Roanoke.

In March 1584 the English adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh obtained a patent to discover and settle lands in North America in the name of the English Crown. The voyages and colonizing experiments that followed during the next six years marked the first attempts of English men, women, and children to settle any part of the new continent. Although all their attempts failed, the colonists' experiences shaped later English ventures at Jamestown and elsewhere on the Atlantic coast in the early years of the seventeenth century. The first voyage in the spring of 1584 surveyed the coastal region along the Outer Banks of present-day North Carolina, selected a site for the proposed colony at Roanoke Island, and gathered information about the landscape and its inhabitants. The next two ventures, in 1585 and 1587, sent groups of English colonists to try to establish a toehold on...