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This lecture presents the text of the speech about Elizabeth I Queen of England delivered by the author at the 2008 Raleigh Lecture on History held at the British Academy. It explores the religious movement called the Family of Love and discusses Sir Walter Raleigh's knowledge about the discourse on Dover Harbour, which was later spuriously attributed to him. The lecture provides an excerpt and interpretation of Queen Elizabeth's poem titled On Monsieur's Departure.

In the 1580s, Sir Walter Raleigh’s soldiers and settlers, including Arthur Barlowe and Ralph Lane, ventured into Roanoke. They forged alliances with Wingina, a leader of Roanoke and his allies Wanchese and Manteo, but Lane attacked Manteo’s village of Croatoan, killing Wingina. Wanchese retaliated against Lane’s group. Manteo left and returned in 1587 with Governor John White. After failed negotiations with the Croatoan, White decided to attack Wanchese but mistakenly attacked Croatoan villagers. White left for England, and when he returned to Virginia three years later, the colony was gone, the settlers having taken refuge with the Croatoan. Other settlers, such as the ones in Tuscarora territory, established their societies under Indians’ authority and agreed to live by Indians’ rules. The society that blossomed under Tuscarora supervision was multiracial and prospered from trade. The Tuscarora War was a violent explosion of tensions between the Tuscarora, Europeans, and their Indian allies. By the 1750s, the people of Drowning Creek and its swamps traced belonging through kinship, spoke English, farmed, and adopted European land-tenure systems. They regenerated their identity as an Indian community and developed a nation that operated independently and valued autonomy, freedom, and justice.

This book concludes with George Chapman's celebration of Sir Walter Raleigh's encounter with Guiana in his quest for the fabled El Dorado. This ode to the new promised land reflected the optic of the colonizer and his bizarre fantasies about the colonized peoples' submission and acquiescence to the domination of outsiders. There is no record that the indigenous peoples sanctioned their colonization, nor had the African peoples agreed to cross the Atlantic in order to join the colony as enslaved persons. The Indians had come voluntarily as indentured workers, but their treatment was hardly better than what slaves received. The peoples of Guiana's raison d'être was to serve the colonial masters and to do so with pride and gratitude.

This chapter focuses on Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian explorer in the service of the French king. Da Verrazano became the first European to view the southern tip of the Outer Banks. He painted a romantic picture of the tall sweeping grasses and majestic evergreens of Bogue Banks, the twenty-five-mile-long sandy island that teemed with dozens of species of exotic birds and sheltered tranquil Beaufort harbor from the tempestuous Atlantic Ocean. In 1585 Sir Richard Grenville, a captain in Sir Walter Raleigh's first English-sponsored colonization effort, became the first European to sail into Pamlico Sound and the mouth of the Neuse River, a few miles from present-day New Bern. Though Raleigh's colonization attempt ultimately failed, just over a century later Europeans began settling and developing the coastal areas that would become Craven and Carteret counties.