“All along the Sea coast,” Hariot wrote, “there are great store of Otters, which being taken by weares and other engines made for the purpose, wil yeeld good profit. We hope also of Marterne furres, and make no doubt by the relation of the people, that in some places of the countrey there are store, although there were but two skinnes that came to our hands. Luzernes also we have understanding of, although for the time we saw none.”
But even Hariot, along with Ralph Lane, the governor of the colony at the time, listened gullibly to the tales of Indians who wanted to gain favor. While Sir Richard Grenville, the admiral of the Virginia fleet, raided the Spaniards in the West Indies, Lane and his men spent months of fruitless search in the interior for white pearls or mines, and followed many a river whose source might prove to be “near unto a sea.”
They explored north as far as the Chesapeake, entering the capes and looking for a channel that might be the passage, while one of their party, John White, made sketches of the region. The south side of the bay thus became well known in England about 1590 when White’s work was included in the first engraved map of Virginia published by Theodore de Bry. What the Englishmen failed to understand at the time, because they were more concerned with gold mines and channel passages, was that the Chesapeake tidewater represented a storehouse of valuable fur—muskrat, beaver, mink and otter—all in vast reserve.
Lane, however, was convinced that only “the discovery of a good mine by the goodness of God, or a passage to the South Sea, or some way to it, and nothing else, can bring this country in request to be inhabited by our nation.” If only he had realized that within easy reach there was far more quick gold in fur than the English would ever take out of America in ore!
A last contingent of Raleigh’s colonists, which included some women and children, provided one of history’s most mystifying episodes when the entire colony simply vanished from Roanoke Island. Among them was the first Christian child born in English Virginia, little Virginia Dare, granddaughter of the colony’s new governor, John White, the artist. The word “Croatan,” carved in “faire Romane letters” on a post of the abandoned stockade, was the only clue to the lost colony ever found by those who came later to search for it. A tribe of Indians by that name lived on a near-by island. Even this proved futile however, and the mystery has only darkened with the passing of the centuries.
Other English ventures in America also ended in failure. Beginning in 1585 Captain John Davis, an expert navigator, went out three times in quest of a northwest passage to Cathay. He penetrated farther north than anyone before him to discover the straits that bear his name, never fully realizing that beyond lay only pack ice. Captain George Weymouth followed Davis’ track in 1593, meeting eventual defeat.
Weymouth tried again for a northern passage in 1602; so did Captain John Knight in 1606 while exploring for gold and silver mines. Ice and mutiny stopped Weymouth. Knight simply disappeared ashore one day.
Not long after the turn of the century Captain Charles Leigh led a daring expedition to South America in an attempt to establish a base of operations in what is now French Guiana. Only a remnant survived a massacre by the natives in 1605 to straggle back to England.
The coast of North America from Spanish Florida to Nova Scotia also came in for more investigation at this time. Bartholomew Gilbert, son of Sir Humphrey, was sent out by James I in 1603. He visited the Chesapeake Bay area, possibly hoping to find survivors of the Roanoke colony, only to be killed himself by Indians when he landed with a shore party.
Others explored in the vicinity of Cape Cod and northward, Bartholomew Gosnold, going out to that coast in 1602, and Martin Pring in 1603. They found no mines, but they took back to England quantities of cedar, sassafras and furs. Gosnold’s cargo of pelts obtained from the Buzzard’s Bay area included beaver, marten, otter, “Wild-cat skinnes very large and deepe furre,” seal, deer, black fox, rabbit and “other beasts skinnes to us unknowen.”