On 18 August 1590, Governor John White finally waded ashore on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. By grim coincidence it was his granddaughter's third birthday. He had last seen Virginia Dare — the first English child born in the Americas — as a nine-day-old infant, when he sailed for England to fetch supplies. Now the settlement stood silent. The houses had been carefully taken down, the site ringed with a palisade of tree trunks, and carved on one post, in neat capital letters, was a single word: CROATOAN.
The colony White had left behind was England's second attempt on the island. Sir Walter Raleigh, holder of a royal charter to plant America — and a man who never set foot in North America himself — had sent a military colony under Ralph Lane in 1585. Lane's soldiers antagonised the local Algonquian peoples, ran short of food and went home with Sir Francis Drake's passing fleet in 1586. The 1587 venture was meant to be different: roughly 115 men, women and children, a civilian settlement with White, an artist whose watercolours of Algonquian life remain treasures of the British Museum, as governor. They were bound for the Chesapeake Bay, but their pilot, Simon Fernandes, refused to carry them past Roanoke. Relations with the mainland tribes were already poisoned by Lane's tenure; within weeks a colonist named George Howe was killed while catching crabs. The settlers persuaded their reluctant governor to sail home and organise relief. He left behind his daughter Eleanor, his son-in-law and his newborn granddaughter.
His timing could hardly have been worse. White reached an England bracing for war with Spain, and in 1588 the Armada crisis saw virtually every seaworthy vessel pressed into national service. The two small ships he did scrape together that spring were plundered by French pirates and limped home. Not until 1590 could he beg passage back across the Atlantic, and then only as a passenger aboard a privateering expedition that treated his rescue mission as an afterthought.
One word on a post
What White found was strange chiefly for its tidiness. Before he left, the colonists had agreed a code: if they moved, they would carve their destination; if they left in distress, they would add a Maltese cross. There was no cross. Besides CROATOAN on the palisade post, the letters CRO were cut into a tree, and the houses had been dismantled rather than burned — the signature of an orderly departure, not a massacre. Croatoan was an island to the south, part of the present-day Hatteras banks, and home of the Croatoan people — the tribe of Manteo, the colonists' staunchest ally, who had twice visited England and who, in August 1587, had been baptised and created "Lord of Roanoke" on Raleigh's instructions. To White the carving read as a forwarding address. But the weather broke, his ship lost anchors in the worsening seas, and the captains refused to attempt Croatoan, bearing away instead. White never returned to America, and died without learning what had become of his family.
The likeliest boring answer
Later centuries embroidered the story with abductions, plagues and supernatural doom, but the evidence points somewhere far more mundane. There was no mass grave, no burned village, and the colonists themselves had signposted their destination. Most historians think the settlers did exactly what the post said: moved, in whole or in parts, and merged with Native communities — some to Croatoan, others perhaps inland. Two decades later, colonists at Jamestown recorded second-hand reports of survivors living among the tribes, though none was ever confirmed. Archaeology gently supports assimilation: excavations at Cape Creek on Hatteras Island have turned up sixteenth-century European objects in Native contexts, and a fort symbol hidden under a patch on White's own map of Virginia led investigators to a mainland spot dubbed Site X, which yielded Elizabethan-style pottery. Nothing is conclusive on its own. The famous Dare Stones, a series of inscribed rocks that surfaced from 1937 onward and purported to tell Eleanor Dare's story, were overwhelmingly exposed as a hoax, though a few still argue over the first stone. Several later communities, most famously the Lumbee of North Carolina, have claimed descent from the colonists, though no such link has ever been proven.
The word "lost" says more about London than about the colonists. The likeliest truth is that the settlers of Roanoke were never lost at all — England simply lost sight of them, and never looked hard enough to find out where they had gone.
Quiz nuggets
- Virginia Dare, born on 18 August 1587, was the first English child born in the Americas.
- Governor John White returned on 18 August 1590 — his granddaughter's third birthday — to find the colony gone.
- CROATOAN was carved on a palisade post and CRO on a tree; the agreed distress signal, a Maltese cross, was absent.
- Croatoan was the home island of Manteo, the colonists' closest Native ally, near present-day Hatteras.
- The roughly 115 colonists were sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh, who never visited North America himself.