speculation. When Jamestown was established, in 1607, the search for
them was renewed, but nothing definite could be learned. There is,
indeed, a story told by Strachey that the unfortunate colonists,
finally abandoning all hope, intermixed with the Indians at Croatoan,
and after living with them till about the time of the arrival at
Jamestown were, at the instigation of Powhatan, cruelly massacred.
Only seven of them--four men, two boys, and a young maid--were
preserved by a friendly chief, and from these, as later legends have
declared, descended a tribe of Indians found in the vicinity of
Roanoke Island in the beginning of the eighteenth century and known as
the Hatteras Indians.[22]

Sir Walter Raleigh will always be esteemed the true parent of North
American colonization, for though the idea did not originate with him
he popularized it beyond any other man. Just as he made smoking
fashionable at the court of Elizabeth, so the colonization of
Virginia--that is, of the region from Canada to Florida--was made
fashionable through his example. His enterprise caused the advantages
of America's soil and climate to be appreciated in England, and he was
the first to fix upon Chesapeake Bay as the proper place of
settlement.

When James I succeeded Elizabeth on the throne Raleigh lost his
influence at court, and nearly all the last years of his life were
spent a prisoner in the Tower of London, where he wrote his _History
of the World_. In 1616 he was temporarily released by the king on
condition of his finding a gold-mine in Guiana. When he returned
empty-handed he was, on the complaint of the Spanish ambassador,
arrested, sentenced to death, and executed on an old verdict of the
jury, now recognized to have been based on charges trumped up by