On July 22, 1587, 116 men,
women and children landed on Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North
Carolina, the second English settlement sponsored by Walter Raleigh. Raleigh's
enterprise was launched under a charter granted by Elizabeth I to discover and
colonize the “remote heathen and barbarous lands of North America.”
Three years passed before
the artist-explorer Governor John White could return with supplies for Roanoke
in 1590, primarily because of the Spanish Armada. The colonists had disappeared,
among them White's grand-daughter Virginia Dare, first child of English parentage
born in the New World...
“We found the houses taken down and the place very strongly enclosed with a high palisade of great trees, with curtains and flankers very fortlike, and one of the chief trees or posts at the right side of the entrance had the bark taken off, and five feet from the ground in fair capital letters was graven CROATAN, without any cross or sign of distress. We entered the palisade, where we found many bars of iron, two pigs of lead, four fowlers, iron sacker-shot and such like heavy things, thrown here and there, almost overgrown with grass and weeds.”
-- John White, Second Voyage,
1590.