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US 19005.30

COLLE

Jun 191939

LIBRARY

Charles Lee Smith

“Carolina! Carolina! Heaven's blessings attend her! While we live we will cherish, protect and defend her.”

VIRGINIA DARE.

On the eastern shore of North Carolina, in the shallow sounds enclosed by long sand banks, which bound the coast, lies a little island twelve miles long and three miles broad.

This is Roanoke-the scene of the first English settlement in this country, and the birth-place of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in America.

How much of romance, and yet more of history,-"a romance of the real "-clusters around the sad story of this young girl! Out of the unfortunate expeditions, of which she, in some sense, may be said to have been the first fruits, grew the schemes of colonization at Jamestown and at Plymouth a score of years later. The seed were sown at Roanoke, were fertilized by the sacrifice of the settlers there, but took enduring root first at Jamestown.

Associated with the humble, and almost unknown colonists of Roanoke are the names: Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen; Raleigh, the preux chevalier, soldier, statesman, poet, historian; Sir Richard Grenville, sailor, soldier and martyr; Sir Francis Drake, Admiral and circumnavigator of the Globe. Truly our little Virginia Dare was in goodly company.

Of chroniclers, too, she, her companions and their acts, had no lack.

There were Arthur Barlowe, who commanded a ship in the first expedition; Lane, the governor of the first colo

nists; John White, governor of the second colonists, the grandfather of Virginia Dare, whom he was destined to seek in sorrow and never find. Their accounts, and those of others also, are full and their stories well told. They are still on record, and have been published by the Hakluyt Society. It is a noteworthy fact that the history of these colonies which came to naught, and of a locality now so little known, should be so fully recorded and preserved in every detail-much more so than that of other localities of far greater importance, now of much prominence, whose origin and early history are often obscure and uncertainsometimes almost unknown.

It was in a stirring era, too, in the history of the world, and one of romantic incident and adventure, that the little waif, Virginia Dare, first saw its light. The dreaded Spanish Armada-foiled in part by Drake and Raleigh, so intimately connected with the colonists of Roanoke-was preparing for its descent upon the coasts of Britain; the appeals and groans of the Christian Martyrs who twenty years before perished for their faith at the stake at Smithfield, Oxford and elsewhere, still echoed through the land; Bacon and Shakespeare, all unconscious of their future fame, were in their lusty youth; "The Faery Queen" was taking shape in the prolific brain of Spencer; Sir Philip Sidney was soon to die at Zutphen; Frobisher had returned from his Arctic discoveries, and Drake from his voyage around the world; the horrible butcheries of the Duke of Alva in the Low Countries, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew at Paris, had heightened religious enmity to the fiercest intensity, to which the good Prince of Orange was soon to for

feit his life, a murdered victim; and the lovely Queen of Scots was ere long to lay her beautiful head upon the block in expiation of the plottings and sins of others, of whom she was the tool-perhaps the willing tool.

The Anglo Saxon and the Spaniard were entering upon the long struggle for supremacy at sea and upon this continent, which may be said to have been ended by ourselves but a short time ago, after more than three hundred years, by the expulsion of the latter from Cuba and the other West Indies. Surely little Virginia was born in troublous times, and her sad fate was not the least pathetic incident of that stormy period.

There were two expeditions to Roanoke before the birth there in 1587 of Virginia Dare, some account of which may be of interest. The first was one of discovery and exploration only. It consisted of two small ships, the "Tyger" and the "Admirall," commanded by Captains Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, to the latter of whom we owe the account of the voyage and of its results. He says to Sir Walter Raleigh:

"The 27th of April, in the yere of our redemption 1584, we departed the West of England with two barkes well furnished with men and victuals. The 10th of June we were fallen with the Islands of the West Indes. * * * The 2nd of July we found shole water, wher we smelt so sweet and so strong a smel, as if we had been in the midst of some delicate garden abounding with odoriferous flowers, by which we were assured that the land could not be farre distant."

"The 4th of July we arrived upon the coast,