the first of all true ‘native-born’ Americans, was born on the 18th of August, 1587.  Perhaps Manteo, ‘Lord of Roanoke,’ saved the whole family whose name has been commemorated by that of the North Carolina county of Dare.  Perhaps Virginia Dare alone survived to be an ‘Indian Queen’ about the time the first permanent Anglo-American colony was founded in 1607, twenty years after her birth.  Who knows?

* * * * *

These twenty sundering years, from the end of this abortive colony in 1587 to the beginning of the first permanent colony in 1607, constitute a period that saw the close of one age and the opening of another in every relation of Anglo-American affairs.

Nor was it only in Anglo-American affairs that change was rife.  ’The Honourable East India Company’ entered upon its wonderful career.  Shakespeare began to write his immortal plays.  The chosen translators began their work on the Authorized Version of the English Bible.  The Puritans were becoming a force within the body politic as well as in religion.  Ulster was ‘planted’ with Englishmen and Lowland Scots.  In the midst of all these changes the great Queen, grown old and very lonely, died in 1603; and with her ended the glorious Tudor dynasty of England.  James, pusillanimous and pedantic son of Darnley and Mary Queen of Scots, ascended the throne as the first of the sinister Stuarts, and, truckling to vindictive Spain, threw Raleigh into prison under suspended sentence of death.

There was a break of no less than fifteen years in English efforts to colonize America.  Nothing was tried between the last attempt at Roanoke in 1587 and the first attempt in Massachusetts in 1602, when thirty-two people sailed from England with Bartholomew Gosnold, formerly a skipper in Raleigh’s employ.  Gosnold made straight for the coast of Maine, which he sighted in May.  He then coasted south to Cape Cod.  Continuing south he entered Buzzard’s Bay, where he landed on Cuttyhunk Island.  Here, on a little island in a lake—­an island within an island—­he built a fort round which the colony was expected to grow.  But supplies began to run out.  There was bad blood over the proper division of what remained.  The would-be colonists could not agree with those who had no intention of staying behind.  The result was that the entire project had to be given up.  Gosnold sailed home with the whole disgusted crew and a cargo of sassafras and cedar.  Such was the first prospecting ever done for what is now New England.

The following year, 1603, just after the death of Queen Elizabeth, some merchant-venturers of Bristol sent out two vessels under Martin Pring.  Like Gosnold, Pring first made the coast of Maine and then felt his way south.  Unlike Gosnold, however, he ‘bore into the great Gulfe’ of Massachusetts Bay, where he took in a cargo of sassafras at Plymouth Harbor.  But that was all the prospecting done this time.  There was no attempt at colonizing.