Sir Walter Raleigh, of chivalrous memory, sent the first English
colony to America in the sixteenth century. He was a half-brother of
Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the English explorer, and had previously
accompanied Gilbert to Newfoundland. He sent out an expedition in
1584, which selected Roanoke Island, south of the Chesapeake, for a
settlement, and for this enterprise Queen Elizabeth knighted Raleigh,
gave him a grant of the whole country, and directed that the new land
be named in her honor, Virginia. In 1585-86 colonizing expeditions
were sent to Roanoke, but they did not prosper. The colonists
quarrelled with the Indians, and in the latter year the Governor
returned to England for provisions and reinforcements, leaving behind
with the colony his daughter, Mrs. Dare, and a granddaughter, nine
days old, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the new land.
Then came the Spanish Armada to conquer England, and the long war with
Spain. Nobody went to succor the little band of exiles on Roanoke
Island for three years, and when they did, the settlement was
obliterated, the hundred colonists and little Virginia Dare had
disappeared, and no tidings of them were ever obtained. Thus perished
Raleigh's colony; and, his means being exhausted, he was discouraged
and sent no more expeditions out to America. His enterprise failed in
making a permanent settlement, but it gave two priceless gifts to
Europe. The returning Governor took back to England the potato, which
Raleigh planted on his Irish estate and which has proved the salvation
of old Erin, and also the Virginia tobacco, which he taught the people
to smoke, and the fragrant weed became the solace of the world.
No further attempts at colonization were made until the seventeenth
century, when new grants were issued, and the country was named
Carolina in honor of King Charles I. The Atlantic Coast south of the
Chesapeake Bay entrance is low and bordered by sand beaches, which for
most of the distance in front of North Carolina are far eastward of
the mainland, with broad sounds and river estuaries between. These
long and narrow beaches protrude in some cases a hundred miles into
the ocean and form dangerous shoals, the extensive Albemarle and
Pamlico Sounds being enclosed by them, the former stretching fifty
miles and the latter seventy-five miles into the land. Out in front of
Pamlico Sound projects the shoulder of Cape Hatteras into the
Atlantic, the outer point of a low, sandy island, with shoals
extending far beyond it, and marked by the great beacon of this
dangerous coast, a flashing light one hundred and ninety feet high.
Here is the principal storm factory of the southern coast, noted for
cyclonic disturbances and dreaded by the mariner. Upon the outer
Diamond Shoals the Government has long tried in vain to erect a
lighthouse. A lightship is kept there, but is frequently blown from
her moorings and drifts ashore. The Gulf Stream, coming with warm and
speedy current up from Florida, is here diverged out into the ocean by
the shoulder of Hatteras; and, similarly, the whirling West India
cyclones of enormous area come along with their resistless energy,
destroying everything in their paths. In the terrific hurricane of the
autumn of 1899 a wind velocity of one hundred and sixty miles an hour
was reached momentarily, and the anemometer at Hatteras was blown down
after having recorded a velocity of one hundred and twenty miles. The
actual force exerted by one of these great cyclones in its work of
devastation, which uproots trees, demolishes buildings and strews the
coast with wrecks, has been calculated as equalling one thousand
million horse-power.