Columbus and Other Heroes of American DiscoveryD'Anvers, N.
History
Columbus and Other Heroes of American Discovery
D'Anvers, N.
America -- Discovery and exploration; North America -- Discovery and exploration
After exchanging presents with Wingina and his brother, Granganamco,
of the neighboring “island” of Roanoake, the name of which is
still retained by a river of Virginia, the adventurers returned to
England, and in the ensuing year, 1585, a second and more important
expedition was sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh, under Sir Richard
Grenville, with instructions to found a colony in Virginia, from which
further explorations inland and along the coasts were to be made as
opportunity offered.
Illustration: SIR FRANCIS DRAKE.
The colony was duly founded, with Roanoake as its headquarters,
and leaving 108 men and women to inhabit the country, under the
governorship of Ralph Lane, Sir Richard returned to England, confident
that he had sown the seed of an important offshoot of the mother
country. In a short excursion he had made up the coast, however, the
governor had planted a thorn in the side of the infant community by
the summary vengeance he had taken on a whole village, one member
of which had stolen a silver cup. The natives, who had at first
been prepared to allow the new-comers to plant and build without
molestation, were now eager to get rid of them by fair means or foul,
and no course seemed open to Lane but the fatal one of intimidation,
which had already led to so many terrible scenes on the fair western
coasts of America.
After a trip up the coast resulting in the discovery of Chesapeake Bay,
which had, however, long been known to the Spanish, Lane, misled by
legends, in which he thought he read signs of the existence, not very
far westward, of abundance of pearls, of copper-mines, and, best of
all, of the white breakers of the Pacific Ocean, went for some little
distance up the Roanoake river, returning disheartened and disgusted,
to find his people at daggers drawn with the Indians, who were in
their turn embroiled with a neighboring chief. With the prospect
of massacre if their enemies triumphed, and death by famine through
the failure of native supplies if they were defeated, the unlucky
colonists were in despair, when Sir Francis Drake, red-handed from his
destruction of St. Augustine, arrived off the coast with a fleet of
twenty-six vessels.
Illustration: DRAKE’S SHIP.
Although Drake would have left with Lane men and provisions enough to
save them from either of the evils they so much dreaded, the colonists,
who had completely lost heart, clamored to be taken home, and one
and all embarked for England, taking with them as sole trophy of
their brief occupation of Virginia a supply of tobacco, the use of
which they had learned from the Indians, who had from time immemorial
connected the smoking of it with all their religious or civil
ceremonies of any importance, and who would probably have looked upon
its everyday consumption as little short of sacrilege and mockery of
the “Great Spirit.”
Illustration: ELIZABETH KNIGHTING DRAKE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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