Narrative of the 1584 Voyage (Document 1)

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Rahul Patel Instructor: Raymond Maxey History 1301-057 19 February 2013 Narrative of the 1584 Voyage (Document 1) Arthur Barlowe was an English explorer and sea captain who helped to lead a reconnaissance expedition to Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina, preparing for a larger English settlement the following year. Little is known about Barlowe's life other than that by early in the 1580s he was a gentleman-soldier attached to Walter Raleigh's household in London. In 1584, Barlowe and Philip Amadas captained two ships that landed at Roanoke Island in what would become the Virginia Colony. The explorers remained in the region for two months, and upon his return Barlowe produced a report, "The first voyage made to the coastes of America," that appeared in Richard Hakluyt the Younger's Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in 1589. An entertaining narrative, Barlowe's report appears to have been based on a ship's log of the voyage, and the final text may have been reworked by others, including Thomas Hariot, Raleigh's primary assistant, and Raleigh himself. Raleigh used the completed report as a propaganda tool to further his aims of settling a permanent colony in Virginia. This document provides one of the first English accounts of the geography, soils, flora, fauna, and native inhabitants of the southern coast. It describes the process of burning out logs to form large canoes, and the fortified villages where the Indians lived. First, Arthur Barlowe captained one of the two vessels that Sir Walter Raleigh fitted out for a preliminary exploration of the American coast in 1584. Little more is known about him than the information contained in his narrative of the voyage. journey was a reconnaissance trip financed by Sir Walter Raleigh, whose colonization efforts
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