The Lost Colony of Roanoke
In August of 1587, two years after a failed English settlement attempt along present-day coastal North Carolina, 115 English settlers dropped anchor at Roanoke Island, determined to form England’s first permanent community in the New World.
Supplies Depleted
Later that same year, as supplies ran short in the fledgling colony, Governor John White left his wife, daughter and infant granddaughter behind when he sailed back to England for fresh supplies, only to find his ship conscripted into service during the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585 to 1604, when Queen Elizabeth the 1st called on every available British ship to repel the powerful Spanish Armada.
A Change in Plans
When he returned to Roanoke in August of 1590, he found little trace of the colony or its inhabitants, save for scattered clues about what happened to them, including the word “Croatoan” carved into a tree. The disappearance of the Lost Colony of Roanoke has stoked centuries of academic debate regarding what happened to the settlers, with precious little agreement regarding their fate, other than the fact that Croatoan was the name of an island south of Roanoke—now known as Hatteras—that was also home to a Native American tribe of the same name, leading some to propose that the settlers may have been killed or abducted by the Croatoans.
Speculations Abound
Others believe that the settlers may have built a boat and sailed for England, only to shipwreck and perish at sea, while still others have propose that the Spanish marched or sailed up from Santa Elena, the Spanish capital of Florida, wiping out the English settlement in the name of hegemony or solitary dominance in the New World.
Absorbed into Native Culture?
In more recent years, some scholars have proposed that the settlers may have moved further inland and were simply absorbed into a friendly Native American tribe, leading to a 2007 campaign to collect and analyze DNA samples from local families, both indigenous and otherwise, looking for matches in DNA collected from human remains left behind at the settlement site, making the Lost Colony of Roanoke, an enduring mystery in the early days of North American colonial history.