Sir Walter Raleigh had meanwhile made more attempts at settling the New World. In 1586, shortly after Drake’s fleet had returned home with the colonists from Roanoke Island, Sir Richard Grenville had arrived at the deserted colony with three supply ships. He made a fruitless search for the men he had expected to find there, until a captured Indian explained that they had sailed off with other white men. But Grenville was unwilling to lose possession of this English outpost in America; eighteen volunteers were once again left at Roanoke Island with two years’ provisions, and the ships returned to England for reinforcements.
The following year three more ships set out for the Plantation of Virginia, this time with 89 men, 17 women, and 11 children, led by John White, newly appointed ‘Governor of the City of Raleigh in Virginia.’ When they arrived at Roanoke Island, however, the men left behind in the previous year had once again vanished, and the newcomers soon learned that they had been killed by hostile Indians.
With a remarkable determination these Englishmen now decided that John White should return to England once again for additional supplies and men, while they remained behind on this hostile coast to prepare the beginnings of yet another colony. But when the governor arrived in England, he found that country deeply involved in preparations to meet the Spanish Armada. Two more years passed before John White was able to recruit enough ships and men to return to Virginia.
In August, 1590, the supply ships approached the Roanoke coast, but again there was no sign of life. It had been arranged that if the settlers should have to move for any reason, they would carve the directions in the wooden fort. A single word – Croaton – was all that John White ever found; none of the Indians knew the meaning of the word, and no trace of the lost colony has ever been discovered. Among the missing people was John White’s daughter, her husband, and their daughter, Virginia Dare, the first American-born English colonist, and possibly the first of many European settler women who were forced into new lives as captives among the Indians.
The idea of a settlement on this tragic island was now abandoned, though Raleigh never lost faith in the ultimate success of English colonization of Virginia. “I shall yet live,” he once remarked, “to see it an Inglishe Nation.” But two more decades would pass before the first permanent English colony began its desperate struggle for life on the coast of North America – two decades that marked the close of one age in England and saw the opening of another. The creation of the East India Company marked the beginnings of the British Empire that was to stretch around the globe. Hawkins, Drake, and most of the Sea Dogs of Elizabethan England were dead, while the last of their number, Walter Raleigh, was aged, out of favor at court, and in prison. William Shakespeare began to write his immortal plays, and the Puritans were becoming a powerful force in England.
Queen Elizabeth, grown old and lonely, became ill, and in March of 1603, at the age of seventy, she died after a 56-year rule of England. Post riders carried the news north to Scotland, where James VI, son of Mary Stuart, was waiting to hear that he had inherited the throne of England. Fifteen year later, this same King James bowed to vindictive Spain and ordered Sir Walter Raleigh, the last of the Elizabethan lions, beheaded.
By that time, however, Raleigh’s prediction had already come true: England had gained a permanent foothold in this New World by establishing a settlement at the banks of the River James in Virginia. An Inglishe Nation was about to be born.