Note Note 3, page 8 — BOOK I. RISE OF THE FIRST ENGLISH COLONY.

But the ever-mischievous South Sea delusion did not vanish when the period of colonization was reached. Ralph Lane's quest. Ralph Lane, the governor of Ralegh's first colony on Roanoke Island, having inquired perhaps for that western sea which Hakluyt had seen "on the mightie old mappe in parchment," understood the inventive savages to say that the Roanoke River sprang from a rock so near to a sea that the waves in storm often dashed into this fountain, making the river brackish for some distance below. That the story might be more interesting, they added that there was gold there, and that the walls of a town in that land were made of pearls. This is what the white men fancied the Indians said; but whatever they said was spoken in a tongue of which Lane's men had but the most scanty knowledge, if indeed it were not given mainly by signs. Note 3. Nothing dispirited by the extravagance of these tales, Lane and some of his men set out to immortalize and enrich themselves—like a company of children running after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Lane's Account in Hakl. III. While the crafty Indians were plotting the destruction of the colonists left behind, the governor and his followers pursued their quest until they were obliged to eat their dogs, made palatable by seething with a dressing of sassafras leaves. They returned, half famished and wholly disappointed, just in time to rescue the colony from destruction. But faith is faith, and despite his severe experience Lane went back to England believing that the Roanoke rose near to the Bay of Mexico "that openeth out into the South Sea." The map which the colonists brought with them when they abandoned the country in 1586 handed down the delusion, in another form, by showing a strait leading from the neighborhood of Port Royal into a body of water to the westward. Note 4.