[1587 A.D.]

appointed its governor; and to him, with eleven assistants, the administration of the colony was intrusted. A fleet of transport ships was prepared at the expense of the proprietary; "Queen Elizabeth, the godmother of Virginia,' declined contributing "to its education." The company as it embarked April 26th), was cheered by the presence of women; and an ample provision of the implements of husbandry gave a pledge for successful industry. 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; wild deer were reposing in the untenanted houses, and were feeding on the productions which a rank vegetation still forced from the gardens. The fort was in ruins. No vestige of surviving life appeared. The miserable men whom Grenville had left, had been murdered by the Indians.

The fort of Governor Lane, "with sundry decent dwelling-houses," had been built at the northern extremity of the island; it was there that the foundations of the city of Raleigh were laid (July 23rd). The island of Roanoke is now almost uninhabited; commerce has selected securer harbours for its pursuits; the inquisitive stranger may yet discern the ruins of the fort, round which the cottages of the new settlement were erected.

But disasters thickened. A tribe of savages displayed implacable jealousy, and murdered one of the assistants. The mother and the kindred of Manteo welcomed the English to the island of Croatan; and a mutual friendship was continued. But even this alliance was not unclouded. A detachment of the English, discovering a company of the natives whom they esteemed their enemies, fell upon them by night, as the harmless men were sitting fearlessly by their fires; and the havoc was begun, before it was perceived that these were friendly Indians.

The vanities of life were not forgotten in the New World; and Manteo, the faithful Indian chief, "by the commandment of Sir Walter Raleigh," received Christian baptism, and was invested with the rank of a feudal baron, as the lord of Roanoke. It was the first peerage erected by the English in America, and remained a solitary dignity, till Locke and Shaftesbury suggested the establishment of palatinates in Carolina, and Manteo shared his honours with the admired philosopher of his age. As the time for the departure of the ship for England drew near, the emigrants became gloomy with apprehensions; they were conscious of their dependence on Europe; and they, with one voice, women as well as men, urged the governor to return and use his vigorous intercession for the prompt despatch of reinforcements and supplies. It was in vain that he pleaded a sense of honour, which called upon him to remain and share in person the perils of the colony, which he was appointed to govern. He was forced to yield to the general importunity.

Yet, previous to his departure, his daughter, Eleanor Dare, the wife of one of the assistants, gave birth (August 18th) 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 eighty-nine men, seventeen women, and two children, whose names are all preserved, might reasonably hope for the speedy return of the governor, who, as he sailed for England, left with them, as hostages, his daughter and his grandchild, Virginia Dare.

And yet even those ties were insufficient. The colony received no seasonable relief; and the further history of this neglected plantation is involved in

H. W.-VOL. XXII. 20

[1588-1589 A.D.]

gloomy uncertainty. The inhabitants of the city of Raleigh, the emigrants from England and the first-born of America, failed, like their predecessors, in establishing an enduring settlement; but, unlike their predecessors, they awaited death in the land of their adoption. If America had no English towns, it soon had English graves.

For when White reached England, he found its whole attention absorbed by the threats of an invasion from Spain; and Grenville, Raleigh, and Lane, not less than Frobisher, Drake, and Hawkins, were engaged in planning measures of resistance. Yet Raleigh, whose patriotism did not diminish his generosity, found means to despatch White with supplies in two vessels (April 22nd, 1588). But the company, desiring a gainful voyage rather than a safe one, ran in chase of prizes; till, at last, one of them fell in with men-ofwar from Rochelle, and, after a bloody fight, was boarded and rifled. Both ships were compelled to return immediately to England, to the ruin of the colony and the displeasure of its author. The delay was fatal; the independence of the English kingdom, and the security of 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 when complete success against the Spanish fleet had crowned the arms of England, Sir Walter Raleigh, who had already incurred a fruitless expense of forty thousand pounds, found himself unable to continue the attempts at colonising Virginia. Yet he did not despair of ultimate success; and as his fortune did not permit him to renew his exertions, he used the privilege of his patent to form a company of merchants and adventurers, who were endowed by his liberality with large concessions, and who, it was hoped, would replenish Virginia with settlers. Among the men who thus obtained an assignment of the proprietary's rights in Virginia, is found the name of Richard Hakluyt; it is the connecting link between the first efforts of England in North Carolina and the final colonisation of Virginia. The colonists at Roanoke had emigrated with a charter; the new instrument (March 7th, 1589) was not an assignment of Raleigh's patent, but extended a grant, already held under its sanction, by increasing the number to whom the rights of that charter belonged. Yet the enterprise of the adventurers languished, for it was no longer encouraged by the profuse liberality of Raleigh. 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. Had the emigrants already perished? or had they escaped with their lives to Croatan, and, through the friendship of Manteo, become familiar with the Indians? The conjecture has been hazarded, that the deserted colony, neglected by their own countrymen, were hospitably adopted into the tribe of Hatteras Indians, and became amalgamated with the sons of the forest. This was the tradition of the natives at a later day, and was thought to be confirmed by the physical character of the tribe, in which the English and the Indian race seemed to have been blended. Raleigh long cherished the hope of discovering some vestiges of their existence; and though he had abandoned the design of colonising Virginia, he yet sent at his own charge, and, it is said, at five several times, to search for his liege-men.' But it was all in vain; imagination received no help in its attempts to trace the fate of the colony of Roanoke.ƒ

[' In 1602, Raleigh made his fifth effort to afford them help by sending them Captain Mace, a mariner of experience, with instructions to search for them. Mace returned without executing his orders, and Raleigh wrote to Sir Robert Cecil on the 21st of August that he would

[1588-1589 A.D.]

After the founding of Jamestown, according to Strachey, the English were told by the Indians that the Roanoke settlers had finally intermingled with the natives and had been massacred at the command of Powhatan and his priests just about the time when the English reached Jamestown. One chief had saved the lives of four men, two boys, and a girl, and from their intermarriage came the so-called Hatteras Indians found near Roanoke Island early in the eighteenth century, and notable for their grey eyes, and their traditions of white ancestry.a

GEORGE BANCROFT'S ESTIMATE OF RALEIGH

The name of Raleigh stands highest among the statesmen of England, who advanced the colonisation of the United States; and his fame belongs to American history. No Englishman of his age possessed so various or so extraordinary qualities. Courage which was never daunted, mild self-possession, and fertility of invention, insured him glory in his profession of arms; and his services in the conquest of Cadiz, or the capture of Fayal, were alone sufficient to establish his fame as a gallant and successful commander. In every danger, his life was distinguished by valour, and his death was ennobled by true magnanimity.

He was not only admirable in active life as a soldier; he was an accomplished scholar. No statesman in retirement ever expressed the charms of tranquil leisure more beautifully than Raleigh; and it was not entirely with the language of grateful friendship, that Spenser described his "sweet verse as sprinkled with nectar," and rivalling the melodies of "the summer's nightingale." When an unjust verdict, contrary to probability and the evidence, against law and against equity," on a charge which seems to have been a pure invention, left him to languish for years in prison, with the sentence of death suspended over his head, his active genius plunged into the depths of erudition; and he who had been a soldier, a courtier, and a seaman, now became the elaborate author of a learned History of the World.

His career as a statesman was honourable to the pupil of Coligny and the contemporary of L'Hopital. In his public policy, he was thoroughly an English patriot; jealous of the honour, the prosperity, and the advancement of his country; the inexorable antagonist of the pretensions of Spain. In parliament, he defended the freedom of domestic industry. When, by the operation of unequal laws, taxation was a burden upon industry rather than wealth, he argued for a change: himself possessed of a lucrative monopoly, he gave his voice for the repeal of all monopolies; and, while he pertinaciously used his influence with his sovereign to mitigate the severity of the judgments against the non-conformists, as a legislator he resisted the sweeping enactment of persecuting laws.

In the career of discovery, his perseverance was never baffled by losses. He joined in the risks of Gilbert's expedition; contributed to the discoveries of Davis in the northwest; and himself personally explored "the insular regions and broken world" of Guiana. The sincerity of his belief in the wealth of the latter country has been unreasonably questioned. If Elizabeth had hoped for a hyperborean Peru in the Arctic seas of America, why might not Raleigh expect to find the city of gold on the banks of the Orinoco? His lavish efforts in colonising the soil of America, his sagacity which enjoined a send Mace back, and expressed his faith in the colonisation of Virginia in these words: "I shall yet live to see it an English nation." He lived, indeed, to see his prediction verified, but not until he was immured in the Tower of London.-WM. WIRT HENRY."

[1593-1602 A.D.] settlement within the Chesapeake Bay, the publications of Hariot, and Hakluyt, which he countenanced, if followed by losses to himself, diffused over England a knowledge of America, as well as an interest in its destinies, and sowed the seeds, of which the fruits were to ripen during his lifetime, though not for him.

Raleigh had suffered from palsy before his last expedition. He returned broken hearted by the defeat of his hopes, by the decay of his health, and by the death of his eldest son. What shall be said of King James, who would open to an aged paralytic no other hope of liberty but through success in the discovery of mines in Guiana? What shall be said of a monarch who could, at that time, under a sentence which was originally unjust, and which had slumbered for fifteen years, order the execution (in 1618) of the decrepit man, whose genius and valour shone brilliantly through the ravages of physical decay, and whose English heart, within a palsied frame, still beat with an undying love for his country?

The judgments of the tribunals of the Old World are often reversed at the bar of public opinion in the New. The family of the chief author of early colonisation in the United States was reduced to beggary by the government of England, and he himself was beheaded. After a lapse of nearly two centuries, the state of North Carolina, in 1792, by a solemn act of legislation, revived in its capital the city of Raleigh, and thus expressed its confidence in the integrity, and a grateful respect for the memory, of the extraordinary man, who united in himself as many kinds of glory as were ever combined in an individual, and whose name is indissolubly connected with the early period of American history

VOYAGES OF GOSNOLD AND PRING

Some traffic with Virginia may perhaps have been continued. But at the north, the connection of the English merchants was become so intimate, that, in 1593, Sir Walter Raleigh, in the house of commons had declared the fishing of Newfoundland to be the stay of the west countries. These voyages, and the previous exertions of Raleigh, had trained men for the career of discovery; and Bartholomew Gosnold, who, perhaps, had already sailed to Virginia, in the usual route, by the Canaries and West Indies, now conceived the idea of a direct voyage to America, and, with the concurrence of Raleigh, had well nigh secured to New England the honour of the first permanent English colony. Steering, in a small bark, directly across the Atlantic, in seven weeks he reached (March 26th, 1602) the continent of America in the bay of Massachusetts, not far to the north of Nahant. He failed to observe a good harbour, and, standing for the south, discovered (May 14th, 1602) the promontory which he called Cape Cod - a name which would not yield to that of the next monarch of England. Here he and four of his men landed; Cape Cod was the first spot in New England ever trod by Englishmen. Doubling the cape, and passing Nantucket, they again landed on a little island, now called No Man's land, and afterwards passed round the promontory of Gay Head, naming it Dover Cliff. At length they entered Buzzard's Bay - a stately sound, which they called Gosnold's Hope. The westernmost of the islands was named Elizabeth, from the queen — a name which has been transferred to the whole group. There is on the island a pond, and within it lies a rocky islet; this was the position which the adventurers selected for their residence. Here they built their storehouse and their fort; and here the foundations of the first New England colony were to be laid.

[1603-1606 A.D.]

A traffic with the natives on the main land, soon enabled Gosnold to complete his freight, which consisted chiefly of sassafras root, then greatly esteemed in pharmacy as a sovereign panacea. The little band, which was to have nestled on the Elizabeth Islands, finding their friends about to embark for Europe, despaired of obtaining seasonable supplies of food, and determined not to remain. Fear of an assault from the Indians, who had ceased to be friendly, the want of provisions, and jealousy respecting the distribution of the risks and profits, defeated the design. The whole party soon set sail and bore for England. The return voyage lasted but five weeks; and the expedition was completed in less than four months, during which entire health had prevailed.

Gosnold and his companions spread the most favourable reports of the regions which he had visited. The merchants of Bristol, with the ready assent of Raleigh, and at the instance of Richard Hakluyt, determined to pursue the career of investigation. The Speedwell, a small ship of fifty tons and thirty men, and the Discoverer, a bark of twenty-six tons and thirteen men, under the command of Martin Pring, set sail for America (April 10th, 1603) a few days after the death of the queen. It was a private undertaking, and therefore not retarded by that event. It reached the American coast among the islands which skirt the harbours of Maine. The mouth of the Penobscot offered good anchorage and fishing. Pring made a discovery of the eastern rivers and harbours - the Saco, the Kennebunk, and the York; and the channel of the Piscataqua was examined for three or four leagues. Meeting no sassafras, he steered for the south; doubled Cape Ann; and went on shore in Massachusetts; but, being still unsuccessful, he again pursued a southerly track, and finally anchored in Old Town harbour, on Martha's Vineyard. The whole absence lasted about six months, and was completed without disaster or danger. Pring, a few years later, in 1606, repeated his voyage, and made a more accurate survey of Maine.

Enterprises for discovery were now continuous. Bartholomew Gilbert, returning from the West Indies, made an unavailing search for the colony of Raleigh. It was the last attempt to trace the remains of those unfortunate men. But as the testimony of Pring had confirmed the reports of Gosnold, the career of navigation was vigorously pursued. An expedition, in 1605, promoted by the earl of Southampton and Lord Arundel, of Wardour, and commanded by George Weymouth, who, in attempting a northwest passage, had already explored the coast of Labrador, now discovered the Penobscot river. Weymouth left England in March, and, in about six weeks, came in sight of the American continent near Cape Cod. Turning to the north, he approached the coast of Maine, and ascended the western branch of the Penobscot beyond Belfast Bay. Five natives were decoyed on board the ship, and Weymouth, returning to England, gave three of them to Sir Ferdinand Gorges, a friend of Raleigh, and governor of Plymouth.

Such were the voyages which led the way to the colonisation of the United States. The daring and skill of these earliest adventurers upon the ocean deserve the highest admiration. The difficulties of crossing the Atlantic were new, and it required great courage to encounter hazards which ignorance exaggerated. The character of the prevalent winds and currents was unknown. The possibility of making a direct passage was but gradually discovered. The imagined dangers were infinite; the real dangers, exceedingly great. The ships at first employed for discovery were generally of less than one hundred tons burthen; Frobisher sailed in a vessel of but twenty-five tons; two of those of Columbus were without a deck; and so perilous were the voyages