III. escape shipwreck, they put to sea; and the vessels set CHAPTER aside for the colony were driven off the coast. Lane and his companions were now totally discour- 1586. aged. They declined to accept Drake's offer of another vessel, and, embarking on board the fleet, set sail for En- June 19. gland. Hardly were they gone when a ship, dispatched by Raleigh, with abundant supplies, arrived at Roanoke, and a fortnight after came Grenville with three more ships. Having searched in vain for the departed colonists, Grenville left fifteen men to retain possession. On his way home he plundered the Azores, a Portuguese settlement; the Portuguese and Spanish crowns, with the vast colonial empire appertaining to them, being now united on the head of Philip II., who claimed the Portuguese crown by inheritance, and held it in spite of the wishes of the people. January. The failure of Lane's colony did not deter Raleigh from a second experiment; and he found others ready to join him in it. To give the settlers a feeling of home, and to make them willing to remain, it was wisely determined to send out, not single men only, but families having a personal interest in the enterprise. A company was formed, and a charter was granted to John White 1587. and eleven others, as governor and assistants of the "city of Raleigh," in Virginia. Such was the designation of the new colony, designed to be planted in Chesapeake Bay, of which some vague idea had been obtained by Lane in his intercourse with the Indians. But the commander of the ships in which these adventurers sailed was in haste to depart for the West Indies, where he hoped to enrich himself by trade or Spanish prizes, and, refusing to spend time in explorations, he put the new colonists ashore at Roanoke. The houses of the former July. company were found standing, but deserted, and over CHAPTER grown with vines and weeds. A human skeleton lay whitening on the ground. Nothing appeared of the fif- 1587. teen men left by Grenville. ently visited by Manteo, the them that the fifteen men had been slain by some of the neighboring Indians, of whose hostility a new proof was presently experienced in the slaughter of one of the assistants, who had strolled a little distance from the fort. In haste for revenge, the colonists attacked an Indian party by night, and had slain several before they discovered in these supposed enemies a friendly band. When August. the time came for the departure of the vessels, White, the governor, was urged to go to England to secure and hasten the promised supplies. He left behind eightynine men, seventeen women, and eleven children, among whom was an infant grand-daughter of his own, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in America. When White arrived in England he found the nation. in universal excitement and alarm. The hostilities so long carried on against the Spaniards had produced, at last, a crisis. Provoked beyond endurance by the expeditions of Drake, the execution of Mary of Scotland, and the aid still afforded to the revolted Dutch, who had even chosen Leicester, Elizabeth's favorite, as their governor general, Philip II. undertook to carry into effect a sentence of the pope excommunicating and deposing the English queen, proclaiming a crusade against her, and giving her kingdom to any Catholic prince who would 1588. undertake to drive her from it. A great armament was preparing in the ports of Spain, Portugal, and the Low Countries, for the invasion of England. Notwithstanding the terrors of this threatened invasion, Raleigh fitted April. out White with two ships; but, stopping to cruise for Spanish prizes, one of these vessels, after a bloody en III. gagement, was itself boarded and rifled, and both were CHAPTER compelled to return. Other vessels, fitted out for the same purpose, were pressed into the public service; 1588. White himself was so employed; and, for the moment, the colony was neglected and forgotten. Raleigh had already spent £40,000 ($180,000) on this fruitless enterprise. Discouraged, or too much impoverished to go on, he assigned his patent to a compa- 1589. ny, of which Thomas Smith, a merchant of London, March 7. and White, already mentioned, were principal members. Some delay occurred in sending out assistance; 1590. but White, by the interest of Raleigh, presently obtained for three ships bound to the West Indies an exemption from an embargo which the queen had just laid, on condition that these ships should take out men and supplies for the colony at Roanoke. This condition was not very faithfully observed; only White was taken on board, and the ships remained so long cruising in the West Indies that it was the autumnal stormy season before they arrived on the Virginia coast. None of the colonists were any where to be found. The site of the settlement at Roanoke was inclosed by a strong palisade, but broken articles scattered about suggested the idea of violence and plunder. From an inscription carved on a tree, it was supposed that the colonists might have gone to Croatan, an island in the neighborhood; but, before search could be made, a storm arose, and the masters of the vessels, afraid to remain longer on so dangerous a coast, hastily set sail for England. Nor was any thing further ever heard of this unfortunate colony, the fate of which excited not a little commiseration. The company to which Raleigh had assigned his patent was content with occasionally sending a trading vessel to the coast. Among its members was Richard Hak CHAPTER luyt, a prebend of Westminster, who took a great interIII. est in the general subject of maritime adventure, and 1590. especially of American discovery, and who had just com menced the publication of a valuable collection of voyages. Through his interest, the sketches made by Wythe were delivered to De Bry, an enterprising German engraver and bookseller, by whom they were published in four separate editions, with an English, French, German, and Latin text-thus first exhibiting to the eyes of Europe the figures, dresses, and customs of the North American natives. De Bry also obtained and published the sketches of the painter Le Moyne, who had accompanied the ill-starred Huguenot expedition to Florida. Raleigh's attempt to colonize Virginia has been commonly assigned as the era of the introduction of tobacco into England. Very soon after the discovery of America, the Spaniards had learned the luxury of that narcotic. Through the Moors of Spain, its use very soon. spread to the Mohammedan nations of the East, among whom it seems to have become a great favorite long before it was much known in Europe. Commerce with Spain, or, perhaps, trading and privateering expeditions against the Spanish American settlements, first brought tobacco to England; but it does not appear to have attracted much attention till Raleigh made it fashionable. Lane's companions, who had learned from the Indians. the practice of smoking it, brought home a quantity with them, and, under the impulse of Raleigh's example, smoking, or "drinking" tobacco, as it was then called, became the fashion among the courtiers. Its exhilarating and soothing effects were obvious; it was imagined, also, to possess great medicinal virtues. use gradually spread, the physicians, the Puritans, and presently King James, opposing it in vain. In the course Its III. of the twenty or thirty years following, tobacco began CHAPTER to be a considerable article of commerce, and its use was not without a perceptible influence upon American colo- 1590. nization. It has often been asserted that these same colonists introduced the potato into England; but that must be a mistake. The history of the potato is somewhat obscure. It seems to have been derived from the cold plateaus of Peru. It was certainly known in Italy years before the planting of Roanoke. Among the vegetables described by Hariot as the produce of Virginia, there is none which can be taken for the potato-a root never cultivated by the North American Indians, and nowhere indigenous in North America, unless possibly somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. The mistake appears to have arisen from confounding this root with the potato, or sweet potato, which seems, indeed, to have been known and cultivated by the Indians of Virginia and Florida, and specimens of which Lane might have carried to England. These two roots, indeed, were long confounded by the English, who applied the name batata to both; indeed, a mistaken idea still prevails in the English colonies that they are the same plant, varied only by change of climate. was not till the middle of the last century that the potato began to be extensively cultivated as an article of food. It After years of blood and confusion in France, occasioned by the civil war between the Catholics and Protestants, peace was once more restored to that country by the reconciliation of Henry IV. to the pope, and the 1595. publication of the Edict of Nantes, by which the Hugue- 1598. nots were secured in the enjoyment of their civil rights and religious opinions. Under the administration of the judicious Sully, commerce revived. Even during the wars, a valuable fur trade to the American coast had been |