England in America, 1580-1652

England's race to claim America began not with triumphant landings but with a generation of failure, ambition, and blood. Lyon Gardiner Tyler chronicles the desperate decades before permanent settlement took hold: the dreams of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, drowned at sea; the Lost Colony of Roanoke, vanished into history; Sir Walter Raleigh's ill-fated expeditions to a wilderness that devoured his fortune and his head. Set against Elizabethan England's life-or-death struggle with Spain, this account reveals the forces propelling Englishmen into the unknown: greed for Spanish treasure, the push to plant Protestant colonies in Catholic territory, the restless energy of a nation reaching for global dominion. Tyler traces how these early efforts, so often tragic, laid the rough foundation for Jamestown's eventual survival and the later Puritan migrations that would reshape the continent. Written in 1904 with scholarly precision and period prose, this remains a valuable window into how England learned, at enormous human cost, to plant colonies in American soil.