The site of the settlement was at the northeast corner of the island of Roanoke, whence the settlers could command the strait.  There, even now, choked by vines and underwood, and here and there broken by the crumbling remains of an earthen bastion, may be traced the outlines of the ditch which enclosed the camp, some forty yards square, the home of the first English settlers in the New World....

If the failure of his colony was likely to deter Raleigh from further efforts, this was more than outweighed by the good report of the country given both by Lane and Heriot.  Accordingly, in the very next year, Raleigh put out another and a larger expedition under the leadership of John White.  The constitution of White’s expedition would seem to show that it was designed to be more a colony, properly speaking, than Lane’s settlement at Roanoke.  A government was formed by Raleigh, consisting of White and twelve others, incorporated as the governor and assistants of the city of Raleigh.  Of the hundred and fifty settlers seventeen were women, of whom seven seem to have been unmarried.  The emigrants evidently did not go as mere explorers or adventurers; they were to be the seed of a commonwealth....

On the 2d of July the fleet reached Haterask, the port at which Grenville had landed on his last voyage.  There White took fifty men ashore to search for the fifteen whom Grenville had left there.  They found nothing but the bones of one man, slain, as they afterward learned, by the Indians.  The rest had disappeared, and it was not till some time afterward that their countrymen learned any tidings of their fate.  Ignorant, no doubt, of the altered feelings of the natives, Grenvile’s men had lived carelessly, and kept no watch.  Pemissapan’s warriors had seized the opportunity to revenge the death of their chief, and had sent a party of thirty men against the English settlement.  Two of the chief men were sent forward to demand a parley with two of the English.  The latter fell into the trap, and sent out two of their number.  One of these was instantly seized and killed, whereupon the other fled.  The thirty Indians then rushed out and fired the house, in which the English settlers took refuge.  The English, thus dislodged, forced their way out, losing one man in the skirmish, and at last, after being sorely prest by the arrows of their enemies, and by their skill in fighting behind covert, they reached the boat and escaped to Haterask.  After this neither Indians nor English ever heard of them again....

A more hopeful omen might be drawn from the birth of a child five days later, the first born to English parents in the New World.  Her father, Ananias Dare, was one of the twelve assistants, and her mother, Eleanor, was the daughter of John White.  Each event, the birth of Virginia Dare, the baptism and ennobling of Manteo, was trivial in itself, yet when brought together, the contrast gives a solemn meaning.  It seemed as if within five days the settlement of Roanoke had seen an old world pass away, a new world born.