Joachim Gans
Sir Richard Grenville, leader of Raleigh's expedition, founded the Roanoke Colony on Roanoke Island off the coast of modern North Carolina in 1585. Among the ruins at the Roanoke site, archaeologists have discovered lumps of smelted copper and a goldsmith’s crucible attributed to Gans's work at the colony. Because the royal mining company failed to resupply colonists who were also becoming increasingly fearful of conflicts with the Native Americans, they accepted an offer from Sir Francis Drake in June 1586 to sail them to England. Each of the colonists, including Gans, left North America.
Roanoke Colony
Between their arrival in Roanoke in April 1585 and the July 1586 departure, Harriot and White both conducted detailed studies of the Roanoke area, with Harriot compiling his samples and notes into several notebooks that did not survive the colony's disappearance. Harriot also wrote descriptions of the surrounding flora and fauna of the area, which survive in his work "A Brief and True Report of the New Founde Land of Virginia," written as a report on the colony's progress to the English government on the request of Raleigh. Viewed by modern historians as propaganda for the colony, this work has become vastly important to Roanoke's history due to Harriot's observations on wildlife as well as his depictions of Indian activities at the time of the colony's disappearance.