All except one--he was Thomas Hariot, a precise man and an observant one. Raleigh sent him out as geographer to the second expedition. Noting the resources of the country, he listed among other things wine, “medicinal” tobacco and furs as saleable exports. He made special mention of the fur trade potential. “All along the Sea coast,” Hariot wrote, “there are great store of Otters, which being taken by weares and other engines made for the purpose, wil yeeld good profit. We hope also of Marterne furres, and make no doubt by the relation of the people, that in some places of the countrey there are store, although there were but two skinnes that came to our hands. Luzernes also we have understanding of, although for the time we saw none.” But even Hariot, along with Ralph Lane, the governor of the colony at the time, listened gullibly to the tales of Indians who wanted to gain favor. While Sir Richard Grenville, the admiral of the Virginia fleet, raided the Spaniards in the West Indies, Lane and his men spent months of fruitless search in the interior for white pearls or mines, and followed many a river whose source might prove to be “near unto a sea.” They explored north as far as the Chesapeake, entering the capes and looking for a channel that might be the passage, while one of their party, John White, made sketches of the region. The south side of the bay thus became well known in England about 1590 when White’s work was included in the first engraved map of Virginia published by Theodore de Bry. What the Englishmen failed to understand at the time, because they were more concerned with gold mines and channel passages, was that the Chesapeake tidewater represented a storehouse of valuable fur--muskrat, beaver, mink and otter--all in vast reserve. Lane, however, was convinced that only “the discovery of a good mine by the goodness of God, or a passage to the South Sea, or some way to it, and nothing else, can bring this country in request to be inhabited by our nation.” If only he had realized that within easy reach there was far more quick gold in fur than the English would ever take out of America in ore! A last contingent of Raleigh’s colonists, which included some women and children, provided one of history’s most mystifying episodes when the entire colony simply vanished from Roanoke Island. Among them was the first Christian child born in English Virginia, little Virginia Dare, granddaughter of the colony’s new governor, John White, the artist. The word “Croatan,” carved in “faire Romane letters” on a post of the abandoned stockade, was the only clue to the lost colony ever found by those who came later to search for it. A tribe of Indians by that name lived on a near-by island. Even this proved futile however, and the mystery has only darkened with the passing of the centuries.