Exploration

Imagine this. You are the ruler of a country in Europe. Right now, it is pretty peaceful.  You have complete control over your small country, and no wars are going on. You are getting kind of bored with all of it. What can you do to make your life a little more exciting?

Make your country bigger, that’s what! You don’t want to start a war, so the ideal idea would be to find some land that no one else has found or claimed yet. That means that you should send some ships out to sea to where Columbus found land. Since hardly any of it has been claimed and you do not know how big it is, then it would be a perfect place to send settlers.

That is what Queen Elizabeth the First was thinking, (more or less,)when she sent ships to America to claim land for England. One reason why she did this, was that Spain was getting bigger and bigger. It now covered most of Italy, all of Spain itself, and other parts of Europe. If Spain took over North and South America, it would be the biggest country in the world! So Elizabeth gave the job of organizing the exploration to one of her favorite knights, Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh filled two ships with food, men, and provisions, and sent them off to America. When the sailors returned, they were very optimistic. There had been fertile soil, friendly Indians, black pearls, soft animal skins, and some new plants that they had never seen before. These were potatoes and tobacco. So Raleigh sent more ships, this time filled with settlers, to settle in the New World. But the people begged to be allowed to come back. The winters were cold, the ground was not very fertile, they were hungry, and the Indians were not being too friendly.  Finally, they sailed back in their ships.  But they left 15 soldiers to try and guard their town. When the second group of settlers sailed past the island the earlier colonists had been living on,  they saw no one. All the houses were in ruins, and there was no sign of human life. But they found only the skeleton of a soldier. But the commander of the ship was tired of having the colonists on board. He told them to get off and to go live on Roanoke Island. The settlers could not get off because they had only a few small boats, and so the commander and his sailors sailed away. The colonists persuaded a man named John White to England in one of the small boats. He arrived safely and asked for more food and provisions for the colonists, but England was now at war, and Elizabeth the First could not spare any ships for the mission at this point.

 White was not able to get back to the colony for at least three years! Finally, he got on a warship headed to fight the Spanish in South America. The captain agreed to stop at Roanoke Island to see the colonists, but when White  got there, as before, there were only ruins. There were no signs of life anywhere. There were no windows, doors, or walls, only the foundations of the houses. This made White think that the people might have moved there houses somewhere else. But he searched the whole island to no avail. He found only a word carved into a tree; CROATION. No one knows what happened to the lost colony of Roanoke.

Eventually, Sir Walter Raleigh lost his favor with the queen because he fell in love with one of her maids, and the maid became pregnant. Elizabeth wanted her knights to be only dedicated to her service, and when she died there were still no English colonies in America.