often constituted a government; a collection of ten or twenty wigwams might be an independent state. The greatest chief in the country could not muster more than seven or eight hundred fighting men. The dialect of each government seemed a language by itself. The country which Hariot explored was on the boundary of the Algonkin race, where the Lenni-Lenape tribes melted into the widely differing nations of the south. Their wars rarely led them to the open battle-field; they were accustomed rather to sudden surprises at daybreak or by moonlight, to ambushes and the subtle devices of cunning falsehood. Destitute of the arts, they yet displayed "excellency of wit" in all which they attempted. To the credulity of fetichism they joined an undeveloped conception of the unity of the Divine Power, continued existence after death, and retributive justice. The mathematical instruments, the burning-glass, guns, clocks, and the use of letters, seemed the works of gods rather than of men; and the English were reverenced as the pupils and favorites of Heaven. In every town which Hariot entered he displayed and explained the Bible; the Indians revered the volume rather than its doctrines; with a fond superstition, they embraced the book, kissed it, and held it to their breasts and heads, as an amulet. As the colonists enjoyed uniform health and had no women with them, there were some among the Indians who imagined that the English were not born of woman, and therefore not mortal; that they were men of an old generation, risen to immortality. The terrors of fire-arms the natives could neither comprehend nor resist; every sickness which now prevailed among them was attributed to wounds from invisible bullets, discharged by unseen agents with whom the air was supposed to be peopled. They prophesied that "more of the English generation would come, to kill them and take their places."

The natives desired to be delivered from guests by whom they feared to be supplanted. A wily savage allured them by tales that the river Roanoke gushed from a rock near the Pacific; that its banks were inhabited by a nation skilled in refining the rich ore in which the country abounded; that the walls of their city glittered with pearls. In March, Lane attempted to ascend the rapid Roanoke; and his followers

VOL. 1-7

would not return till their provisions were exhausted, and they had eaten the dogs which bore them company.

The Indians had hoped to destroy the English by dividing them; the prompt return of Lane prevented open hostilities; but in the two following months he became persuaded that a grand alliance was forming to destroy the strangers by a general massacre. Desiring an audience of Wingina, the most dreaded of the native chiefs, Lane and his attendants were, on the first day of June, readily admitted to his presence. Immediately, and without any sign of hostile intentions by the Indians, the watchword was given; and the Christians, falling upon the king and his principal followers, put them to death.

The discoveries of Lane on the south extended only to Secotan, in the present county of Craven, between the Pamlico and the Neuse; to the north they reached the river Elizabeth, which joins the Chesapeake bay at Hampton Roads; in the interior, the Chowan had been examined beyond the junction of the Meherrin and the Nottoway; the excursion up the Roanoke did not advance beyond the present village of Williamstown. The hope of finding better harbors at the north was confirmed; and the bay of Chesapeake, so long before discovered by the Spanish, was first made known to the English. But, though the climate was found salubrious, in the island of Roanoke the men began to despond; they had waited long for supplies from England; they were sighing for their native land; when early in June it was rumored that the sea was white with the sails of three-and-twenty ships, and within three days Sir Francis Drake anchored his fleet outside of Roanoke inlet, in "the wild road of their bad harbor."

Homeward bound from the West Indies, he had come to visit the domain of his friend; and readily supplied the wants of Lane, giving him a bark of seventy tons, pinnaces and small boats, and all needed provisions. Above all, he induced two experienced sea-captains to remain and employ themselves in more extended discoveries. Everything was furnished to complete the surveys along the coast and the rivers, and in the last resort, if suffering became extreme, to convey the emigrants to England.

At this time an unwonted storm suddenly arose, and the fleet had no security but in standing away from the shore. When the tempest was over, nothing could be found of the boats and the bark which had been set apart for the colony; and Drake yielded to the unanimous desire of Lane and his men to embark with him for England. Thus ended the first actual settlement of the English in America. The exiles of a year had grown familiar with the favorite amusement of the lethargic Indians; and they introduced into England the use of tobacco.

A few days after their departure a vessel arrived, laden with all stores needed by the infant settlement. It had been despatched by Raleigh; but, finding "the paradise of the world" deserted, it could only return to England. Another fortnight had hardly elapsed when Sir Richard Grenville appeared off the coast with three well-furnished ships, and made search for the departed colony. Unwilling that the English should lose possession of the country, he left fifteen men on the island of Roanoke.

The decisive testimony of Hariot to the excellence of the country rendered it easy to collect recruits for America. Raleigh, undismayed by losses, determined to plant an agricultural state; to send emigrants with wives and families, who should make their homes in the New World; and, that life and property might be secured, in January, 1587, he granted a charter for the settlement, and a municipal government for "the city of Raleigh." John White was appointed. its governor; and to him, with eleven assistants, the administration of the colony was intrusted. Transport ships were prepared at the expense of the proprietary; "Queen Elizabeth, the godmother of Virginia," declined contributing "to its education." Embarking in April, in July they arrived on the coast of North Carolina; they were saved from the dangers of Cape Fear; and, passing Cape Hatteras, they hastened to the isle of Roanoke, to search for the handful of men whom Grenville had left there as a garrison. They found the tenements deserted and overgrown with weeds; human bones lay scattered on the field where wild deer were reposing. The fort was in ruins. No vestige of surviving life appeared.

The instructions of Raleigh had designated the place for the new settlement on the bay of the Chesapeake. But Fernando, the naval officer, eager to renew a profitable traffic in the West Indies, refused his assistance in exploring the coast, and White was compelled to remain on Roanoke. The fort of Governor Lane, "with sundry decent dwelling-houses," had been built at the northern extremity of the island; it was there that in July the foundations of the city of Raleigh were laid. The island is now almost uninhabited; commerce has selected securer harbors; the intrepid pilot and the hardy "wrecker" are the only occupants of the spot, where the inquisitive stranger after more than two centuries could still discern the ruins of the fort, round which the cottages of the new settlement were erected.

Disasters thickened. A tribe of savages displayed implacable jealousy, and murdered one of the assistants. The mother and the kindred of Manteo welcomed the English to the island of Croatan, and mutual good-will was continued; but even this alliance was not unclouded. A detachment of the English, discovering a company of the natives whom they esteemed their enemies, fell upon them by night as they were sitting by their fires, and havoc was begun before it was perceived that these were friendly Indians.

The vanities of life were not forgotten; "by the commandment of Sir Walter Raleigh," Manteo, the faithful Indian chief, after receiving Christian baptism, was invested with the rank of baron, as the Lord of Roanoke.

With the returning ship White embarked for England, under the excuse of interceding for re-enforcements and supplies. Yet, on the eighteenth of August, nine days previous to his departure, his daughter, Eleanor Dare, the wife of one of the assistants, gave birth to a female child, the first offspring of English parents on the soil of the United States. The infant was named from the place of its birth. The colony, now composed of eighty-nine men, seventeen women, and two children, whose names are all preserved, might reasonably hope for the speedy return of the governor, as he left with them his daughter and his grandchild, VIRGINIA Dare.

The further history of this plantation is involved in gloomy

uncertainty. The inhabitants of "the city of Raleigh," the emigrants from England and the first-born of America, awaited death in the land of their adoption.

For, when White reached England, he found its attention absorbed by the threats of an invasion from Spain; and Grenville, Raleigh, and Lane, not less than Frobisher, Drake, and Hawkins, were engaged in measures of resistance. Yet Raleigh, whose patriotism did not diminish his generosity, found means, in April, 1588, to despatch White with supplies in two vessels. But the company, desiring a gainful voyage rather than a safe one, ran in chase of prizes, till one of them fell in with men-of-war from Rochelle, and, after a bloody fight, was boarded and rifled. Both ships were compelled to return to England. The delay was fatal: the English kingdom and the Protestant reformation were in danger; nor could the poor colonists of Roanoke be again remembered till after the discomfiture of the Invincible Armada.

Even then Sir Walter Raleigh, who had already incurred a fruitless expense of forty thousand pounds, found his impaired fortune insufficient for further attempts at colonizing Virginia. He therefore used the privilege of his patent to endow a company of merchants and adventurers with large concessions. Among the men who thus obtained an assignment of the proprietary's rights in Virginia is found the name of Richard Hakluyt; it connects the first efforts of England in North Carolina with the final colonization of Virginia. The colonists at Roanoke had emigrated with a charter; the instrument of March, 1589, was not an assignment of Raleigh's patent, but the extension of a grant, already held under its sanction, by increasing the number to whom the rights of that charter belonged.

More than another year elapsed before White could return to search for his colony and his daughter; and then the island of Roanoke was a desert. An inscription on the bark of a tree pointed to Croatan; but the season of the year and the dangers from storms were pleaded as an excuse for an immediate return. The conjecture has been hazarded that the deserted colony, neglected by their own countrymen, were hospitably adopted into the tribe of Hatteras Indians. Raleigh