Raleigh's Pirate Colony in America: America Through Time

This new account of the tragedy gives a convincing explanation of how the project was doomed from the start. Phil Jones sets the tragedy in its global context and lays bare the myth of Elizabethan sea power, examining the true motives of its supposedly selfless heroes, who conveniently managed to reconcile patriotism with profiteering. With officially sanctioned piracy and plunder the only incentive for sailors in a private-enterprise war against Spain, it is hardly surprising that making money became the overriding priority to which everything else was sacrificed. The subsequent search for them among the local Indian tribes brought to light a grisly tale of ethnic cleansing. It heralded a race war of genocidal proportions, as Europeans and Native Americans fought for the control of a continent, a battle in which imported alien disease, rather than the superiority of European technology and culture, was triumphant.