Stories of Elizabethan heroes : $b Stirring records of the intrepid bravery and boundless resource of the men of Queen Elizabeth's reignGilliat, Edward
History
Stories of Elizabethan heroes : $b Stirring records of the intrepid bravery and boundless resource of the men of Queen Elizabeth's reign
Gilliat, Edward
Great Britain -- Biography; Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603
At length, in May 1586, the Indians could brook no more such wrongs;
they stole into Port Ferdinando, broke up the fish-weirs and wooden
huts, and crossed over to the mainland. In June a battle
ensued--guns against bows and arrows--the Indians were out-matched
and fled. Their king, being shot through with a pistol, lay on the
ground for dead; but suddenly started up and ran away as though he
had not been touched. But he was shot again, fell and was killed.
"I met my man," says Lane, "returning out of the woods with
Pemisapan's head in his hand."
The colony was now in despair--a few oysters were found or they would
have been starved. One prophet amongst them vowed that "the hand of
God had come upon them for the cruelty and outrages committed by some
of them on the natives." Then came Drake with three-and-twenty ships
out of the misty deep, and at once Ralph Lane saw "the very hand of
God stretched out to save them."
On the 19th of June they embarked on Drake's ship and returned to
Portsmouth. But they carried with them that wonderful herb uppowoc,
or tobacco, which all Europe has now learnt to suck after the manner
of the Red Indians, which Edmund Spenser in his "Faerie Queen," writ
a few years after, called "divine." Of course Lane blamed Sir
Richard Grenville for his failure, since Grenville had promised to
return in the spring with fresh colonists and supplies; but he did
not arrive until a fortnight after Lane's departure with Drake.
We have given this short sketch of the doings of the colony in
Virginia, partly that the reader may judge where the fault lay. It
was not Sir Richard's, and it was not wholly Lane's; it was the ill
choice of unworthy colonists that really wrecked the scheme; it was
their gross ill-treatment of the natives that ruined the settlement.
But if Lane had stayed with his own men, instead of hunting for
pearls and copper, he might have kept them in better order. But as
it happened, the real savages were some few of those English
settlers, the off-scouring of England's gaols, and the ill-conduct of
the few made the Indians suspicious of all.
Grenville, when he left Virginia for Plymouth, took the opportunity
of having a little fight with a richly laden Spaniard of 300 tons
burthen, and arrived home rich. He had been unable to fulfil his
promise to return in the spring, because Raleigh had a difficulty in
raising money for the three ships and their outfit. When Grenville
did reach Roanoke, he found all deserted and left in confusion, as if
the colonists had been hunted away by a mighty army.
After scouring the country round and making inquiries of the Indians,
Grenville left fifteen men on the island with provisions for two
years, and set sail for England; but he did not omit to fill his
coffers by an attack upon Spanish towns in the Azores, where he
seized considerable store of booty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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