The island was reached at sunset and White and his companions landed at the point where he understood that Grenville’s fifteen men had established themselves. Not one was found. But the discovery of the bones of one of them led the searchers to fear that all had perished at the hands of the Indians. The next morning White with several of his party walked up to the Old Colony’s plantation at the north end of the island, hoping there to find some trace of the missing men. The place was deserted. The fort had been razed, and its site was overgrown with vines. The “decent dwelling houses” of the colony yet stood, but they were open to the weather, and, like the site of the fort, overgrown with vines, and within them deer were feeding. With this melancholic spectacle the governor’s party returned “without hope of ever seeing any of the fifteene men living.” Then the governor gave orders for the repairing of the houses on the deserted plantation and for the erection of new cottages; and when this work was well under way the colonists were all brought up here. On the twenty-fifth the fly-boat appeared in the road off Roanoke with all her passengers safe, to the joy of their fellow planters and the grief of Ferdinando. For when he had “purposely left them in the Bay of Portugal, and stole away from them in the night,” he had hoped that the master of the ship, Edward Spicer, “for that he had never bene in Virginia would hardly finde the place, or els being left in so dangerous a place as that was, by meanes of so many men of warre as at that time were abroad, they would surely be taken or slain.” Such is the record, but let us cherish the hope that the chronicler misinterpreted Ferdinando’s strange act, and that he was not guilty of so diabolical a scheme. On the twenty-eighth, when the new colonists were probably settling themselves at Roanoke, one of the assistants, George Howe, was set upon and slain by a little band of Indians who had come over to the island either to spy upon the new comers, or to hunt deer, or both. He was alone at the time, and some distance from the plantation, wading in the water catching crabs with a forked stick. He was only half dressed and had no weapon, his gun perhaps having been left on the shore. The savages stealthily approached him from a hiding place among tall reeds, where deer were often found asleep, and killed by the Indian hunters. They sprang at his back and gave him sixteen wounds with their arrows, finally beating him to death with their wooden swords. The deed done, they “fled over the water to the main.” These savages belonged to the remnant of the dead Wingina’s—or Pemisapan’s—people, who were now dwelling on the mainland at Dasamonguepeuk.