According to McMullan, Raleigh quietly re-established contact with the colony by 1597, and his sassafras expeditions were simply picking up the colonists' harvests. In this view, the colony was not truly abandoned until the secret of the colony's location died with Raleigh in 1618. After that point, McMullan argued, the colonists would have begun to assimilate with the Croatan at Beechland. This hypothesis largely depends upon oral traditions and unsubstantiated reports about Beechland, as well as a 1651 map that depicts a sassafras tree near the Alligator River. A significant problem with the hypothesis is that Raleigh supposedly planned a sassafras farm in 1587, to capitalize on a dramatic increase in crop prices, so that he could quickly compensate for the great expense of the failed 1585 colony. The proposed financial motivation overlooks the fact that Richard Grenville's privateering recovered the cost of the 1585 expedition. Additionally, sassafras prices did not skyrocket in value until the late 1590s, well after the establishment of the 1587 colony. Spanish attack P. Green, while collecting material for a 1937 stage play, noticed that Spanish records from the period contained abundant references to Raleigh and his settlements. Spanish forces knew of English plans to establish a new Virginia base in 1587, and were searching for it before White's colonists had even arrived. The Spanish Empire had included most of North America in their Florida claim, and did not recognize England's right to colonize Roanoke or Chesapeake Bay. Given the Spanish sack of Fort Caroline in 1565, the colonists likely recognized the threat they represented. However, the Spanish were still searching for the colony in Chesapeake Bay as late as 1600, suggesting that they also were unaware of its fate. CORA tree In 2006, writer Scott Dawson proposed that a Southern live oak tree on Hatteras Island, which bears the faint inscription "CORA" in its bark, might be connected to the Lost Colony. The CORA tree had already been the subject of local legends, most notably a story about a witch named "Cora" that was popularized in a 1989 book by C. H. Whedbee. Nevertheless, Dawson argued that the inscription might represent another message from the colonists, similar to the "CROATOAN" inscription at Roanoke. If so, "CORA" might indicate that the colonists left Croatoan Island to settle with the Coree (also known as the Coranine) on the mainland, near Lake Mattamuskeet. A 2009 study to