of
our country. It is quite certain that in all these early Latin colonies
there were women and that these bore no inconsiderable part in the
events which were trending, though sometimes by devious paths, to the
establishment of Caucasian empire in America; but their names are
unknown to us and we are even ignorant of their place in the history of
their time. The story of southern settlement, as far as this has any
effect upon the present, begins for us with the settlement of Roanoke
Island by Sir Walter Raleigh's ill-fated colony. The tale of its
mysterious disappearance is too well known to call for recapitulation
here; but before that sudden and final ending of its story we have
chronicles which tell us that among these pioneer pilgrims were women,
mostly wives of the men settlers, who bore their part in the burden and
heat of the day,--and those days were toilsome and full of peril,--as
well as their more active lords. Also to that lost colony belongs the
honor of having reared the first alien child born on American soil, the
forerunner of the race that was to make that soil its own,--Virginia
Dare, the little maiden whose passing was as mysterious as her coming
was ominous. The first of the enormous army of the conquering palefaces
who were to overrun the land like locusts, she passed away into the
mysterious silence of the woods as the standard bearer of the advance,
leaving her name to be a shadowy record for all future ages and the very
embodiment of the spirit of romance that was in the story of the
subjugation of America. Had she lived the normal life of the woman
pioneer, her memory would have lacked something of romance; but her
unknown fate, and her position in the van of the great coming nation of
Americans, keep her in remembrance.

Jamestown was founded on May 13, 1607, and with its foundation began the
real era of English rule in America. We know but little of the place of
woman in the first days of the colony, and it is not until 1608 that we
find any record of female influence or even presence. At this time,
Captain Newport, who had brought from England the first fleet and in
whose honor Newport News--originally Newport Ness--was named, made his
reappearance with a number of fresh settlers, among them being Mistress
Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras by name, who was shortly afterward
wedded to Master John Laydon and thus won for herself fame as the first
woman of English blood to be married on America