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 Aug. 27. his daughter and his grandchild, VIRGINIA DARE. 1587. Yet even those ties were insufficient. The further history of this neglected 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. If America had no English town, it soon had English graves. 1588. 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 to despatch White with supplies in two vessels. But the company, desiring a gain- April 22. ful 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 immediately to England, to the ruin of the colony and the displeasure of its author. 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; 1589 the new instrument was not an assignment of RaMarch 7. leigh'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. 1590. 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. 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 it was all in vain; 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 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 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, his active genius plunged into the depths of erudition; and he who had been a warrior, a courtier, and a seaman, became the author of an elaborate History of the World. In his civil career he was thoroughly an English patriot; jealous of the honor, the prosperity, and the advancement of his country; the steadfast antagonist of the exorbitant pretensions of Spain. In parliament, he defended the freedom of domestic industry. When, through unequal legislation, 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; 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 were to ripen during his lifetime, though not for him. Raleigh had suffered in health before his last expedition. He returned broken-hearted by the defeat of his hopes, by the decay of his strength, 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 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 English 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 1792. 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, 1593. Who in time knows whither we may vent The treasures of our tongue? To what strange shores T'enrich unknowing nations with our stores? Already the fishing of Newfoundland was become the stay of the west countries. Some traffic may have continued with Virginia. Thus were men trained for the career of discovery; and in 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold, who, perhaps, had already sailed to Virginia, in the usual route, by the Canaries and West Indies, conceiving the idea of a direct voyage to America, with the concurrence of Raleigh, Mar. 26. had well-nigh secured to New England the honor of 1602 the first permanent English colony. Steering, in a small bark, directly across the Atlantic, in seven weeks he reached Cape Elizabeth, on the coast of Maine. Following the coast to the south-west, he skirted "an outpoint May 14. 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 May 15. 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 New England ever trod by Englishmen, while as yet there was not one Euro pean family on the continent from Florida to HudMay 24. son's Bay. 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 the first New England colony were laid. The island, the pond, the islet, are yet visible; 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, finding their friends about to embark for Europe, despaired of supplies of food, and determined not to remain. Fear of 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 party soon set sail, and bore June 18. 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. 1602. Gosnold and his companions spread the most favorable reports of the regions which he had visited. Could it be that the voyage 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 the career of investigation. The "Speedwell," a ship of fifty tons and thirty men, the "Discoverer," a bark of twenty-six tons and thirteen men, under the command of Martin Pring, set sail for America a few days after the death of the queen. It was a private undertaking, and therefore not retarded by that event. The ship was well provided with trinkets and merchandise, suited to a traffic with the 1603. Apr. 10. |