During the year which the colony had passed at Roanoke, Withe had made drawings from nature illustrative of the appearance and habits of the natives; and Hariot had accurately observed the soil and productions of the country, and the manners and customs of the natives, an account of which he afterwards published, entitled, "A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia." He (Lane) and some others of the colonists learned from the Indians the use of a narcotic plant called by them uppowoc; by the English tobacco. The natives smoked it; sprinkled the dust of it on their fishing weirs, to make them fortunate; burned it in sacrifices to appease the anger of the gods, and scattered it in the air and on the water to allay the fury of the tempest. Lane carried some tobacco to England, supposed by Camden to have been the first ever introduced into that kingdom. Sir Walter Raleigh, by his example, soon rendered the use of this seductive leaf fashionable at court; and his tobacco-box and pipes were long preserved by the curiosity of antiquaries. It is related, that having offered Queen Elizabeth some tobacco to smoke, after two or three whiffs she was seized with a nausea, upon observing which some of the Earl of Leicester's faction whispered that Sir Walter had certainly poisoned her. But her majesty in a short while recovering, made the Countess of Nottingham and all her maids smoke a whole pipe out among them. It is also said that Sir Walter made a wager with the queen, that he could calculate the weight of the smoke evaporated from a pipeful of tobacco. This he easily won by weighing first the tobacco, and then the ashes, when the queen acknowledged that the difference must have gone off in smoke. Upon paying the wager, she gayly remarked, that "she had heard of many workers in the fire who had turned their gold into smoke, but that Sir Walter was the first that had turned his smoke into gold." Another familiar anecdote is, that a country servant of Raleigh's, bringing him a tankard of ale and nutmeg into his study as he was intently reading and smoking, was so alarmed at seeing clouds of smoke issuing from his master's mouth, that, throwing the ale into his face, he ran down stairs crying out that Sir Walter was on fire.
Sir Walter Raleigh never visited Virginia himself, although it has been so represented by several writers. Hariot's "Report of the new found land" was translated by a Frenchman[25:A] into Latin, and this translation refers to those "qui generosum D. Walterum Raleigh in eam regionem comitati sunt." The error of the translator in employing the words "comitati sunt," has been pointed out by Stith, and that error probably gave rise to the mistake which has been handed down from age to age, and is still prevalent. A few days after Drake's departure, a vessel arrived at Roanoke with supplies for the colony; but finding it abandoned, she set sail for England. Within a fortnight afterwards, Sir Richard Grenville, with three relief vessels fitted out principally by Raleigh, arrived off Virginia; and, unwilling that the English should lose possession of the country, he left fifteen men on the island, with provisions for two years. These repeated disappointments did not abate Raleigh's indomitable resolution. During the ensuing year he sent out a new expedition of three vessels to establish a colony chartered by the title of "The Governor and Assistants of the City of Raleigh in Virginia." John White was sent out as governor with twelve counsellors, and they were directed to plant themselves at the town of Chesapeakes, on Elizabeth River. Reaching Roanoke near the end of July, White found the colony deserted, the bones of a man scattered on the beach, the fort razed, and deer couching in the desolate houses or feeding on the rank vegetation which had overgrown the floor and crept up the walls. Raleigh's judicious order, instructing White to establish himself on the banks of Elizabeth River, was not carried into effect, owing to the refusal of Ferdinando, the naval-officer, to co-operate in exploring the country for that purpose.
One of the English having been slain by the savages, a party was dispatched to avenge his death, and by mistake unfortunately killed several of a friendly tribe. Manteo, by Raleigh's direction, was christened, and created Lord of Roanoke and Dassamonpeake. On the eighteenth of August, the governor's daughter, Eleanor, wife to Ananias Dare, one of the council, gave birth to a daughter, the first Christian child born in the country, and hence named Virginia. Dissensions soon arose among the settlers; and, although not in want of stores, some, disappointed in not finding the new country a paradise of indolent felicity, as they had fondly anticipated, demanded permission to return home; others vehemently opposed; at length all joined in requesting White to sail for England, and to return thence with supplies. To this he reluctantly consented; and setting sail in August, 1587, from Roanoke, where he left eighty-nine men, seventeen women, and eleven children, he arrived in England on the fifth of November.
He found the kingdom wholly engrossed in taking measures of defence against the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, and Raleigh, Grenville, and Lane assisting Elizabeth in her council of war—a conjuncture most unpropitious to the interests of the infant colony. Raleigh, nevertheless, found time even in this portentous crisis of public affairs to dispatch White with supplies in two vessels. But these, running after prizes, encountered privateers, and, after a bloody engagement, one of them was so disabled and plundered that White was compelled to put back to England, while it was impossible to refit, owing to the urgency of more important matters. But, even after the destruction of the Armada, Sir Walter Raleigh found it impracticable to prosecute any further his favorite design of establishing a colony in Virginia; and in 1589 he formed a company of merchants and adventurers, and assigned to it his proprietary rights. This corporation included among its members Thomas Smith, a wealthy London merchant, afterwards knighted; and Richard Hakluyt, dean of Westminster, the compiler of a celebrated collection of voyages. He is said to have visited Virginia, and Stith gives it as his opinion that he must have come over in one of the last-mentioned abortive expeditions. Raleigh, at the time of making this assignment, gave a hundred pounds for propagating Christianity among the natives of Virginia. After experiencing a long series of vexations, difficulties, and disappointments, he had expended forty thousand pounds in fruitless efforts for planting a colony in Virginia. At length, disengaged from this enterprise, he indulged his martial genius, and bent all his energies against the colossal ambition of Spain, who now aspired to overshadow the world.
More than another year was suffered to elapse before White returned to search for the long-neglected colony. He had now been absent from it for three years, and felt the solicitude not only of a governor, but also of a parent. Upon his departure from Roanoke it had been concerted between him and the settlers, that if they should abandon that island for another seat, they should carve the name of the place to which they should remove on some conspicuous object; and if they should go away in distress, a cross should be carved above the name. Upon his arrival at Roanoke, White found not one of the colonists; the houses had been dismantled and a fort erected; goods had been buried in the earth, and in part disinterred and scattered; on a post within the fort the word CROATAN was carved, without a cross above it. The weather proving stormy, some of White's company were lost by the capsizing of a boat; the stock of provisions grew scanty; and no further search was then made. Raleigh, indeed, sent out parties in quest of them at five different times, the last in 1602, at his own charge; but not one of them made any search for the unfortunate colonists. None of them were ever found; and whether they perished by famine, or the Indian tomahawk, was left a subject of sad conjecture. The site of the colony was unfortunate, being difficult of access, and near the stormy Cape Hatteras, whose very name is synonymous with peril and shipwreck. Thus, after many nobly planned but unhappily executed expeditions, and enormous expense of treasure and life, the first plantation of Virginia became extinct.
In the year 1591 Sir Richard Grenville fell, in a bloody action with a Spanish fleet near the Azores. Mortally wounded, he was removed on board one of the enemy's ships, and in two days died. In the hour of his death he said, in the Spanish language, to those around him: "Here I, Richard Grenville, die with a joyous and quiet mind, for that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, fighting for his country, queen, religion, and honor, my soul willingly departing from this body, leaving behind the lasting fame of having behaved as every valiant soldier is in his duty bound to do." His dying words may recall to mind the familiar verses of Campbell's Lochiel:—
"And leaving in death no blot on my name,
Look proudly to heaven for a death-bed of fame."
Sir Richard Grenville was, next to his kinsman, Sir Walter Raleigh, the principal person concerned in the first settlement of Virginia.
In 1602, the forty-third and last year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, deviating from the usual oblique route by the Canaries and the West Indies, made a direct voyage in a small bark across the Atlantic, and in seven weeks reached Massachusetts Bay. It was on this occasion that Englishmen, for the first time, landed on the soil of New England. Gosnold returned to England in a short passage of five weeks. In these early voyages the heroism of the navigators is the more admirable when we advert to the extremely diminutive size of their vessels and the comparative imperfection of nautical science at that day. Encouraged by Gosnold's success, the mayor, aldermen, and merchants of Bristol sent out an expedition under Captain Pring, in the same direction, in 1603, the year of the accession of James I. to the throne. During the same year a bark was dispatched from London under Captain Bartholomew Gilbert, who fell in with the coast in latitude 37°, and, as some authors say, ran up into the Chesapeake Bay, where the captain and four of his men were slain by the Indians.
In 1605 Captain Weymouth came over under the auspices of Henry, Earl of Southampton, and Lord Thomas Arundel.