A Brill Calendar: August 18

Few days were allotted to Virginia Dare for staking her place in the chronicle of European settlement in Northern America.

This daughter of Eleanor White and Ananias Dare was born on Roanoke Island, off the American mainland, August 18 1587. Mother Eleanor – or Elinor – was already ‘large with child’ when she and her husband set sail from Devon, on May 8 1587, in the good ship ‘Lion’ for an expedition intending to create a ‘Plantation’, (permanent settlement) in the New World. Sponsored by one of Queen Elizabeth’s most flamboyant courtiers, Sir Walter Raleigh, this was his third effort to realize a stable English presence at the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The party of 117 souls departed with good hopes for success.

When the first child of English stock was born there and called ‘Virginia’ – a suckling subject of the ‘Virgin Queen’ – the maternal grandfather of the infant, John White, left for England nine days later, trying to solicit support for the colony and arriving there in November 1587. Within a matter of months, the mighty Spanish Armada left the Iberian Peninsula for an all-out sea-battle against the English. It was only after the successful result that ‘Gloriana’s’ Realm could afford to honour earlier promises given to the colonists. The relief for the settlers arrived August 1590, three years after Virginia’s birth; and Governor John White found as the only trace of the presence there of his ilk the mysterious word ‘croatoan’, carved into a wooden post.

It is seldom that magnificent English words like ‘sad’ or ‘forlorn’ have been more appropriate. Roanoke Island measures some 36 square miles and is readily surveyed for traces of human habitation. The name may be of Algonkin origin and mean ‘people from the north’.