A Concise History of the United States of America (2012)

24 A Concise History of the United States of America
Accompanying these men of war when the expedition set off in April
1585 was a varied assortment of sailors, soldiers, and settlers, the painter
John White, the mathematician Thomas Hariot, and the two natives who
had accompanied Barlowe and Amada back to England the previous year,
Wanchese and Manteo.
Although they made good time across the Atlantic, the expedition
encountered problems on arrival when the Tyger ran aground and the
supplies intended to support the new colony were spoiled. Nevertheless,
under Lane’s direction, a settlement was established and a fort constructed.
Lane’s initial reports were promising, and Wingina’s people were, as
before, both welcoming and generous with provisions, so the loss of the
Tyger’s cargo was not, at first, the disaster it might have been. Whether
it in fact caused more problems in the long run, or whether the settlers’
total lack of ability to fend for themselves was intrinsic to the military
nature of the endeavor, is harder to assess. What is certain is that these
first settlers, as would be the case with future ones, exerted little effort
toward becoming self-sufficient and relied almost entirely on the voluntary
largesse of their hosts and, when that reached its limits, turned to
violence to secure their survival.
At Roaonke, however, the violence was ultimately self-defeating. The
English killed the goose that laid the golden egg. Lane murdered Wingina
and then headed to England, just as Grenville, who had left Roanoke the
previous year, was on his way back. Finding no sign of Lane or the colony,
Grenville stationed a small body of men at the fort and then headed out
to sea and to the prospect of seizing more Spanish ships. In July 1587,the
artist John White arrived along with his family, the native Manteo, and
more than one hundred prospective settlers. Leaving them there, White
himself sailed with the fleet to England to secure supplies, arriving home
just in time for his ship to be requisitioned as part of England’s defense
against the Spanish Armada (1588). On his return in 1590, he found
the Roanoke colony deserted and the settlers, including his daughter
and granddaughter, gone. All that remained was the word “Croatoan”
carved into a tree. This was possibly a reference to the Croatan people,
but whether the settlers had been rescued or murdered by them, no one
knew. As far as the English were concerned, the fate of the “Lost Colony”
of Roanoke could only be imagined.
This inauspicious beginning did not bode well for future English colonization
efforts, but neither did it diminish the growing enthusiasm for the
opportunities perceived to exist across the Atlantic. In naming the land
Virginia, Ralegh had accorded it a validity it had not previously held in