The Lost Colony of Roanoke: 'CROATOAN' and the Missing Settlers

The Story

In April 1587 a group of English colonists sailed for Sir Walter Raleigh under John White. They meant to settle on Chesapeake Bay and stop at Roanoke Island only to find soldiers left behind by an earlier expedition. According to the National Park Service, the fleet's captain, Simon Fernandes, refused to take them farther, and they had to stay on Roanoke.

Things went badly from the start. The NPS says a colonist named George Howe was ambushed and killed. In retaliation White's men attacked people they took for the Roanoke tribe, but who were in fact friendly Croatoan people, until the Croatoan man Manteo, who worked with the colonists, stopped it. The bright spot was the birth of Virginia Dare, the first English-born child in the Americas. Short of food and facing winter, the colonists asked White to return to England for help. He left in late August 1587.

'No one has definitively proven what happened to the Lost Colony,' the National Park Service says.

War kept him away. The Spanish Armada threatened England, and Queen Elizabeth I ordered English ships to stay home. It was not until early 1590 that White persuaded privateers bound for the West Indies to take him back. He landed on 18 August 1590. The NPS says he found 'CRO' carved into a tree and 'CROATOAN' carved into a palisade, and 'no signs of a struggle or of the colonists leaving in haste.' He tried to sail to Croatoan, but a storm forced him back to England.

Croatoan was the name of both a people and a place, today's Hatteras Island. White had told the colonists that if they left they should move 50 miles inland, and leave a message if they went anywhere else. He believed they had gone to Croatoan. He never found out.

The NPS lays out the main theories and the problems with each. White saw no hurricane damage, no graves and no sign of a Spanish attack. Jamestown settlers were later told by local Algonquian people that many of the lost colonists had died in a battle, but no archaeological evidence of the colony has turned up near the Chesapeake. Digs in Bertie County and on Hatteras Island have found English artifacts, but 'no human remains, graves, buildings, or village sites' definitively tied to the colony.

After more than four centuries, the NPS's conclusion stands: 'no one has definitively proven what happened to the Lost Colony.'