John White John White, who was assumed to be born around the year 1540, is a well known British artist and cartographer, and is also known as the governor of the second English expedition of the Roanoke Islands. Very little is known about White’s life before his creations of art began and after he returned back to England from his discovery of the lost colony, but the time period that is marked by those two life experiences are the ones that John White is famous for. White’s first trip to America was on 1577 when he came aboard the ship Aid whose mission was to find precious metals and a passage to Asia, neither of which were achieved. Although the actual mission of the ship failed, White was able to draw detailed sketches of the people and the land they encountered. After Aid had returned home, White’s illustrations were admired by many people and about eight years later he was asked by Walter Raleigh to join an expedition to settle on Roanoke Island. On this expedition White was able to …show more content…
In 1587 he sailed back to the island with 100 colonists and became the governor of the second colony that Walter Raleigh was attempting to establish. White and his group returned to what remained from their last expedition and worked to rebuild what had previously been constructed and also try to rebuild the broken relationship that had been between the Indians and the last settlers, the latter of which was not as successful as they had hoped. Because of the time of year White and the colonists had arrived at Roanoke, it was too late for them to produce crops before winter, they were running out of supplies and were receiving no aid from the Indians. The colonists asked White to return to England and bring back more supplies, but by the time White was able to return, he returned to what is known as the “lost colony”. There was no sign of the colonists he had left, which included his own daughter and