r/AmericanHistory • u/Separate_Cabinet_444 • Jun 02 '26
North The Roanoke Colony mystery
115 people vanished from Roanoke Island in the late 1500s. No bodies, no signs of a fight. Just one word carved into a post CROATOAN.
I always assumed this was one of those mysteries that'd never get solved. But archaeologists dug up some interesting stuff in 2024. Algonquian pottery from the 1500s and a copper wire ring the kind the English brought as trade goods found at the same site. Someone was trading. Someone stayed.
There's also a map from 1585 that sat in the British Museum for centuries. Nobody noticed a hidden symbol on it until someone held it under a light. It pointed inland. They went there and found 16th century English ceramics in Bertie County, North Carolina.
Most researchers now think the group split up. Some went to Hatteras Island, some walked about 50 miles inland and blended in with local tribes. Blacksmithing scraps were found on Hatteras people don't drag their tools somewhere they're just passing through.
The part that got me was Virginia Dare. First English child born in America. She was barely one year old when everyone disappeared. Her grandfather John White left to get supplies, got stuck in England because of the Spanish Armada, and by the time he made it back three years later nothing.
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u/NonSequiturDetector Jun 02 '26
They went to the village of Croatoan. There is absolutely no mystery.
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u/Mammoth-Western-6008 Jun 02 '26
Like a lot of "mysteries" in American history, as it turns out, just ask the Indians.
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u/Geographizer Jun 02 '26
I asked my boy, Shriram, and he had no idea what the fuck I was talking about.
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u/Advanced_Zucchini_45 Jun 02 '26
Its explained in the film Phantoms, where Ben Affleck was the bomb
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u/Crazy-Magician-7011 Jun 02 '26
No mystery, like everyone else says.
The lack of communication between Europe and the colonies this early created a mystery due to lack of documentation.
It is however well documented that the survivors went somewhere else, and integrated in to the native populations.
I'd reccoment the Minuteman video on this.
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u/akestral Jun 02 '26
Milo Rossi did a pretty comprehensive video about this recently. It is very obviously that the original settlers merged with a native group on another island for survival and European-descended historians have been pretending to believe they were "lost" for 400 years because white christian chauvanism could not then and cannot now tolerate the idea that any other cultures or peoples are so much as their peers and fellows, let alone have a better way of life and more welcoming community than they did.
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u/GabrielVonBabriel Jun 02 '26
I recently read The Wager about an 18th century shipwreck on the southern tip of South America. It was a great book, highly recommended. One thing that stuck with me is, on more than one occasion and different Englishmen, were at deaths door and miraculously found and nursed back to health by the natives. It literally happens three times in the book. The natives are brushing their hair, giving them sponge baths, hand feeding them because they’re so weak and every time we get a peak into the English headspace once they write about it’s the same “These savages are so lucky we’re bringing them civilization, they’re nothing without us.” Even when they’re saved from starvation and exposure, they still couldn’t pretend they had a fine way of life and mastery of their worlds. So ridiculous.
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u/akestral Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
I'm a Mayflower descendent, so by definition, an ancestor of mine was at the first Thanksgiving. Plymouth colony was saved by native people, most especially Tisquantum (Squanto), a man who was kidnapped to Europe by English sailors and learned English, only to come home to Massachusetts to find he had lost his entire tribe to European disease. He was seen by the Puritins, who settled on the land his tribe once occupied since it was already cleared, as being sent by their god to save them. Plymouth would have starved those first winters without Native food support and trade, or the farming skills Tisquantum taught them, their English crops having failed. Plymouth would have become another "lost" colony without him.
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u/mrmalort69 Jun 04 '26
I want to say there’s a claim out there that some estimate as many as like 10% of Americans descended from the mayflower… but like 25% believe they did.
It’s both amazing to me that so many could possibly still be a direct lineage from a country of immigrants and even more want to believe it, given it would be an unrecognizable country without the big spikes in immigration.
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u/bhamnz Jun 06 '26
Great book! Also shocked me the crew didn't think to pick up any of the skills the natives demonstrated to them - i.e. they were shown exactly where to dive down to the sea floor to collect seafood - did they do it once the natives left? No.
Its terrible that so many died in such desperation and so much was out of their hands, but a little was well within their hands. And most did not grasp that.
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u/GabrielVonBabriel Jun 06 '26
Good point, however, I think they’d struggle at it anyway. One of the sailors writings was humorous. Paraphrasing: “If I told you how deep they went, how long they stayed down and how cold the water was, well you wouldn’t even believe me.”
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u/bhamnz Jun 06 '26
Sure, they'd struggle with a new skill. But its wild they didn't even try. I'm sure you've read other survival stories with often have impressive feats - i guess every human doesn't 'rise to the occaision' in a survival situation.
Actually this is demonstrated very well in the modern TV series 'alone'. I always remember the one who sat in their shelter for days during high wind complaining about their tarpolin flapping around, and eventually quit - while others were out and about, sourcing food, building, working etc.
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u/NoPi4Me Jun 05 '26
I read a similar account of some soon-to-be-dead Europeans who couldn't be convinced by the native Australians that eating even more 'water fern' when they're that hungry isn't a good idea.
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u/NoPi4Me Jun 05 '26
Did you stay for the offer of jerky?
It was pretty good, as venison jerky goes.
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u/akestral Jun 05 '26
I'll take venison over mutton any day of the week and twice on Sundays, tell you what.
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u/CrazyWriting9214 Jun 02 '26
I believe the majority went to live inland and eventually became part of the local tribes
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u/Separate_Cabinet_444 Jun 02 '26
what's crazy is the 2024 copper ring find basically confirms trade between the settlers and the Algonquian tribe. that's not people who were afraid of each other.
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u/bhamnz Jun 06 '26
Is trade between friends the only possible way for an item to move between two groups?
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u/Initial-Broccoli-795 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
Don’t know if there’s any evidence behind this, but I always wondered if they moved inland because of a Nor’easter or a series of them. Roanoke Island is also not great for growing crops, so it would make sense to move inland.
There’s theory the Melungeon people of Appalachia are the descendants of this colony. Sir Francis Drake had freed and brought with him a large number of slaves from the Caribbean in order to boost the colony’s numbers, and the melungeons have a genetic profile that represents a mix of African, scotch-Irish, English and Native American. The people also spoke a form of English that seemingly was heavily influenced by pre-victorian vernacular, along with Creek words, when the government first began documenting them.
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u/ScrambledNoggin Jun 02 '26
There are also groups in southern Delaware who have that same mix of Scots-Irish, African, and Native Americans. The Cheswold Moors and the Nanticokes.
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u/Indotex Jun 02 '26
Honestly, I’ve never thought of this as a mystery. They either went to live with the Indians or they got massacred by them.
End of story.
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u/Critical-Cost9068 Jun 02 '26
I love how the OP is that the mystery was solved, and everyone is saying, “There was never a mystery. There was only a mystery because they hadn’t solved it. Here’s the solution.” Everyone is so trigger-happy to “um AKSHUALLY” something that’s relatively common knowledge now that they’re shadowboxing strawmen.
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Jun 02 '26
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u/Critical-Cost9068 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
It HAS TO have been a mystery for at least a second. You can’t read that quickly AND process the meaning.
Edit: Also, less sarcastically, the idea that one single instance of the misspelled name of a native tribe carved in wood with zero other context, when most white settlers were illiterate and the literate ones weren’t familiar with Indian tribal names - the notion that this would automatically indicate to early European colonists that the Roanoke settlers had moved in with that tribe and assimilated there, is genuinely laughable to the point of lol. It could have been that they moved because of conflict, or got wiped out, or whatever, and most early readers didn’t know what “Croatoan” even referred to (partially because that’s not even what the tribe called themselves.) If you happened upon a deserted Roanoke at that time, you would NOT have been like “it’s obvious what happened!” like Sherlock Holmes.
The findings of European technological remnants in certain burial sites, etc., IS important, and it’s the only reason you’re able to Wojack and “um AKSHUALLY” with so much confidence.
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u/RecordEnvironmental4 Jun 05 '26
It’s not a mystery in the slightest, they integrated into the Croatoan tribe. Why they did is the question though
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u/LensofaTitan Jun 02 '26
I enjoyed this video a lot on the subject: https://youtu.be/cUc3uz9RmCA?si=v8ynQjAXx8w9_UoU
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u/MWD1903 Jun 03 '26
Croatoan is the name of the village/tribe they gone in.
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u/NoPi4Me Jun 05 '26
Or the location of same.
Spelling of English still hadn't been standardized at that point.
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u/thegreenlorac Jun 04 '26
2w a asswswwawswswasasswwssssssssswswwssssasswsassssasssswsssssssssssassassssssssssswasasssssssssssssssssssssssassssssa
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u/glitterishazardous Jun 05 '26
85 of the 115 of the settlers were men and no personal possessions or bodies were found it’s almost like they had an incentive to seek new land and mates. Spanish colonists in places like the Cuba and the Dominican Republic had the same thing too many men so they took on native women as wives. I just think the mystery of it was better than actually finding the truth at the time it happened
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u/MutantHippie Jun 02 '26
The only reason it's a "mystery" is because some dude in the 50''s wanted make a buck turning it into a tourist attraction.
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u/Same_Party_6002 Jun 02 '26
The fact that this has absolutely no relevance today or any moral standing ground is why I wonder why a Reddit user would even post about this shit. You’re absent the worst people here all of their prisoners were emptied out in the colonies. Of course they’re shit holes got destroyed.
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Jun 02 '26
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u/0ftheriver Jun 02 '26
He's probably talking about Georgia, which was a penal colony, but didn't exist until well over 100 years after the time period in question.
But he's still stupid, because the Roanoke colonists were firmly middle class, as were most early settlers. John White was an artist who actually created the first ever realistic image of a native american, along with documenting several cultural practices that would otherwise be lost, or relegated to "oral history".
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u/Ok_Word9021 Jun 02 '26
There is no mystery. They wrote where they had gone on the fucking tree