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Carolina; they were saved from the dangers of Cape
Fear; and, passing
Cape Hatteras, they hastened to the
Isle of Roanoke, to search for the handful of men whom
Grenville had left there as a garrison.
They found the tenements deserted and overgrown with weeds; human bones lay scattered on the field; wild deer were reposing in the untenanted houses, and were feeding on the productions which a rank vegetation still forced from the gardens.
The fort was in ruins.
No vestige of surviving life appeared.
The miserable men whom
Grenville had left, had been murdered by the Indians.
The instructions of
Raleigh had designated the place for the new settlement on the
Bay of the
Chesapeake.
It marks but little union, that Fernando, the naval officer, eager to renew a profitable traffic in the
West Indies, refused his assistance in exploring the coast, and
White was compelled to remain on
Roanoke.
The fort of
Governor Lane, ‘with sundry decent dwelling-houses,’ had been built at the northern extremity of the island; it was there that the foundations
of the city of
Raleigh were laid.
The Island of
Roanoke is now almost uninhabited; commerce has selected securer harbors for its pursuits; the intrepid pilot and the hardy ‘wrecker,’ rendered adventurously daring by their familiarity with the dangers of the coast, and in their natures wild as the storms to which their skill bids defiance, unconscious of the associations by which they are surrounded, are the only tenants of the spot where the inquisitive stranger may yet discern the ruins of the fort, round which the cottages of the new settlement were erected.
But disasters thickened.
A tribe of savages dis-
played implacable jealousy, and murdered one of the
