XCIX.--Cornwallis and La Fayette in Virginia. Nelson, Governor. 726 C.--Capture of the Patriot. The Barrens and Captain Starlins. Battle of the Barges. 738 CI.--Washington in the North. Cornwallis occupies Yorktown. Battle of Eutaw Springs. Henry Lee. Washington invests Yorktown. Cornwallis surrenders. 742 HISTORY OF THE COLONY AND ANCIENT DOMINION OF VIRGINIA. CHAPTER I. 1492-1591. Early Voyages of Discovery--Sir Humphrey Gilbert--Walter Raleigh--Expedition of Amadas and Barlow--They land on Wocokon Island--Return to England--The New Country named Virginia--Grenville's Expedition--Colony of Roanoke--Lane, Governor--The Colony abandoned--Tobacco--Grenville returns to Virginia--Leaves a small Colony at Roanoke--Sir Walter Raleigh sends out another Expedition--City of Raleigh chartered--White, Governor--Roanoke found deserted--Virginia Dare, first Child born in the Colony--White returns for Supplies--The Armada-- Raleigh assigns the Colony to a Company--White returns to Virginia--Finds the Colony extinct--Death of Sir Richard Grenville--Gosnold's Voyage to New England. THE discoveries attributed by legendary story to Madoc, the Welsh prince, have afforded a theme for the creations of poetry; those of the Northmen of Iceland, better authenticated, still engage the dim researches of antiquarian curiosity. To Columbus belongs the glory of having made the first certain discovery of the New World, in the year 1492; but it was the good fortune of the Cabots to be the first who actually reached the main land. In 1497, John Cabot, a Venetian merchant, who had become a resident of Bristol in England, with his son Sebastian, a native of that city, having obtained a patent from Henry the Seventh, sailed under his flag and discovered the main continent of America, amid the inhospitable rigors of the wintry North. It was subsequent to this that Columbus, in his third voyage, set his foot on the main land of the South. In the following year, Sebastian Cabot again crossed the Atlantic, and coasted from the fifty-eighth degree of north latitude, along the shores of the United States, perhaps as far as to the southern boundary of Maryland. Portuguese, French, and Spanish navigators now visited North America. Dreadful circumstances attended the foundation of the ancient St. Augustine. The blood of six hundred French Protestant refugees has sanctified the ground at the mouth of St. John's River, where they were murdered "not as Frenchmen, but as heretics," by the ruthless Adelantado of Florida, Pedro Menendez, in the year 1565.