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Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen to America (1900)
Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen to America - 1900 Author:Richard Hakluyt Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AMADAS AND BARLOW. On Gilbert's death Raleigh, his half-brother, succeeded to his enterprise, and obtained in March, 1584, a grant in similar form, to be carr... more »ied into execution within six years. He resolved that there should be little delay in giving it effect. Before April was over, two small vessels quitted Plymouth for the purpose of taking possession of some fitting spot for a colony between Florida and Newfoundland. Raleigh directed that the northern route of Gilbert should be abandoned. American enterprise had thus early divided itself, in accordance with the physical conditions of the Atlantic Ocean, into northern and southern. Gilbert, we have seen, had declared in favour of the former: and his choice was justified, in the next generation, by the success which attended the French on the St. Lawrence, and the English in New England. But Raleigh had derived from his reading of the Spanish histories a strong predilection for the richer and more romantic south : and accordingly his two skippers, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow, took the old route by the Canaries, and made the continent of North America in the latitude of North Carolina. They touched successively at the island of Wocokon (Ocracoke) at the entrance of Pamlico Sound, and at that of Roanoak, farther northward, near the mouth of Albemarle Sound, spent some weeks in viewing the country and trafficking with the natives, and then returned to England, with the report embodied in the narrative of Barlow which is here printed. The Queen was delighted with the prospect of an English settlement in this desirable land, and gave it the name of Virginia. Raleigh's attempts at founding such a settlement were uniformly unfortunate. In the next year (1585) Greenville,Lane, Cavendish, Amadas, and Harlot, sailed thither with...« less