volume 12.

AMERICA: A. D. 1584-1586. Raleigh's First Colonizing attempts and failures.

"The task in which Gilbert had failed was to be undertaken by one better qualified to carry it out. If any Englishman in that age seemed to be marked out as the founder of a colonial empire, it was Raleigh. Like Gilbert, he had studied books; like Drake he could rule men. ... The associations of his youth, and the training of his early manhood, fitted him to sympathize with the aims of his half-brother Gilbert, and there is little reason to doubt that Raleigh had a share in his undertaking and his failure. In 1584 he obtained a patent precisely similar to Gilbert's. His first step showed the thoughtful and well-planned system on which he began his task. Two ships were sent out, not with any idea of settlement, but to examine and report upon the country. Their commanders were Arthur Barlow and Philip Amidas. To the former we owe the extant record of the voyage: the name of the latter would suggest that he was a foreigner. Whether by chance or design, they took a more southerly course than any of their predecessors. On the 2d of July the presence of shallow water, and a smell of sweet flowers, warned them that land was near. The promise thus given was amply fulfilled upon their approach. The sight before them was far different from that which had met the eyes of Hore and Gilbert. Instead of the bleak coast of Newfoundland, Barlow and Amidas looked upon a scene which might recall the softness of the Mediterranean. ... Coasting along for about 120 miles, the voyagers reached an inlet and with some difficulty entered. They then solemnly took possession of the land in the Queen's name, and then delivered it over to Raleigh according to his patent. They soon discovered that the land upon which they had touched was an island about 20 miles long, and not above six broad, named, as they afterwards learnt, Roanoke. Beyond, separating them from the mainland, lay an enclosed sea, studded with more than a hundred fertile and well-wooded islets." The Indians proved friendly, and were described by Barlow as being "most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all guile and treason, and such as live after the manner of the golden age." "The report which the voyagers took home spoke as favourably of the land itself as of its inhabitants. ... With them they brought two of the savages, named Wanchese and Manteo. A probable tradition tells us that the queen herself named the country Virginia, and that Raleigh's knighthood was the reward and acknowledgment of his success. {70} On the strength of this report Raleigh at once made preparations for a settlement. A fleet of seven ships was provided for the conveyance of 108 settlers. The fleet was under the command of Sir Richard Grenvillle, who was to establish the settlement and leave it under the charge of Ralph Lane. ... On the 9th of April [1585] the emigrants set sail." For some reason not well explained, the fleet made a circuit to the West Indies, and loitered for five weeks at the island of St. John's and at Hispaniola, reaching Virginia in the last days of June. Quarrels between the two commanders, Grenville and Lane, had already begun, and both seemed equally ready to provoke the enmity of the natives. In August, after exploring some sixty miles of the coast, Grenville returned to England, promising to come back the next spring with new colonists and stores. The settlement, thus left to the care of Lane, was established "at the north-east corner of the island of Roanoke, whence the settlers could command the strait. There, even now, choked by vines and underwood, and here and there broken by the crumbling remains of an earthen bastion, may be traced the outlines of the ditch which enclosed the camp, some forty yards square, the home of the first English settlers in the New World. Of the doings of the settlers during the winter nothing is recorded, but by the next spring their prospects looked gloomy. The Indians were no longer friends. ... The settlers, unable to make fishing weirs, and without seed corn, were entirely dependent on the Indians for their daily food. Under these circumstances, one would have supposed that Lane would have best employed himself in guarding the settlement and improving its condition. He, however, thought otherwise, and applied himself to the task of exploring the neighbouring territory." But a wide combination of hostile Indian tribes had been formed against the English, and their situation became from day to day more imperilled. At the beginning of June, 1586, Lane fought a bold battle with the savages and routed them; but no sign of Grenville appeared and the prospect looked hopeless. Just at this juncture, a great English fleet, sailing homewards from a piratical expedition to the Spanish Main, under the famous Captain Drake, came to anchor at Roanoke and offered succor to the disheartened colonists. With one voice they petitioned to be taken to England, and Drake received the whole party on board his ships. "The help of which the colonists had despaired was in reality close at hand. Scarcely had Drake's fleet left the coast when a ship well furnished by Raleigh with needful supplies, reached Virginia, and after searching for the departed settlers returned to England. About a fortnight later Grenville himself arrived with three ships. He spent some time in the country exploring, searching for the settlers, and at last, unwilling to lose possession of the country, landed fifteen men at Roanoke well supplied for two years, and then set sail for England, plundering the Azores, and doing much damage to the Spaniards."

_J. A. Doyle, The English in America: Virginia, &c., chapter 4_.

"It seems to be generally admitted that, when Lane and his company went back to England, they carried with them tobacco as one of the products of the country, which they presented to Raleigh, as the planter of the colony, and by him it was brought into use in England, and gradually in other European countries. The authorities are not entirely agreed upon this point. Josselyn says: 'Tobacco first brought into England by Sir John Hawkins, but first brought into use by Sir Walter Rawleigh many years after.' Again he says: 'Now (say some) Tobacco was first brought into England by Mr. Ralph Lane, out of Virginia. Others will have Tobacco to be first brought into England from Peru, by Sir Francis Drake's Mariners.' Camden fixes its introduction into England by Ralph Lane and the men brought back with him in the ships of Drake. He says: 'And these men which were brought back were the first that I know of, which brought into England that Indian plant which they call Tobacco and Nicotia, and use it against crudities, being taught it by the Indians.' Certainly from that time it began to be in great request, and to be sold at a high rate. ... Among the 108 men left in the colony with Ralph Lane in 1585 was Mr. Thomas Hariot, a man of a strongly mathematical and scientific turn, whose services in this connection were greatly valued. He remained there an entire year, and went back to England in 1586. He wrote out a full account of his observations in the New World."

_L. N. Tarbox, Sir Walter Raleigh and his Colony (Prince Society 1884)._

ALSO IN _T. Hariot, Brief and true Report (Reprinted in above-named Prince Society Publication)._

_F. L. Hawks, History of North Carolina, volume 1 (containing reprints of Lane's Account, Hariot's Report, &c.)_

_Original Documents edited by E. E. Hale (Archæologia Americana, volume 4)._

AMERICA: A. D. 1587-1590. The Lost Colony of Roanoke. End of the Virginia Undertakings of Sir Walter Raleigh.

"Raleigh, undismayed by losses, determined to plant an agricultural state; to send emigrants with their wives and families, who should make their homes in the New World; and, that life and property might be secured, in January, 1587, he granted a charter for the settlement, and a municipal government for the city of 'Raleigh.' John White was appointed its governor; and to him, with eleven assistants, the administration of the colony was intrusted. Transport ships were prepared at the expense of the proprietary; 'Queen Elizabeth, the godmother of Virginia,' declined contributing 'to its education.' Embarking in April, in July they arrived on the coast of North Carolina; they were saved from the dangers of Cape Fear; and, passing Cape Hatteras, they hastened to the isle of Roanoke, to search for the handful of men whom Grenville had left there as a garrison. They found the tenements deserted and overgrown with weeds; human bones lay scattered on the field where wild deer were reposing. The fort was in ruins. No vestige of surviving life appeared. The instructions of Raleigh had designated the place for the new settlement on the bay of Chesapeake. But Fernando, the naval officer, eager to renew a profitable traffic in the West Indies, refused his assistance in exploring the coast, and White was compelled to remain on Roanoke. ... It was there that in July the foundations of the city of Raleigh were laid. But the colony was doomed to disaster from the beginning, being quickly involved in warfare with the surrounding natives. "With the returning ship White embarked for England, under the excuse of interceding for re-enforcements and supplies. {71} Yet, on the 18th of August, nine days previous to his departure, his daughter Eleanor Dare, the wife of one of the assistants, gave birth to a female child, the first offspring of English parents on the soil of the United States. The infant was named from the place of its birth. The colony, now composed of 89 men, 17 women, and two children, whose names are all preserved, might reasonably hope for the speedy return of the governor, as he left with them his daughter and his grandchild, Virginia Dare. The farther history of this plantation is involved in gloomy uncertainty. The inhabitants of 'the city of Raleigh,' the emigrants from England and the first-born of America, awaited death in the land of their adoption. For, when White reached England, he found its attention absorbed by the threats of an invasion from Spain. ... Yet Raleigh, whose patriotism did not diminish his generosity, found means, in April 1588, to despatch White with supplies in two vessels. But the company, desiring a gainful voyage rather than a safe one, ran in chase of prizes, till one of them fell in with men of war from Rochelle, and, after a bloody fight, was boarded and rifled. Both ships were compelled to return to England. The delay was fatal: the English kingdom and the Protestant reformation were in danger; nor could the poor colonists of Roanoke be again remembered till after the discomfiture of the Invincible Armada. Even then Sir Walter Raleigh, who had already incurred a fruitless expense of £40,000, found his impaired fortune insufficient for further attempts at colonizing Virginia. He therefore used the privilege of his patent to endow a company of merchants and adventurers with large concessions. Among the men who thus obtained an assignment of the proprietary's rights in Virginia is found the name of Richard Hakluyt; it connects the first efforts of England in North Carolina with the final colonization of Virginia. The colonists at Roanoke had emigrated with a charter; the instrument of March, 1589, was not an assignment of Raleigh's patent, but the extension of a grant, already held under its sanction by increasing the number to whom the rights of that charter belonged. More than another year elapsed before White could return to search for his colony and his daughter; and then the island of Roanoke was a desert. An inscription on the bark of a tree pointed to Croatan; but the season of the year and the dangers from storms were pleaded as an excuse for an immediate return. The conjecture has been hazarded that the deserted colony, neglected by their own countrymen, were hospitably adopted into the tribe [the Croatans] of Hatteras Indians. Raleigh long cherished the hope of discovering some vestiges of their existence, and sent at his own charge, and, it is said, at five several times, to search for his liege men. But imagination received no help in its attempts to trace the fate of the colony of Roanoke."

_G. Bancroft, History of the United States,