In 1585 Raleigh sent seven ships and one hundred and eight settlers to the land which had been granted to him by patent. The territory had already been named Virginia, in honour of the Queen, and it was here that he hoped to establish a little colony composed of sturdy Englishmen. In June the settlers, having landed in Roanoke, were left under the leadership of Ralph Lane; the other generals, Grenville, Cavendish, and Amidas, returning to the mother country. From the outset it was certain that Raleigh's colony must fail. The man chosen as leader had no special aptitude for the post, being possessed with the mania for discovery rather than the desire to teach the settlers to form a self-supporting community. But even worse than this, Lane made the fatal error of estranging the natives by the severity and brutality of his punishments. Exactly a year after the settlers had landed, Sir Francis Drake put in to see how his friend Raleigh's Utopian schemes progressed. He found the colony in a miserable plight and, yielding to the earnest entreaties of the settlers, took them on board and sailed to England. Raleigh, however, had not forgotten his colony, and had dispatched Sir Richard Grenville with supplies; but when he reached the settlement he found it deserted. Sir Walter Raleigh's buoyant nature was not depressed by this first failure, and in 1587 a fresh attempt to settle Virginia was made. Under the command of White, one hundred and thirty-three men and seventeen women were sent out. White soon returned to England for supplies, leaving his daughter Eleanor Dare, who gave birth to the first white child born in the New World. The unhappy emigrants received but little assistance from the home authorities. Certainly two expeditions were sent out to help them, but they failed because their captains found it more lucrative and exciting to go privateering. The stirring times in Europe and the coming of the Armada were sufficient to absorb the minds of such men as Raleigh and Drake, and the colony in Virginia was left to its fate. What that fate was can only be imagined, for, when White at last reached Virginia in 1589, not a trace of the colony was to be found, while another expedition in 1602 proved equally unsuccessful in the search. Hunger and the Indians had done their cruel work, and the hand of destiny seemed turned against the foundation of an Anglo-Saxon colony in the mysterious West.