I am the cyber spirit of John White Lord of Roanoke. Not much is known about me, but I'll tell you a few secrets about myself.
No one on earth knows exactly when or where I was born. I know it was somewhere around the mid 1500's. Some people say I was born in England. When I grew up I became a great surveyor. I was part of a group that went to the New World in 1577 and while we were there I drew sketches of the land and the people.
I come into this story when Sir Walter Raleigh got together a group of men, women and children who wanted to go to the New World and start a colony. He asked me to be the Governor of this new place called Virginia. We were all excited to go there. Among the group was my daughter, Eleanor, who was pregnant, and her husband, Ananais. We sailed with three ships from England on May 5, 1587. The ships got very dirty and one of the ships we thought got lost. The trip was very hard on all of us.
We reached Roanoke Island in July of 1587. We were suppose to pick up fifteen men left by Sir Richard Grenville in July of 1586. Then we planned to sail north up the coast to Chesapeake Bay. When we got to Roanoke Island we couldn't find Grenville's men. We found only one dead body on the beach. The bigger ship whose captain was Ferdinando dropped off their supplies and left the island at the end of August. The rest of us were left on Roanoke, a place where others had said it wasn't the best place to start a colony.
We began rebuilding the fort because we knew bad weather would soon come. We met friendly natives who helped us. I asked the friendly Croatoan Indians to help us deal with the native Roanoacs who were not so friendly to our group. To our surprise the lost ship arrived and we unloaded the supplies. I thought of a plan to attack the Roanoacs after one of our men was killed. It turned out not to be a good idea. My men killed a native Croatoan carrying a child. This made the Croatoan's mad and they wouldn't give us any more food.
Some happiness did happen when my granddaughter, Virginia Dare was born. We were all excited about the first English child born in the New World.
Now to get back to the story, supplies were going fast. Someone had to go back to England for food and other things. The group decided it should be me. We planned that I would come back to Roanoke Island in the spring with new supplies. I left on August 27, 1587, and didn't get to return until August 17, 1590, because of England's war with Spain. It was three long years for me and I missed my family very much and worried about them.
Finally, I did return to Roanoke three years later. The colonists were
not there. A group of us looked for them and my family on the island. We
couldn't find anyone. We only found two clues, "CRO" carved in
a tree and "Croatoan" carved on a wooden fence post. There was
a fire at the end of the island, but the weather started getting bad while
we were looking. It was the hurricane season and we had to leave quickly.
We took our small boats back to the ship and returned to England. I never
saw my family again.
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