nicotine in all of them, cocaine in eight, and hashish in ten; of some seventy-two Peruvian mummies, at least twenty-six had traces of nicotine, sixteen of cocaine, and twenty of hashish; the two Sudanese skeletons both showed nicotine, but not cocaine or hashish, and of ten burials in Germany, eight had revealed the presence of nicotine, but none had any cocaine or hashish content. Balabanova’s results were bound to spark a furious controversy. Attention has focused on the cocaine mummies, seen by Egyptologists as an impossibility. They argue that there is no chance that a transatlantic drug trade could have been operating by 1000 BC, for this would completely change our picture of the ancient world, and so there must be something wrong with Balabanova’s method. Yet this is the same technique used by police and private companies to determine if people have been using drugs—the legal consequences of the method being flawed are considerable.

—Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Mysteries

Most folks will tell you that nicotine only reached Europe after that old scoundrel Sir Walter Raleigh imported the idea of smoking to the Old World. (Technically, Europe is not older than the Americas, but we’ll let that one hang there for the rest of the essay. We expect to be forgiven for our laziness.) Well, it may probably have been Raleigh’s employee Thomas Hariot, since Raleigh himself never even set foot in America… at least not by boat. (I’ll get back to that.) However, since we have Egyptian and even German corpses with nicotine in their tissues from nearly two thousand years before Columbus was an itch in his daddy’s pants, we find ourselves forced to confront the possibility that there was, in fact, some form of transatlantic contact between Europe and Africa and the Americas stretching back to the times before Christ. And since there’s hashish in them there corpses, we also find ourselves considering the involvement of our favorite Ismaili assassins, the hashishin, and where there’s hashishin, can the Knight’s Templar be far behind? Well, sure, they could be. However, since I’m not fond of playing by the rules, I have to suspect they won’t be. Speculating on Egyptian mummies loaded with cocaine and nicotine and hashish, and Peruvian mummies with the same, necessarily leads us to Roanoke Island.

Stop looking at me like that. I already told you that Raleigh was credited with introducing tobacco to Europe, it’s an easy jump to Roanoke from there.