Sir Walter Ralegh, upon receiving the report of Lane, determined to make no further effort to settle Roanoke Island, but at once began to prepare for a settlement upon Chesapeake Bay. He granted a charter of incorporation to thirty-two persons, nineteen of whom were merchants of London who contributed their money, and thirteen, styled “the Governor and Assistants of the city of Ralegh in Virginia,” who adventured their persons in the enterprise. Of the nineteen styled merchants, ten were afterwards subscribers to the Virginia Company of London which settled Jamestown. Among them were Sir Thomas Smith, for years the chief officer of that company, and one of the two Richard Hakluyts. John White was selected as the governor, and with him were sent one hundred and fifty persons, including seventeen women. They were carried in three ships in charge of Simon Ferdinando, with directions to visit Roanoke Island and take away the men left there by Sir Richard Grenville, and then to steer for Chesapeake Bay. On July 22, 1587, they arrived at Hatorask, and White, taking with him forty of his best men, started in the pinnace to Roanoke Island.
Ferdinando, who was a Spaniard by birth, was either acting in the interest of Spain or was angered by his difficulties with White. He had purposely separated from one of the ships during the voyage, and instead of carrying the colony to Chesapeake Bay, as he had agreed, he no sooner saw White and his men aboard the pinnace for Roanoke Island, than he directed the sailors to bring none of the men back, on the pretext that the summer was too far spent to be looking for another place. The colony was thus forced to remain upon the island. They found evidence of the massacre by the savages of the men left by Grenville, and they soon experienced the hostility of the Indians toward themselves.
Manteo, who had gone to England with Lane, returned with White, and was of the greatest service to the colony. By the direction of Ralegh he “was christened in Roanoke, and called lord thereof, and of Dasamonguepeuk, in reward of his faithful service.” On the 18th of August Eleanor, daughter of the governor and wife of Ananias Dare one of the assistants, gave birth to a daughter, “and because this child was the first Christian born in Virginia, she was named Virginia.”
The little vessel, from which Ferdinando had parted company, arrived safely with the rest of the colony aboard in a few days, and the men who landed on the island, all told, were one hundred and twenty souls.
When the time came for the ships to return to England it was determined by the unanimous voice of the colony to send White back to represent their condition and to obtain relief. He at first refused to go, but at last yielded to their solicitation, and on the 5th of November arrived in England.
When White landed he found the kingdom alarmed by the threatened Spanish invasion. Ralegh, Grenville, and Lane were all members of the council of war, and were bending every energy toward the protection of England from the Spanish Armada. Ralegh’s genius shone forth conspicuously in this crisis, and his policy of defending England on the water by a well-equipped fleet was not only adopted, but has been steadily pursued since, and has resulted in her becoming the great naval power of the world.
Ralegh did not forget his colony, however, and by the spring he had fitted out for its relief a small fleet, which he placed under the command of Sir Richard Grenville. Before it sailed every ship was impressed by the Government, and Sir Richard was required to attend Sir Walter, who was training troops in Cornwall. Governor White, with Ralegh’s aid, succeeded in sailing for Virginia with two vessels, April 22, 1588, but encountering some Spanish ships and being worsted in a sea-fight, he was forced to return to England, and the voyage was abandoned for the time. White was not able to renew his effort to relieve the colony during the year 1589, but during the next year, finding that three ships ready to sail for the West Indies at the charges of John Wattes, a London merchant, had been detained by the order prohibiting any vessel from leaving England, he applied to Ralegh to obtain permission for them to sail, on condition that they should take him and some others with supplies to Roanoke Island. After obtaining permission to sail on this condition, the owner and commanders of the ships refused to take any one aboard except White; and as they were in the act of sailing, and White had no time to lodge complaint against them, he went aboard, determined alone to prosecute his search. On the 15th of August they came to anchor at Hatorask. When White left the colony they had determined to remove fifty miles into the interior, and it had been agreed that they should carve on the trees or posts of the doors the name of the place where they were seated, and if they were in distress a cross was to be carved above the name. White found no one on the island, but the houses he had left had been taken down and a fort erected, which had been so long deserted that grass was growing in it. The bark had been cut from one of the largest trees near the entrance, and five feet from the ground, in fair capital letters, was cut the word Croatoan, without any sign of distress. Further search developed the fact that five chests, buried near the fort, had been dug up and their contents destroyed. White recognized among the fragments of the articles some of his own books, maps, and pictures. He concluded that the colony had removed to Croatoan, the island from which Manteo came, whose inhabitants had been friendly to the English. White at once begged the captain of the ship to carry him to Croatoan, which the captain promised to do; but a violent storm preventing, he finally determined to sail for England, where they arrived on the 24th of October. This was White’s fifth and last voyage, as he states in his letter to Hakluyt in 1593. His disappointment produced despondency, and he abandoned all hope of relieving the colony, with whom he had left his daughter and grandchild.
Ralegh had already spent forty thousand pounds in his several efforts to colonize Virginia, and he found himself unable to follow up his design from his own purse alone. He thereupon leased his patent to a company of merchants, hoping thus to achieve his object. But in this he was disappointed. He did not abandon all hope of final success, however, but continued to send out ships to look for his lost colony. In 1602 he made his fifth effort to afford them help by sending Captain Samuel Mace, a mariner of experience, with instructions to search for them. Mace returned without executing his orders, and Ralegh wrote to Sir Robert Cecil on the 21st August that he would send Mace back, and expressed his faith in the colonization of Virginia in these words, “I shall yet live to see it an Englishe nation.” He lived, indeed, to see his prediction verified, but not until he was immured in the Tower of London. During the last years of Elizabeth’s reign he continually pressed the Secretary and Privy Council for facilities to resume his schemes, but without success; and he finally abandoned all hope of finding the colony left at Roanoke Island.
What became of this colony was long a question of anxious inquiry, only to be solved by the information obtained from the Indians after the English settled at Jamestown. It was then ascertained that they had intermixed with the natives, and, after living with them till about the time of the arrival of the colony at Jamestown, had been cruelly massacred at the instigation of Powhatan, acting under the persuasions of his priests.[215] Only seven of them—four men, two boys, and a young maid—had been preserved from slaughter by a friendly chief. From these was descended a tribe of Indians found in the vicinity of Roanoke Island in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and known as the Hatteras Indians. They had gray eyes, which were found among no other tribes, and claimed to have white people as their ancestors.
The failure of Ralegh’s efforts to colonize Virginia may be ascribed to the inherent difficulties of the enterprise, increased by the inexperience of those sent out; to the unfortunate selection of the place of settlement; and, above all, to the war with Spain, which prevented Ralegh from taking proper care of the infant colony until it could become self-sustaining.