Amadas and Barlow sailed in 1584.  Prospecting for Sir Walter Raleigh, they discovered several harbors in North Carolina, then part of the vast ‘plantation’ of Virginia.  Roanoke Island, Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds, as well as the intervening waters, were all explored with enthusiastic thoroughness and zeal.  Barlow, a skipper who was handy with his pen, described the scent of that fragrant summer land in terms which attracted the attention of Bacon at the time and of Dryden a century later.  The royal charter authorizing Raleigh to take what he could find in this strange land had a clause granting his prospective colonists ’all the privileges of free denizens and persons native of England in such ample manner as if they were born and personally resident in our said realm of England.’

Next year Sir Richard Grenville, who was Raleigh’s cousin, convoyed out to Roanoke the little colony which Ralph Lane governed and which, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, Drake took home discomfited in 1586.  There might have been a story to tell of successful colonization, instead of failure, if Drake had kept away from Roanoke that year or if he had tarried a few days longer.  For no sooner had the colony departed in Drake’s vessels than a ship sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘freighted with all maner of things in most plentiful maner,’ arrived at Roanoke; and ’after some time spent in seeking our Colony up in the countrey, and not finding them, returned with all the aforesayd provision into England.’  About a fortnight later Sir Richard Grenville himself arrived with three ships.  Not wishing to lose possession of the country where he had planted a colony the year before, he ’landed fifteene men in the Isle of Roanoak, furnished plentifully with all maner of provision for two yeeres, and so departed for England.’  Grenville unfortunately had burnt an Indian town and all its standing corn because the Indians had stolen a silver cup.  Lane, too, had been severe in dealing with the natives and they had turned from friends to foes.  These and other facts were carefully recorded on the spot by the official chronicler, Thomas Harriot, better known as a mathematician.

Among the captains who had come out under Grenville in 1585 was Thomas Cavendish, a young and daring gentleman-adventurer, greatly distinguished as such even in that adventurous age, and the second English leader to circumnavigate the globe.  When Drake was taking Lane’s men home in June, 1586, Cavendish was making the final preparations for a two-year voyage.  He sailed mostly along the route marked out by Drake, and many of his adventures were of much the same kind.  His prime object was to make the voyage pay a handsome dividend.  But he did notable service in clipping the wings of Spain.  He raided the shipping off Chile and Peru, took the Spanish flagship, the famous Santa Anna, off the coast of California, and on his return home in 1588 had the satisfaction of reporting:  ’I burned and sank nineteen sail of ships, both small and great; and all the villages and towns that ever I landed at I burned and spoiled.’