xecution! And
yet how immeasurably beyond his wildest dreams the actual development
to-day! Gilbert was not a sea-dog but a soldier with an uncanny
reputation for being a regular Jonah who 'had no good hap at sea.' He
was also passionately self-willed, and Elizabeth had doubts about the
propriety of backing him. But she sent him a gilt anchor by way of good
luck and off he went in June, financed chiefly by Raleigh, whose name
was given to the flagship.

Gilbert's adventure never got beyond its base in Newfoundland. His ship
the _Delight_ was wrecked. The crew of the _Raleigh_ mutinied and ran
her home to England. The other four vessels held on. But the men, for
the most part, were neither good soldiers, good sailors, nor yet good
colonists, but ne'er-do-wells and desperadoes. By September the
expedition was returning broken down. Gilbert, furious at the sailors'
hints that he was just a little sea-shy, would persist in sticking to
the Lilliputian ten-ton _Squirrel_, which was woefully top-hampered with
guns and stores. Before leaving Newfoundland he was implored to abandon
her and bring her crew aboard a bigger craft. But no. 'Do not fear,' he
answered; 'we are as near to Heaven by sea as land.' One wild night off
the Azores the _Squirrel_ foundered with all hands.

Amadas and Barlow sailed in 1584. Prospecting for Sir Walter Raleigh,
they discovered several harbors in North Carolina, then part of the vast
'plantation' of Virginia. Roanoke Island, Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds,
as well as the intervening waters, were all explored with enthusiastic
thoroughness and zeal. Barlow, a skipper who was handy with his pen,
described the scent of that fragrant summer land in terms which
attracted the attention of Bacon at the time and of Dryden a century
later. The royal charter authorizing Raleigh to take what he could find
in this strange land had a clause granting his prospective colonists
'all the privileges of free denizens and persons native of England in
such ample manner as if they were born and personally resident in our
said realm of England.'

Next year Sir Richard Grenville, who was Raleigh's cousin, convoyed out
to Roanoke the little colony which Ralph Lane governed and which, as we
have seen in an earlier chapter, Drake took home discomfited in 1586.
There might have been a story to tell of successful colonization,
instead of failure, if Drake had kept away from Roanoke that year or if
he had tarried a few days l