6. Hakluyt's Voyages (ed. 1904), vii. p. 155.
7. It is thought by some that Cabot sailed to Greenland. Cf. Biggar, Voyages of the Cabots and of the Corte Reals (Paris, 1903).
8. Hakluyt's Voyages, vii. p. 150.
9. Ibid., viii. p. 37.
10. Hakluyt's Voyages, viii. p. 3.
11. Ibid., viii. p. 5.
12. Ibid., viii. p. 7.
13. Hakluyt's Voyages, x. p. 2.
14. Ibid., viii. p. 9.
15. Ibid., viii. p. 10.
16. Hakluyt's Voyages, vii. p. 149.
17. Fletcher, Cornhill Magazine, Dec. 1902.
18. Hakluyt's Voyages, ii. p. 178.
19. Hakluyt's Voyages, vii. p. 212.
20. Ibid., vii. p. 320.
21. Ibid., vii. p. 321.
22. Ibid., vii. p. 38.
23. Hakluyt's Voyages, viii. p. 54.
24. Hakluyt's Voyages, viii. p. 74.
25. Ibid., x. pp. 6, 7.
26. Egerton, Origin and Growth of the English Colonies, p. 65.
27. Hakluyt's Voyages (ed. 1904), viii. p. 123.
28. Hakluyt's Voyages (ed. 1904), viii. p. 141.
29. Ibid., viii. pp. 298 and 305.
30. Hakluyt's Voyages, xi. p. 25.
CHAPTER II
VIRGINIA: THE FIRST GREAT COLONY OF THE BRITISH
The English settlers in America may be less romantic and less interesting figures than their Elizabethan predecessors, but they were undoubtedly fitter instruments for the specific work. The Elizabethan seamen had played their part, and men now arose who were to fulfil a greater destiny. The Gilberts and the Drakes were of a race which had ceased to be, and Fuller justly remarks "how God set up a generation of military men both by sea and land which began and expired with the reign of Queen Elizabeth, like a suit of clothes made for her and worn out by her; for providence so ordered the matter that they almost all attended their mistress before or after, within some short distance, unto her grave."31 Although the adventurous spirit of the Golden Age had passed away, men were still left who could echo the words of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and say, "and therefore to give me leave without offence always to live and die in this mind, that he is not worthy to live at all that for fear or danger of death shunneth his country's service and his own honour, seeing death is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal."32 The one great figure who appears to connect the old period with the new was Sir Walter Raleigh. As has already been mentioned, he had sent out an expedition in 1584 to see what possibility there was of establishing a colony in America. The glowing accounts brought back by his two captains made Raleigh decide upon an undertaking which, though it proved a failure, must ever be regarded as memorable in the world's history.
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.
There were, however, dominant motives for colonisation at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and these, together with the intrepidity of certain of the Elizabethan school, changed the aspect of the whole question. The previous incentives for discovery and adventure upon the