to wear at his breast.  Raleigh risked L 2,000 in the venture, and equipped a ship which bore his name, but which had ill luck.  An infectious fever broke out among the crew, and the “Ark Raleigh” returned to Plymouth.  Sir Humphrey wrote to his brother admiral, Sir George Peckham, indignantly of this desertion, the reason for which he did not know, and then proceeded on his voyage with his four remaining ships.  This was on the 11th of January, 1583.  The expedition was so far successful that Gilbert took formal possession of Newfoundland for the Queen.  But a fatality attended his further explorations:  the gallant admiral went down at sea in a storm off our coast, with his crew, heroic and full of Christian faith to the last, uttering, it is reported, this courageous consolation to his comrades at the last moment:  “Be of good heart, my friends.  We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.”

In September, 1583, a surviving ship brought news of the disaster to Falmouth.  Raleigh was not discouraged.  Within six months of this loss he had on foot another enterprise.  His brother’s patent had expired.  On the 25th of March, 1584, he obtained from Elizabeth a new charter with larger powers, incorporating himself, Adrian Gilbert, brother of Sir Humphrey, and John Davys, under the title of “The College of the Fellowship for the Discovery of the Northwest Passage.”  But Raleigh’s object was colonization.  Within a few days after his charter was issued he despatched two captains, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow, who in July of that year took possession of the island of Roanoke.

The name of Sir Walter Raleigh is intimately associated with Carolina and Virginia, and it is the popular impression that he personally assisted in the discovery of the one and the settlement of the other.  But there is no more foundation for the belief that he ever visited the territory of Virginia, of which he was styled governor, than that he accompanied Sir Humphrey Gilbert to Newfoundland.  An allusion by William Strachey, in his “Historie of Travaile into Virginia,” hastily read, may have misled some writers.  He speaks of an expedition southward, “to some parts of Chawonock and the Mangoangs, to search them there left by Sir Walter Raleigh.”  But his further sketch of the various prior expeditions shows that he meant to speak of settlers left by Sir Ralph Lane and other agents of Raleigh in colonization.  Sir Walter Raleigh never saw any portion of the coast of the United States.

In 1592 he planned an attack upon the Spanish possessions of Panama, but his plans were frustrated.  His only personal expedition to the New World was that to Guana in 1595.