Soon after White's return Raleigh fitted out a fleet under the command of Grenville. Before that fleet could sail Raleigh and Grenville were called off to a task even more pressing than the relief of the Virginia plantation. Yet, notwithstanding the prospect of a Spanish invasion, White persuaded Raleigh to send out two small vessels, with which White himself sailed from Bideford on the 25th of April, 1588. The sailors, however, fell into the snare so often fatal to the explorers of that age. In the words of a later writer, whose vigorous language seemed to have been borrowed from some contemporary chronicler, the captains, "being more intent on a gainful voyage than the relief of the colony, ran in chase of prizes; till at last one of them, meeting two ships of war, was, after a bloody fight, overcome, boarded and rifled. In this maimed, ransacked, and ragged condition she returned to England in a month's time; and in about three weeks after the other also returned, having perhaps tasted of the same fare, at least without performing her intended voyage, to the distress, and, as it proved, the utter destruction of the colony of Virginia, and to the great displeasure of their patron at home." Raleigh had now spent forty thousand pounds on the colonization of Virginia, with absolutely no return. In March, 1589, he made an assignment, granting to Sir Thomas Smith, White and others the privilege of trading in Virginia, while he proved at the same time that he had not lost his interest in the undertaking by a gift of a hundred pounds for the conversion of the natives. The unhappy colonists gained nothing by the change. For a whole year no relief was sent. When, at length, White sailed with three ships, he or his followers imitated the folly of their predecessors, and preferred buccaneering among the Spaniards in the West Indies to conveying immediate relief to the colonists. On their arrival nothing was to be seen of the settlers. After some search the name Croaton was seen carved on a post, according to an arrangement made with White before his departure, by which the settlers were thus to indicate the course they had taken. Remnants of their goods were found, but no trace of the settlers themselves. Years afterward, when Virginia had been at length settled by Englishmen, a faint tradition found its way among them of a band of white captives, who, after being for years kept by the Indians in laborious slavery, were at length massacred. Such were the only tidings of Raleigh's colonists that ever reached the ears of their countrymen. White, with his three ships, returned, and the colonization of Virginia was for a time at an end. Even Raleigh's indomitable spirit gave way, and he seems henceforth to have abandoned all hope of a plantation. Yet he did not, till after fifteen years of disappointment and failure, give up the search for his lost settlers. Before he died the great work of his life had been accomplished, but by other hands.