r White, and the
following Sunday Virginia Dare, the granddaughter of Governor White,
was baptized, both events being officially reported to Raleigh. In this
day of religious freedom any enforced adoption of religious forms
shocks our pious instincts. Yet baptism has always been considered
_necessary_ to salvation, and in the past the zeal of Christians for
the salvation of their fellow-men often assumed the form of mild force.
We read where the Spaniards, always religious fanatics, administered
the Holy Sacrament to thousands in Central America and Mexico _at the
point of the sword_; their zeal misleading them to force upon those
less enlightened than themselves the hope of that heaven which they
believed to be accessible only through certain Christian rites. So to
order the baptism of an Indian chief seems a simple, kindly thing, and
most probably Manteo desired it done. The only other Indian who
received baptism in those early settlements was Pocahontas, in 1614.
She was a captive at the time and held as a hostage to induce Powhatan
to comply with certain demands of the colonists at Jamestown.

Despite the fact that Virginia Dare was baptized twenty-seven years
earlier than Pocahontas, yet it is the Indian Princess who is figured
in the painting on the walls of the dome of the Capitol at Washington
as receiving the first baptism in the colonies. Buried in the annals of
that time lies the fact that twenty-seven years before any colonist
even came to Jamestown, Virginia Dare was born and baptized, as the
sequence of Christian birth and as the child of Christian parents.
Virginia Dare was not a myth. She was a living, breathing reality, a
human creature of good English descent, the granddaughter of the
governor of the colonies, the daughter of the assistant governor, and a
sharer in the mysterious fate of Raleigh's Lost Colony. The historical
facts of her life and the legend of her fate and death are contained in
the pages of "The White Doe."

Her baptism would not have been mentioned in the records if it had not
been official and proper. In a new land, surrounded by dangers and
difficulties, with strange environment to divert the mind to other
channels, it would have been easy and natural for her baptism to have
been delayed if not altogether neglected amid the stress of events. Her
prompt baptism and the official report of the event to Sir Walter
Raleigh is convincing testimony to the presence of a chaplain at
Roano