This pioneer band comprised gentlemen of standing, experienced navigators, younger sons of noble houses or gentry seeking adventure, restless spirits with an eye for pelf, hardy sailors. Ralph Lane at the head as governor, was a sailor-soldier of merit, and when invited by Raleigh to this post was serving in Ireland. Captain Amadas, of the reconnoitering expedition, was Lane’s deputy, afterward designated “admiral of the country”—Virginia. Thomas Hariot, or Harriot, named as surveyor, and also to be the historian of the colony, had been Raleigh’s tutor: he became in after years distinguished as a mathematician and astronomer, and materially advanced the science of algebra. John White, to be the principal draughtsman, was a man of affairs as well as a painter of some note, and was later to become governor of Raleigh’s second colony and grandfather of the first English child born in North America—Virginia Dare; and in his drawings, with those of the artist Le Moine, of the Huguenot colony in Florida, 1562–1566 (afterward in London a “servant” of Raleigh’s), we have the first accurate knowledge of the North American Indian and of the natural history of the country. Sir Richard Grenville, a cousin of Raleigh’s, a British naval hero, was the general of the fleet assembled to carry the company out. Captain Thomas Cavendish, navigator and freebooter, soon to circumnavigate the globe, was commander of one of the ships. The two Indians, Wanchese and Manteo, whom Amadas and Barlow brought home with them, were joined to the company as guides. The fleet comprised seven sail: the “Tiger,” admiral or flagship, of one hundred and forty tons; a “Flie-boat called the Roe-bucke, of the like burden”; the “Lyon,” one hundred tons, “or thereabouts”; the “Elizabeth,” fifty tons; the “Dorithie,” a small bark; and two small pinnaces. They weighed anchor and sailed out of Plymouth harbour on the ninth of April, 1585. The outward voyage was a leisurely one, with stops at Porto Rico, Hispaniola, and other places, and with seizures of Spanish prizes along the way, so that their destination at Wocokon and Roanoke Island was not reached till the end of June. Their sometimes exciting adventures on this passage are summarily related in the diary of one of the company, which Hakluyt gives with this unusually brief caption: “The voiage made by Sir Richard Greenvile for Sir Walter Ralegh to Virginia in the yeere 1585.”