Captaine Stafford / Captaine Stafford / Captaine Stafford
Additional Notes
Stafford, Edward:; Captain Edward Stafford served as one of two captains (the other being Vaughan) under Ralph Lane on the Raleigh’s 1585-1586 Roanoke Expedition, and as captain of a pinnace under White in the 1587 Expedition. As there were little over one hundred men in the 1585 Roanoke settlement, it is likely that Stafford and Vaughan each commanded a company of about fifty men, and both certainly took part in the explorations of the area surrounding Roanoke Island. When the colony found itself in dire straits, both regarding food and failing diplomatic relations with the Algonquians, Lane set Stafford with men to keep watch for ships, and it was Captain Stafford’s party of men who spotted and signaled Drake’s passing fleet on 8 June 1586, and secured the expedition’s passage back to England. Lane praised his conduct in his report, writing that: “from the first to the last, he was the gentleman that neuer spared labour or peril either by land or water, faire weather or fowle, to performe any seruice committed vnto him.” Stafford set out again for the New World under John White in the 1587 voyage, this time commanding the fleet’s pinnace. White attributes Stafford’s vigilance as a sailor to their not being shipwrecked on Cape Fear. Stafford evidently sailed back to England with the pinnace around or shortly before White himself returned in 1587. Little is heard of him after these events but by 1589 he was in Devonshire, England, serving under Raleigh.;
Works Cited:; The Roanoke Voyages, 1584-1590: Volume II, ed. David Beers Quinn (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), 132, 177, 194, 288, 500.;