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.