 This is ephemeral, just a blouse, girlfriend's wardrobe. It has a neck in the shape of a V. It was the most ab about Shakespeare. It's some general interest. I think this is very, very this. And then perhaps get to Roanoke. So, yeah, there's just so, so, so many different bits of this book. I really didn't know which is the most interesting one. In 1587, a colony of 123 English men, women, and children was founded on Roanoke Island, Virginia. And three years later, their settlement had disappeared without a trace. Now, one historian believes that they were the victims of an English court conspiracy, led by one of the most powerful men of that. The sad, the sad, the sad. Seafarer and artist John White is the primary source for piecing together the events that doomed the colony of Roanoke. White was the governor of the first English colony in America, which was established on Roanoke Island. It was to be named Raleigh after the expedition's sponsor, Sir Walter Raleigh. A favorite of England's Queen Elizabeth I, Raleigh expected to make his fortune from the colony, but he was to finish up, destitute, imprisoned, and finally executed. John White's account of the 1587 voyage to Roanoke and the subsequent disappearance of 115 men, women, and children on the face of it, a plain narrative of a failed expedition. Now, scholars are arguing that a closer reading divulges secret evidence of sinister scheme. The tragedy was a personal one. He sailed back to England, leaving his daughter and newborn granddaughter with the rest of the settlers on the tiny island. But it was to be three years before he could return. The threat of a Spanish invasion kept English ships in port, trapping White on the wrong side of the Atlantic until finally in 1590. Raleigh persuaded Queen Elizabeth to allow his relief ships. As White really reached the treacherous shallows that guarded the Roanoke Island, he may have hoped for a happy reunion, but could hardly have failed to harbor misgivings about the fate of the vulnerable settlers. He knew that local warriors to be hostile. The week before he left, one colonist had even been shot. And White, of course, found the settlement deserted. The single clue to the settler's fate was a lone word carved into a wooden stake. Croatoan, croatoan, over here. So over here we have charting a disaster. The man-made governor of Roanoke was the artist John White. He had mapped the coastline earlier expedition, indicating Roanoke Island in Croatoan, both circled. Mystery. Roanoke was meant to be the first permanent English colony in America 33 years before, yet the colonists disappeared and were never seen by Europeans again. Now historians argue that they may have been pawns sacrificed as part of an English conspiracy that permeated the high echelon of power. Throughout the 16th century, the 1500s, the thought of conquering North America captivated English traders and inventive mineral riches. The Great American Settlement also had the potential, should an inland passage to the Pacific be found, of becoming the great mercantile gateway. Raleigh had won from the queen of eight and a half million acres of American land, but he was undecided about which land to choose. One explorer, Captain Arthur, had written of Roanoke that it was plentiful, sweet, and bringeth forth all the things in abundance without toil or labor. But Raleigh's first attempt to set a colony on Roanoke had actually failed, with the settlers giving up after just ten months. The Native Americans withdrew food supplies, forcing the settlers to hunt. Raleigh and his backers decided to move the settlement some 50 miles north to a sheltered, deep water port of the Chesapeake Bay. A small garrison remained at Roanoke to guard the old site, but the island was deemed too risky for civilians, unless of course the Secotan tribe were brought under control. In John White, the prospective governor was charged 150 colonists, each of whom would receive 500 and time was pressing, were to reach Chesapeake for the planting season. Under the strength with only 115 recruits, the ships set sail at the end of April 1587, nearly a hundred years after Columbus had landed. White's account of the voyage shows that they were immediately beset by puzzling difficulties. It is clear that in White's opinion these all stemmed. Fernandez was a former pirate. His navigational skills and knowledge of the eastern seaboard of America were undoubted. There was even a stretch of coastline named after him. His judgment was less assured. White wrote in his diary about Fernandez, ludely, that is deliberately, abandoned the fly boat that carried shore stores for the settlement as it foundered in the water of Portugal. In the Caribbean, White recorded the crew failed to take unnecessary supplies of water and salt because of Fernandez's obstruction. The expedition made slow progress and in mid-July, ships that such was Fernandez's carelessness and ignorance that he nearly ran the boat aground on the Cape of Fear. These delays had desperate consequences. For the settlers, they had reached land too late to plant the grain and while the failure to stock up on food meant that supplies were running low. Worse was to come. Raleigh had instructed White to go ashore at the Roanoke for a conference concerning the state. But as White and 40 of his men were being rode ashore, one of Fernandez's deputies shouted that they would not be let back on board. The ship would only stay at Roanoke long enough for all the settlers to be ferryed ashore. And White was dumbfounded. His pilot had overruled the orders of Sir Walter Raleigh himself. Fernandez refused to take the con. Near the original settlement was the village of Pomuoke, populated by the Secotin. At first, relations were good and there was trading. The potato was not introduced to Europe. It grew only in South America at that time. So alone and with their only source of advice and protection, the garrison at Roanoke, the settlers' next discovery was a chilling one, all that remained of the 15 soldiers who destroyed the village. And the colony's salvation appeared only with the late arrival of their next fly boat. Garing surplus provisions, the settlers decided to send White back to England to seek assistance for their predicament. Fernandez's ship's lock, meanwhile, shows that he idled on the American coastline for 30s. Why did Fernandez, an investor in the expedition, choose to abandon the colonists? The answer appears to lay across the Atlantic woman, jostling for position at favor and favor at court. Sir Walter Raleigh stood out. Not only a courtier, but possessed the wardrobe and demeanor of a prince. A particular favorite of the queen, the darling of the English Cleopatra, as one Flemish visitor. There's as deadly enemies there were, there was a great rivalry between Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Walsingham left at the court of Elizabeth I. His policy, his buccaneering style, often held sway with Raleigh's. Overrolling her more cautious advisors such as the Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, Raleigh was well rewarded for his loyalty to the lesson of Anthony Bavington to assassinate the queen. Raleigh was given Bavington's sizable estates, and Raleigh's power and influence ensured that he was a target for others with ambition. Few men, but one certainly did, Sir Francis Walsingham. Sir Francis Walsingham, hello there, had both motive and means. He was a, he was facing financial ruin, one, and as the mastermind behind the exposure of the Bavington conspiracy had expected to be rewarded with the estates that were in fact given to Raleigh. Walsingham knew that the Roanoke settlement was Raleigh's long held, as weakest spot. Its failure would lead to his ruination. American historian Lee Miller has argued that the loss of the colonists stems from Walsingham's plot to bankrupt, and Miller found evidence of a vital connection between Walsingham and Fernandez. So the Portuguese pirate Fernandez should have gone to the gallows, but Walsingham signed papers that released him. Could Fernandez have repaid this debt by sabotaging the Roanoke colony in order to ruin Raleigh? He could, of course, have been referring to rival entrepreneurs, aiming to discredit. When John White was eventually authorized, the missing clue is that John White never found his family or other settlers. In his first, second, rescue ship, the Hopewell White, wrote he's thought to have died in Ireland at around this time. By the time never have learned of the vital Croatone by the settlers and found by John White, not the rescuers would have searched in vain at Chesapeake Bay or on Roanoke instead of Croatone, which is an island 50 miles. Raleigh's legal right to the title of the land was in jeopardy. It depended on having settled a permanent colony within seven years. As the former favorite descended into ruin and disgrace, Walsingham's old allies, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and Robert Cecil, following the death of Elizabeth I, the new king James I, was soon convinced of Raleigh's disloyalty for treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1606. Soon after, his land title was won by Robert Cecil, along with these two men responsible for the charges against him. The Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke and Chief Justice Papa so epilogue to the mystery, it was reported that in 1608, the chief of the Powhatan tribe had told settlers in Jamestown, Virginia that the Roanoke survivors had been slaughtered. Historians then in 1701, the English surveyor John Lawson wrote of an unusual group of light-skinned American Indians he had met on the dunes of Croatones. As far as he could comprehend, several of their ancestors were white and could talk in a book as we do. Could the settlers have survived to be the first European colonists in America after all? That mystery is one that may never be solved. The Roanoke settlers may have been massacred by the American Indians or they may have integrated into one of the tribes that John White painted a decade before their disappearance.