The instructions of Raleigh had designated the place for the new settlement on the bay of the 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. The fort of Governor Lane, "with sundry decent dwelling-houses," had been built at the northern extremity of the island; it was there that in July the foundations of the city of Raleigh were laid. The island is now almost uninhabited; commerce has selected securer harbors; the intrepid pilot and the hardy "wrecker" are the only occupants of the spot, where the inquisitive stranger after more than two centuries could still discern the ruins of the fort, round which the cottages of the new settlement were erected. 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 mutual good-will 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 they were sitting by their fires, and havoc was begun before it was perceived that these were friendly Indians. The vanities of life were not forgotten; "by the commandment of Sir Walter Raleigh," Manteo, the faithful Indian chief, after receiving Christian baptism, was invested with the rank of baron, as the Lord of Roanoke. With the returning ship White embarked for England, under the excuse of interceding for re-enforcements and supplies. Yet, on the eighteenth 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 eighty-nine men, seventeen 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 further 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; and Grenville, Raleigh, and Lane, not less than Frobisher, Drake, and Hawkins, were engaged in measures of resistance. 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 forty thousand pounds, 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 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. The name of Raleigh stands highest among the statesmen of England who advanced the colonization of the United States. Courage, self-possession, and fertility of invention, ensured him glory in his profession of arms; and his services in the conquest of Cadiz and the capture of Fayal established his fame as a gallant and successful commander. No soldier in retirement ever expressed the charms of tranquil leisure more beautifully than Raleigh, whose "sweet verse" Spenser described as "sprinkled with nectar," and rivalling the melodies of "the summer's nightingale." When an unjust verdict left him to languish for years in prison, with the sentence of death suspended over his head, he, who had been a warrior, a courtier, and a seaman, in an elaborate "History of the World," "told the Greek and Roman story more fully and exactly than any earlier English writer, and with an eloquence which has given his work a classical reputation in our language." In his civil career he was jealous of the honor, the prosperity, and the advancement of his country. In parliament he defended the freedom of domestic industry. When, through unequal legislation, taxation was a burden upon indus try rather than wealth, he argued for a change; himself possessed of a lucrative monopoly, he gave his voice for the repeal of all monopolies; he used his influence with his sovereign to mitigate the severity of the judgments against the non-conformists, and 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 that of Davis in the north-west; and explored in person "the insular regions and broken world" of Guiana. His lavish efforts in colonizing the soil of our republic, his sagacity which enjoined a settlement within the Chesapeake bay, the publications of Hariot and Hakluyt which he countenanced, diffused over England a knowledge of America, as well as an interest in its destinies, and sowed the seeds, of which the fruits began to ripen during his lifetime. Raleigh had suffered in health before his last undertaking. He returned broken-hearted by the defeat of his hopes, the decay of his strength, and the death of his eldest son. What shall be said of King James, who would open to an aged paralytic no hope of liberty but through the discovery of mines in Guiana? What shall be said of a monarch who could, under a sentence which had slumbered for fifteen years, order the execution of the decrepit man, whose genius and valor shone through the ravages of physical decay, and whose heart still beat with an undying love for his country? The family of the chief author of early colonization 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, revived in its capital "THE CITY OF RALEIGH," in grateful commemoration of his name and fame. Imagination already saw beyond the Atlantic a people whose mother idiom should be the language of England. "Who knows," exclaimed Daniel, the poet-laureate of that kingdom-"Who in time knows whither we may vent The treasures of our tongue? To what strange shores This gain of our best glory shall be sent T'enrich unknowing nations with our stores? May 'come refined with th' accents that are ours." In 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold, a discreet and intrepid navigator, who remained till death devoted to the English colonization of Virginia, undertook the direct voyage from the British channel to America. From the Azores, to which he was borne by contrary winds, he ran a westerly course across the Atlantic, but the weakness of his ship, the unskilfulness of his crew, and his caution, from ignorance of the ocean and the nearest land, causing him to carry but a low sail, it was only after seven weeks that he came in sight of Cape Elizabeth in Maine. Following the coast to the south-west, he skirted "an outpoint of wooded land;" and, about noon of the fourteenth of May, he anchored "near Savage rock," to the east of York harbor. There he met a Biscay shallop; and there he was visited by natives. Not finding his "purposed place," he stood to the south, and on the morning of the fifteenth discovered the promontory which he named Cape Cod. He and four of his men went on shore; Cape Cod was the first spot in that region ever trod by Englishmen. Doubling the cape, and passing Nantucket, they touched at No Man's Land, passed round the promontory of Gay Head, naming it Dover Cliff, and 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 group. Here they beheld the rank vegetation of a virgin soil: noble forests; wild fruits and flowers bursting from the earth; the eglantine, the thorn, and the honeysuckle; the wild pea, the tansy, and young sassafras; strawberries, raspberries, grape-vines-all in profusion. Within a pond upon the island lies a rocky islet; on this the adventurers built their storehouse and their fort; and the foundations of a colony were laid. The island, the pond, the islet, remain; the shrubs are luxuriant as of old; but the forests are gone, and the ruins of the fort can no longer be discerned. A traffic with the natives on the main enabled Gosnold to lade the Concord with sassafras root, then esteemed in pharmacy as a sovereign panacea. The band, which was to have nestled on the Elizabeth islands, despairing of supplies of food, and fearing the Indians, determined not to remain. In June the party bore for England, leaving not so much as one European family between Florida and Labrador. 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 favorable reports of the regions which they had visited. Could it be that the passage was so safe, the climate so pleasant, the country so inviting? The merchants of Bristol, with the ready assent of Raleigh, and at the instance of Richard Hakluyt,—the enlightened friend and able documentary historian of these commercial enterprises, a man whose fame should be vindicated and asserted in the land which he helped to colonize,-determined to pursue |