to be heard of more. Captain Hall was shown many relics of
Frobisher's voyages, some of which he sent to the Royal Geographical
Society of London, a part to the Smithsonian Institute at Washington.
The small English house of lime and stone on this island was still
standing in good condition, and there was also a trench where they had
built their ill-fated boat.

[Illustration: An Indian Village at the Roanoke Settlement.]

A contemporary of Frobisher, Sir Francis Drake, also entertained the
idea of making the northwest passage. While engaged in privateering or
piratical expeditions against the Spanish, Drake landed on the Isthmus
of Panama, saw the Pacific for the first time, and determined to enter
it by the Straits of Magellan. In 1577 he made his way through the
straits, plundered the Spanish along the coast of Chili and Peru, and
sailed as far north as the 48th parallel, or Oregon, calling the country
New Albion. Steering homeward by the Cape of Good Hope, he arrived at
Plymouth, his starting-point, in 1580, having been absent about two
years and ten months.

[Illustration: Sir Humphrey Gilbert.]

Thomas Cavendish had been with Grenville in the voyage of 1585 to
Virginia. Frobisher's attempts inspired him with the ambition of the
age. In 1586 he, too, sailed through the Straits of Magellan, burning
and plundering Spanish ships, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and reached
Plymouth in 1588, having been gone about two years and fifty days.

[Illustration: Sir Walter Raleigh. From a portrait attributed to Zuccaro
in the National Portrait Gallery, London.]

[1584]

These half-piratical attempts against Spain led continually into
American waters, till the notion of forming a permanent outpost here as
base for such adventures suggested to Sir Humphrey Gilbert the plan,
which he failed to realize, of founding an American settlement. Gilbert
visited our shores in 1579, and again in 1583, but was lost on his
return from the latter voyage.

In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh sent two captains, Amidas and Barlow, to
inspect the coast off what is now North Carolina. They reported so
favorably that he began, next year, a colony on Roanoke Island. England
was now a Protestant land, and no longer heeded Spanish claims to the
transatlantic continent, save so far as actual settlements had been
made.

[1586]

Sir Richard Grenville commanded this expedition, but was to return on
seeing the one hundred and eight colonists who accom