When White reached England he found the whole nation absorbed by the threats of a Spanish invasion; Raleigh, Grenville, and Lane, Frobisher, Drake, and Hawkins, all were employed in devising measures of resistance. It was twelve months before Raleigh, who had to depend almost entirely upon his own means, was able to despatch White with supplies; this he did in two vessels. White, who wished to profit by his voyage, instead of at once returning without loss of time to his colony, went in chase of Spanish prizes, until at length one of his ships was overpowered, boarded, and rifled, and both compelled to return to England. This delay was fatal. The great events of the Spanish Armada took place, after which Sir Walter Raleigh found himself embarrassed with such a fearful amount of debt, that it was no longer in his power to attempt the colonisation of Virginia; nor was it until the following year that White was able to return, and then also through the noble efforts of Sir Walter Raleigh, to the unhappy colony Roanoke. Again the island was a desert. An inscription on the bark of a tree indicated Croatan; but the season of the year, and the danger of storms, furnished an excuse to White for not going thither. What was the fate of the colony never was known. It has been conjectured that through the friendship of Manteo they had probably escaped to Croatan; perhaps had been, when thus cruelly neglected by their countrymen, received into a friendly tribe of Indians, and become a portion of the children of the forest. The Indians had, at a later day, a tradition of this kind, and it has been thought that the physical character of the Hatteras Indians bore out the tradition. The kind-hearted and noble Raleigh did not soon give up all hopes of his little colony. Five different times he sent out at his own expense to seek for them, but in vain. The mystery which veils the fate of the colonists of Roanoke will never be solved in this world. “Roanoke,” says Bancroft, “is now almost uninhabited; the intrepid pilot and the hardy wrecker, rendered bold by their familiarity with the dangers of the ocean, and unconscious of the associations by which they are surrounded, are the only tenants of the spot, where the inquisitive stranger may still discern the ruins of the fort, round which the cottages of the new settlement were erected.”