The Story You Probably Know Is the Wrong Shape
The popular version is a vanishing: a hundred and seventeen English colonists evaporate from an island, leaving one cryptic word behind. Almost every element of that is wrong, and the true version is both better documented and more damning.
A badly provisioned colony was put ashore in the wrong place, in the wrong season, during the worst drought the region had seen in eight hundred years, into a war its predecessors had started. It made a rational decision to leave. It left a clear message saying where it was going, using a signalling system its governor had personally arranged before he sailed. And then, because England was fighting Spain and nobody would spare a ship, it was simply never looked for.
Everything That Went Wrong Before Anyone Disappeared
1585: the soldiers
The first colony was not families, it was a garrison: around six hundred soldiers and seamen sailed in 1585 and about a hundred and seven men were left on Roanoke Island under Ralph Lane. Before they even landed, the flagship grounded at an inlet and salt water spoiled most of the food. They came ashore with roughly twenty days of provisions, in mid-August, far too late to plant anything.
That made them dependent on Algonquian corn from the first week, and they behaved accordingly. When a silver cup went missing they burned the village of Aquascogoc. When the local weroance Wingina, who had originally welcomed them, began to move against a colony that was eating his people's food during a drought, Lane pre-empted him. On 1 June 1586 the English attacked, Wingina was shot, and one of Lane's men beheaded him. Two weeks later Francis Drake's fleet appeared, and Lane abandoned the island entirely. A supply ship arrived days after he left and found nobody.
1587: the families, in the wrong place
The second colony was the real one: men, women and children intending to farm, under the artist John White as governor. Raleigh's plan sent them to the Chesapeake. They never got there, because the pilot running the ships, Simon Fernandes, refused to carry them any further and put them ashore at Roanoke in July 1587. He wanted to get on with privateering. That refusal is the proximate cause of everything that followed: it stranded a hundred-odd farmers at the site of a burned-out military occupation whose neighbours had every reason to want them dead.
Six days after landing, an assistant named George Howe was killed while catching crabs alone. It was understood as revenge for Wingina. The colonists launched a retaliatory raid before dawn on 9 August and hit the wrong people: the Croatoans, the one group allied to them, who were scavenging in an abandoned village. Manteo, a Croatoan himself and the colony's interpreter, was with the raiding party when it attacked his own people.
Within four weeks of landing, the entire colony formally petitioned White in writing to sail home for supplies. He left on 27 August, nine days after his granddaughter Virginia Dare was born.
Three Years of Not Coming Back
White reached England in November 1587 and immediately began organising relief. Then the Spanish Armada happened. In the spring of 1588 the Privy Council stayed all shipping for national defence and the relief fleet was requisitioned.
White sailed anyway, in April 1588, with two small pinnaces and about fifteen extra settlers. Near the Azores a French privateer attacked, plundered his ship and wounded him, and both vessels limped back to England. Nothing reached Roanoke. Then came a year of nothing at all.
When he finally crossed in 1590 it was as a passenger on a privateering voyage whose actual purpose was taking prizes. They anchored off the Outer Banks in August. Crossing the bar, a boat capsized and seven men drowned, and the crew nearly refused to go on. White got ashore on 18 August 1590, which happened to be Virginia Dare's third birthday.
What He Actually Found
Two carvings. On a tree by the shore, three letters: CRO. Then, at the settlement, on one of the main posts of a palisade with the bark stripped off, five feet from the ground and in what he called fair capital letters: CROATOAN.
Here is the part that popular retellings destroy. Before sailing in 1587, White had agreed a protocol with the colonists. If they moved, they would carve the name of the place they had gone to. And if they were in distress when they left, they would carve a cross above the name.
White recorded the post explicitly: it read CROATOAN without any cross or sign of distress. Croatoan was not a riddle. It was Hatteras Island, about fifty miles south, and it was where Manteo had been born. The colonists had left a signed, pre-agreed, non-distress forwarding address for a specific reader. White understood it instantly and wrote that he greatly joyed at finding a certain token of their safe being at Croatoan.
The rest of the site said the same thing. The houses had been taken down rather than burned. A substantial new palisade had been built after he left. Heavy goods nobody could carry were lying in the weeds: iron bars, two pigs of lead, cannon and shot. Chests had been buried, later dug up by someone else and broken open. There were no bodies, no graves, no burning and no sign of a fight.
He never reached Croatoan. Over the next nine days storms parted his cables and took his anchors, and the captain turned for the Azores. Twenty miles of water, and White went home and never came back. He spent his last years in Ireland and sent his account to Hakluyt in 1593.
Why the Colony Was Doomed Anyway
In 1998 a team reconstructed rainfall from the growth rings of baldcypress trees along rivers on the Virginia and North Carolina border. The result is the single most useful fact about Roanoke: 1587 to 1589 was the most extreme three-year drought in the region in eight hundred years.
One of the study's authors put it plainly: even the best planned and supported colony would have been supremely challenged by those conditions. And the drought did not only hit the English. It hit the Algonquian villages whose surplus the colonists were counting on, at a moment when those same communities were being destroyed by introduced disease. Thomas Harriot, on the earlier voyage, had already noticed that people in villages the English visited began dying within days.
So the colonists were stranded in the wrong place, in a war they inherited, in the worst drought in eight centuries, among neighbours who were starving and sick, with no ship and no harvest. Leaving was not a mystery. It was the only sensible thing available.
Where Did They Go? What the Evidence Supports
Croatoan, on Hatteras Island
The strongest documentary case, because it is what the carving says and what White believed. Excavations at Cape Creek on Hatteras have produced sixteenth century European material in Croatoan contexts: a gunlock, lead shot, a Tudor rose, buckles, dress pins, copper waste, and square postholes unlike local building. Against that, sceptical archaeologists point out that trade, gifts and salvage from wrecks explain European objects in a Native village perfectly well without anyone English living there. One researcher puts it bluntly: no artefacts at Croatoan indicate Englishmen were living there. The celebrated signet ring found in 1998 came out of a seventeenth century layer, so it postdates the colony.
Site X, on Salmon Creek
This one begins with a wonderful piece of detective work. In 2012 the British Museum examined two paper patches stuck onto one of John White's own maps. Under one of them, visible on a light box, was a hidden symbol for a fort, inland at the confluence of Salmon Creek and the Chowan River, roughly the fifty miles into the mainland that White said the colonists had been prepared to move.
Excavation there has produced the best Elizabethan material anywhere in the search: dozens of sherds of late Tudor Border ware and a North Devon jar of the kind used to provision ships, mixed with contemporary Algonquian pottery. But the excavators are careful in a way that headlines usually are not. They say the domestic pottery suggests a small party of probably fewer than a dozen people, and state explicitly that they do not claim Site X as the relocation site for the bulk of the colony. Their own phrase is that there is not, and probably never will be, a Lost Colony smoking gun.
The weaker theories
- The Chesapeake. It was the original destination, and a Jamestown official wrote in 1612 that survivors had lived twenty years among the Chesepian before Powhatan had them killed. No archaeology supports it, and the account is second-hand hearsay written during a war, with obvious propaganda value.
- A Spanish attack. Motive existed and a Spanish captain searched the coast in 1588. He found a slipway and casks and no colonists. Spanish records are meticulous about military actions and contain nothing, and Spain was still hunting for the colony around 1600. Effectively ruled out.
- Disease or starvation on the island. Ruled out by the same detail that rules out a hurricane and a massacre: White found no graves, and the houses had been carefully dismantled rather than destroyed.
The synthesis several researchers now favour is the least dramatic one: they split up. A small group inland toward the Chowan, others south among the Croatoans, absorbed into Algonquian communities that were themselves being devastated. No single destination, which is exactly why no single site will ever produce the proof.
Things That Are Simply Not True
- That the Dare Stones say anything. Forty-eight inscribed stones appeared between 1937 and 1940 purporting to be Eleanor Dare's messages. A Georgia stonecutter supplied forty-two of them and was paid around two thousand dollars, and had already tried to blackmail the collector before a 1941 magazine investigation demolished the lot. Only the first stone is still argued about, and no historian builds on it.
- That Walter Raleigh went to Roanoke. He never crossed the Atlantic to it. He held the patent and raised the money.
- That Virginia Dare was the first European child born in the Americas. She was the first English one. Spanish and Portuguese children had been born in the hemisphere for decades.
- That the descendants have been identified. The best-known claim dates from 1888 and was advanced partly for political recognition. A DNA project has run since the early 2000s and has produced no confirmed match.
And one honest caveat about the numbers everyone quotes. White's published list names 117 colonists, conventionally 91 men, 17 women and 9 children. After Howe's death, White's own departure and two babies born on the island, the number actually left behind is somewhere between about 110 and 118. The list is a single imperfect document and scholars have never agreed on the arithmetic. Anyone who gives you a precise figure is rounding off an argument.
Knowledge Check
Why were the colonists on Roanoke Island at all?+
Because the pilot refused to take them anywhere else. Raleigh's plan was the Chesapeake. Simon Fernandes, who was running the ships and wanted to get on with privateering, put them ashore at Roanoke in July 1587 and would not carry them further. That single decision stranded a hundred-odd farmers and tradesmen at the site of an abandoned military garrison that had just fought a war with its neighbours.
What was the worst thing the colonists did to themselves?+
A retaliatory raid before dawn on 9 August 1587, launched after one of their assistants was killed. They attacked the wrong people: the Croatoans, their only allies, who were scavenging in an abandoned village. Manteo was with the raiding party when it struck his own people.
What does tree-ring evidence say about the timing?+
That they could hardly have chosen worse. A 1998 study of baldcypress growth rings found that 1587 to 1589 was the most extreme three-year drought in the region in eight hundred years. It hit the Algonquian villages too, which destroyed the food surplus the English were relying on.
When did John White finally get back to Roanoke?+
18 August 1590, which was his granddaughter Virginia Dare's third birthday. He had one day on the island. Storms then parted his cables and cost him anchors, the crew nearly mutinied, and the ships turned for the Azores without ever reaching Croatoan, twenty miles away.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happened to the Roanoke colony?+
Nobody knows where the colonists ended up, but the disappearance is less mysterious than it sounds. They took their houses down, built a new palisade, buried their chests, left behind iron and lead too heavy to carry, and carved the name of a known place on a post. That is an orderly, planned departure. What was lost was the search: John White got a single day on the island in 1590 before weather drove his ships off, and no serious attempt was ever made again.
What did CROATOAN mean?+
It was a place, not a riddle. Croatoan was Hatteras Island, about fifty miles south, and the home of Manteo, the colonists' closest ally. Before he left, White had agreed with them that if they moved they would carve the name of their destination. They did exactly that. White understood it immediately and wrote that he greatly joyed at finding a certain token of their safe being at Croatoan.
Why does the missing cross matter?+
Because it was half of the agreement. White had arranged that if the colonists were in distress when they moved, they would carve a cross above the name. He recorded specifically that the post read CROATOAN without any cross or sign of distress. The absence turns the carving from an ambiguous clue into a deliberate message saying they had left, on purpose, for a named destination, and were not in trouble when they did.
Who was Virginia Dare?+
The first English child born in the Americas, on 18 August 1587, granddaughter of the governor John White. She is significant purely as a fact of birth: nothing whatsoever is known about her after that August. Every later story about her comes from the Dare Stones hoax or from nineteenth-century invention. Note also that she was the first English child, not the first European one; Spanish and Portuguese children had been born in the hemisphere for decades.
Have archaeologists found the Lost Colony?+
No. Two sites have produced genuine Elizabethan material: Cape Creek on Hatteras Island, in Croatoan contexts, and Site X on Salmon Creek inland, found after conservators discovered a fort symbol hidden under a patch on one of White's own maps. Neither has yielded a colonist's grave, an English house, or an object tied to a named person. The excavators of Site X themselves say the pottery there suggests fewer than a dozen people, not a relocated colony.
Are the Dare Stones real?+
Almost entirely not. Forty-eight inscribed stones surfaced between 1937 and 1940 claiming to be messages from Eleanor Dare. A Georgia stonecutter supplied forty-two of them and was paid around two thousand dollars, and a 1941 magazine investigation destroyed the whole collection. Only the first stone is still argued over, and no historian treats it as evidence.
Sources
- ·John White, The fift voyage of M. John White into the West Indies and parts of America called Virginia, in the yeere 1590, printed by Hakluyt
- ·National Park Service, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site — 1587: The Lost Colony and Major Theories of the Lost Colony
- ·Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Humanities) — The Roanoke Colonies and John White
- ·NCpedia — Roanoke Voyages, CROATOAN, and The Dare Stones
- ·First Colony Foundation — on Site X, Site Y, and the hidden fort symbol on White's La Virginea Pars map
- ·Stahle, Cleaveland, Blanton, Therrell and Gay, The Lost Colony and Jamestown Droughts, Science 280 (1998)
- ·Ralph Lane's account of the 1585 to 1586 colony, via Documenting the American South
- ·Coastal Review — on the archaeological case against the Hatteras findings
