The Lost Colony of Roanoke

On August 18, 1590, a man named John White came ashore on Roanoke Island looking for his family.

He had been gone three years. When he left, there had been a little English village here on the edge of the New World, with houses and a fort and around 115 men, women and children. Among them were his daughter, Eleanor, and his granddaughter, Virginia — the first English child ever born in the Americas.

It was Virginia’s third birthday.

White had imagined this day for three years. He had fought to get back. And as his party rowed toward the island at night, they saw the glow of a fire through the trees. They sang English songs and blew a trumpet so the colonists would know friends had come.

No one answered.

The City of Raleigh

The settlement on Roanoke Island was the dream of Sir Walter Raleigh, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, who had been granted a charter to establish an English colony in the vast territory the English called Virginia.

It wasn’t the first attempt. In 1585, Raleigh had sent a group of about a hundred soldiers to Roanoke Island. They were a military outpost, not a community, and they quickly wore out their welcome with the local Algonquian peoples, the Secotan and their neighbors. Relations turned violent. When Sir Francis Drake stopped by the next summer, the starving, frightened men begged a ride home to England.

The 1587 expedition was different. This time Raleigh sent families. They were to settle not on Roanoke Island itself but farther north, on the Chesapeake Bay, and build a town to be called the City of Raleigh. John White, an artist who had sailed with the earlier expeditions and made stunning watercolor paintings of the native people and wildlife, was appointed governor.

But the ship’s pilot, a Portuguese navigator named Simon Fernandes, refused to take them any farther than Roanoke. The colonists were put ashore in July 1587, on the same island where the soldiers’ outpost had failed, among native neighbors who had every reason to distrust Englishmen.

Virginia

On August 18, 1587, less than a month after landing, Eleanor White Dare, wife of the colonist Ananias Dare, gave birth to a daughter. They named her Virginia, after the colony and the virgin queen. She was baptized the following Sunday.

Already, things were going badly. A colonist named George Howe had been killed by native warriors while hunting crabs alone. Supplies were short. It was too late in the year to plant crops. The colonists decided someone had to go back to England to bring help.

They chose their governor. White resisted. He didn’t want to leave his daughter and newborn granddaughter, and he feared people would think he was abandoning them. But the colonists insisted, and in late August 1587 he sailed for England, promising to return within a year with supplies.

Before he left, the colonists talked about the possibility that they might move inland, perhaps fifty miles, to a better location. White asked them to leave a sign. If they moved, they should carve the name of where they’d gone on a tree or post. If they left because they were in danger, they should carve a cross above the name — a Maltese cross.

Then he was gone.

Three Years

White reached England in November 1587 to find the country preparing for war. The Spanish Armada, a massive invasion fleet, was gathering. Queen Elizabeth ordered every seaworthy ship held in English waters to defend the nation.

White managed to get two small ships out in 1588, but they were attacked and robbed by French pirates and forced to turn back. After the Armada was defeated, other delays piled up — money, politics, ships needed elsewhere. It was not until 1590 that White finally secured passage aboard a privateering expedition, whose captains were far more interested in capturing Spanish treasure ships in the Caribbean than in rescuing a few colonists.

They finally reached the Outer Banks in August 1590. They saw smoke rising from the island, and White’s heart must have leapt. They anchored. On the first attempt to row ashore, a boat capsized in the rough surf and seven men drowned. The sailors wanted to turn back. White persuaded them to try again.

CROATOAN

At dawn on August 18, White and his men walked to the site of the settlement.

On a tree near the shore, they found three letters carved into the bark: CRO.

They pressed on to the village. It was gone. The houses had been taken down. In their place was a palisade — a high fence of tree trunks, like a fort. The colonists had built it after White left. On one of the posts at the entrance, the bark had been stripped away and a word carved in capital letters:

CROATOAN

There was no cross.

White searched. The colonists’ chests had been dug up and broken open, their contents scattered and ruined. Among them, White found some of his own belongings — his books with the covers torn off, his framed pictures and maps rotted by the rain, his armor almost eaten through with rust.

But there were no bodies. No graves. No signs of a battle or a fire. The boats and the small cannon the colonists had kept were gone.

And White was relieved. He knew what Croatoan meant. It was the name of an island about fifty miles south — present-day Hatteras Island — where a friendly native people lived. One of them, a man named Manteo, had traveled to England and back and was a close ally of the English. Manteo’s mother lived on Croatoan. If the colonists had gone there, they had gone to friends.

White wanted to sail to Croatoan immediately. But a storm was rising. Anchor cables snapped. The ships were low on fresh water, and the sailors had lost their nerve. The captain decided to head for the Caribbean to wait out the season, then return. Instead, the ships were blown out into the Atlantic and limped home to England.

John White never returned to America. He never saw his daughter or granddaughter again. In a letter written in 1593, he wrote that he had committed the rest to “the merciful help of the Almighty.” He died a few years later.

The Theories

For more than four centuries, people have tried to answer the question White couldn’t.

They went to Croatoan. The simplest explanation is that the colonists did just what the carving said: moved south to Hatteras Island and lived among the Croatoan people, eventually marrying into the community. In the 1700s, an English surveyor reported meeting people on Hatteras who said their ancestors were white people who could read from a book, and some of whom had gray eyes. In recent decades, archaeologists working on Hatteras Island have found European artifacts — fragments of a sword, a slate writing tablet, gun parts, pieces of a rapier hilt — though there’s fierce debate about whether they came from the Lost Colony or from later trade.

They went inland. In 2012, researchers looking at a map John White himself had drawn — known as La Virginea Pars, held at the British Museum — noticed two small patches of paper glued onto it. Under one patch, revealed by modern imaging, was a tiny symbol of a fort, drawn in red and blue, at the confluence of two rivers about fifty miles inland, near present-day Bertie County. Archaeologists with the First Colony Foundation began digging at the location, which they called Site X, and have reported finding English pottery of the right period. Some believe at least part of the colony moved there, exactly as they told White they might.

They were killed. Some historians point to the writings of William Strachey, secretary of the later Jamestown colony, who reported that the powerful chief Powhatan claimed to have massacred the Roanoke colonists, perhaps around 1607, the same year Jamestown was founded. Others think the Spanish, who knew about the colony and considered it an act of aggression, may have attacked. Others suspect disease, drought, or starvation. Tree-ring studies have shown that the years around 1587 brought the worst drought the region had seen in eight hundred years.

They tried to sail home. The colonists had at least one small boat. Some have suggested a group may have tried to sail back to England and been lost at sea.

All of the above. Perhaps the most likely answer is that the colony broke apart. Some went to Croatoan. Some went inland. Some died. The survivors, over a generation or two, became part of the native communities around them, and their story was simply absorbed into the land.

The Stones

In 1937, a man arrived at Emory University in Atlanta with a stone he said he’d found in North Carolina. It was carved with a message, supposedly from Eleanor Dare to her father, describing the deaths of Virginia, Ananias and most of the colony at the hands of native warriors. Over the next few years, dozens more “Dare Stones” turned up, describing the colonists’ wanderings and Eleanor’s eventual death. They caused a sensation.

Then a journalist investigated and showed that most of them were forgeries. The first stone, the one that started it all, is still debated. Some researchers believe it may be genuine. Most think it is not.

The Child

I have always found that the hardest part of the Roanoke story isn’t the carving or the missing houses. It’s Virginia.

She was born into a strange new world, in a little village on the edge of a continent, among people who were frightened and hungry and far from home. She was three weeks old when her grandfather sailed away. She was three years old the day he came back for her. And she was gone.

Did she grow up on Hatteras Island, speaking two languages, with her mother’s English eyes? Did she grow up fifty miles inland, in a village by two rivers? Did she ever hear the story of her grandfather, the governor who tried so hard to come back?

There is no answer. There may never be.

But every summer since 1937, on Roanoke Island, there has been a play about her.