Almost immediately after the departure
of Sir Francis Drake’s fleet from Roanoke which took Lane’s beleaguered and disillusioned settlers back to England
than Raleigh’s ship arrives at the island at Hataraske with fresh supplies. Hataraske is the Carolina Algonquian name
for the northern part of Roanoke which extends from Port Ferdinando almost to Cape Hatteras.
Raleigh’s crew of course find the place deserted despite spending considerable time on their searches. Mystified, without a
clue as to what has happened they decide to give it all up as a bad job, so hoist their anchor and taking their supplies with
them return, like Drake, home to the old country.
Their departure is ironic for fourteen or fifteen days later Grenville’s
three ships arrive at Roanoke and though he too finds the settlement abandoned, does discover the three men that Drake had
to leave behind. So, undiscouraged, he unloads all the stores and provisions he has brought over and as the scene here shows,
he leaves a new party of fifteen men to await his return next year with the next batch of settlers, then sails homeward back
across the Atlantic.
The cottage shown on the left-hand side of this scene is called Mary Newman’s cottage at Saltash in Cornwall. Mary Newman was Drake’s first wife and back in the 1980’s the local Council were bent
on demolishing if before the Tamar Protection Society stepped in and saved it. They then persuaded the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to loan them furniture of the period and it is now open to the public.
The bridge shown is the Ivybridge
in Devon, there because this panel was stitched by the New World Tapestry team in Ivybridge.
Penshurst in Kent
at the top, is the home of Sir Philip Sidney (arms shown here) who is a promoter backing the Roanoke venture. A soldier
poet, he dies this year on 17 October fighting the Spanish in the Netherlands.
Another important person involved in the Virginia settlement
is Welshman Sir David Williams (arms shown here) a Justice of the King’s Bench in London. He comes from Gwernevet
in Brecon. Likewise involved with the venture in America is Yorkshireman Marmaduke Constable, a graduate of Caius College Cambridge. (His arms in scene 4).
