he headed a last expedition to the southern coast of the land he had
labored so faithfully to unite to England. It failed of its object, and
Raleigh lost his head.

But the purpose which he had steadfastly entertained did not die with
him; and we Americans claim him to-day as the first friend and father of
the conception of a great white people beyond the sea.

As we enter the Seventeenth Century, the figure which looms largest in
the foreground is that of Captain John Smith, governor of the colony at
Jamestown in 1607. But the way was prepared for him by a man as honorable,
though less distinguished, Bartholomew Gosnold by name, who voyaged to the
New England coast in 1602, and was the first to set foot on its shores.
The first land he sighted was what is now called Maine; thence he steered
southward, and disembarked on Cape Cod, on which he bestowed that name.
Proceeding yet further south, between the islands off the coast, he
finally entered the inclosed sound of Buzzard's Bay, and landed on the
island of Cuttyhunk. Gosnold was a prudent as well as an adventurous man,
and he was resolved to take all possible precautions against being
surprised by the Indians. On Cuttyhunk there was a large pond, and in the
pond there was an islet; and Gosnold, with his score of followers, fixed
upon this speck of rocky earth as the most suitable spot in the western
hemisphere wherein to plant the roots of English civilization. They built
a hut and made a boat, and gathered together their stores of furs and
sassafras; but these same stores proved their undoing. They could not
agree upon an equable division of their wealth; and recognizing that
disunion in a strange land was weakness and peril, they all got into their
ship and sailed back to England, carrying their undivided furs and
sassafras with them. By this mishap, New England missed becoming the scene
of the first permanent English colony. For when, five years afterward,