of Ralph Lane, Sir Richard returned to England, confident that he had sown the seed of an important offshoot of the mother country. In a short excursion he had made up the coast, however, the governor had planted a thorn in the side of the infant community by the summary vengeance he had taken on a whole village, one member of which had stolen a silver cup. The natives, who had at first been prepared to allow the new-comers to plant and build without molestation, were now eager to get rid of them by fair means or foul, and no course seemed open to Lane but the fatal one of intimidation, which had already led to so many terrible scenes on the fair western coasts of America.
After a trip up the coast resulting in the discovery of Chesapeake Bay, which had, however, long been known to the Spanish, Lane, misled by legends, in which he thought he read signs of the existence, not very far westward, of abundance of pearls, of copper-mines, and, best of all, of the white breakers of the Pacific Ocean, went for some little distance up the Roanoake river, returning disheartened and disgusted, to find his people at daggers drawn with the Indians, who were in their turn embroiled with a neighboring chief. With the prospect of massacre if their enemies triumphed, and death by famine through the failure of native supplies if they were defeated, the unlucky colonists were in despair, when Sir Francis Drake, red-handed from his destruction of St. Augustine, arrived off the coast with a fleet of twenty-six vessels.
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DRAKE'S SHIP.
Although Drake would have left with Lane men and provisions enough to save them from either of the evils they so much dreaded, the colonists, who had completely lost heart, clamored to be taken home, and one and all embarked for England, taking with them as sole trophy of their brief occupation of Virginia a supply of tobacco, the use of which they had learned from the Indians, who had from time immemorial connected the smoking of it with all their religious or civil ceremonies of any importance, and who would probably have looked upon its everyday consumption as little short of sacrilege and mockery of the "Great Spirit."
The fleet of Sir Francis Drake had scarcely left the coast, before a vessel, under the command of Sir Richard Grenville, arrived sent out by Raleigh, with supplies for the colonists. Finding the settlement deserted, the leader
