England. It was the dastardly ending of the first effort, nobly conceived,
and supported through five years, to engraft the English race in the soil
of America.

Tradition hazards the conjecture that the Roanoke colony, or some of
them, were cared for by the friendly Indians of Hatteras. There was a
rumor that seven of them were still living twenty years after White's
departure. But no certain news was ever had of them, though several later
attempts to trace them were made. Between the time when their
faint-hearted governor had deserted them, and his return, three years had
passed; and if they were not early destroyed by the hostile tribes, they
must have endured a more lingering pain in hoping against hope for the
white sails that never rose above the horizon. Most of them, if not all,
were doubtless massacred by the Indians, if not at once, then when it
became evident that no succor was to be expected for them. Some, possibly,
were carried into captivity; and it may be that Virginia Dare herself grew
up to become the white squaw of an Indian brave, and that her blood still
flows in the veins of some unsuspected red man. But it is more likely that
she died with the others, one of the earliest and most innocent of the
victims sacrificed on the altar of a great idea.

White disappears from history at this point; but Raleigh never forgot his
colony, and five times, at his own expense, and in the midst of events
that might have monopolized the energies of a score of ordinary men, he
dispatched expeditions to gain tidings of them. In 1595 he himself sailed
for Trinidad, on the northern coast of South America, and explored the
river Orinoco, nine degrees above the equator, It was his hope to offset
the power of Spain in Mexico and Peru by establishing an English colony in
Guiana. Wars claimed his attention during the next few years, and then
came his long imprisonment; but in 1616, two years before his execution,