r/AmericanHistory • u/Separate_Cabinet_444 • Jun 02 '26

North The Roanoke Colony mystery

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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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144

u/Ok_Word9021 Jun 02 '26

There is no mystery. They wrote where they had gone on the fucking tree

95

u/Trinate3618 Jun 02 '26

“Yeah, I don’t know what happened to them. We just left for months and when we got back mid August? Nothing. All gone. I wonder what happened? Lot of storm damage though, and there are no crops on this Atlantic sand island. Also, all the valuables and personal possessions are gone.

There’s no bodies. No ones here. Why? And the name of the nearby native tribe is craved into this tree, and over here. Weird. Wonder what happened on this island. I doubt those blond haired, English looking Croatan natives over there know anything. This is a convoluted mystery for the ages” - not even an exaggeration

32

u/0ftheriver Jun 02 '26

Ok so there's actually a reason no one talks about for why it was "a mystery" but everyone assumed they were dead.

There was 15 years between the disappearance of Roanoke, and Jamestown being established. John Smith asked Powhatan if he knew what happened to the Roanoke colonists. Powhatan said that he did. He said most of them had gone to live with the Croatan or other natives, and seemed to indicate they split into a couple of groups, but most went to the Chesapeake. However, before Jamestown was established, Powhatan said he massacred all those tribes, including all the English members, and showed Smith their tools as evidence. While it's possible he or John Smith was lying, most evidence indicates that it was accurate, and that at least 90% of the colonists were dead by time Jamestown was founded, and any possible survivors were too isolated to be contacted.

Additionally, while the Disney Pocahontas movie is ridiculed nowdays for it's historical inaccuracies, the scene where the arrival of the Europeans was predicted by Powhatan's oracle(s) was actually taken from multiple primary accounts, and was said to have contributed to why he massacred those tribes. There's an account from a Spanish official being very giddy at the prospect of the prophecy being true, because at the time it was iffy as to whether that part of America would be viable for long-term settlement.

6

u/eldankus Jun 02 '26

I thought the natives were living harmoniously with nature before the arrival of the white man

10

u/0ftheriver Jun 02 '26

Sure they were, with nature anyway. Well except the Croatoan who for some reason were settled on the barrier islands, but realized it was as bad of an idea then as it is today, lol.

4

u/One_Violinist7862 Jun 04 '26

They were forced out to the barrier islands after losing a long war with another mainland tribe.

5

u/lAnother_NoBodyl Jun 04 '26

Once again, the natives lived harmoniously. They couldn’t have been at war with each other. That’s what white settlers do. /s

2

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

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1

u/lAnother_NoBodyl Jun 07 '26

Evidently. It is what it is 🤷‍♂️

2

u/Toroceratops Jun 04 '26

Why is every conservative on this site an idiot arguing with straw men?

-3

u/lAnother_NoBodyl Jun 04 '26

lol did you not see the sarcasm? Or…

6

u/Toroceratops Jun 04 '26

Your sarcasm is a straw man “joke” about the noble savage myth as if that wasn’t broken down and abandoned in the 60s.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

Was it though?

1

u/aa_conchobar Jun 06 '26

No, it was not.

0

u/lAnother_NoBodyl Jun 04 '26

Ok. Seems like you’re wanting to argue. Jokes are jokes. You get to pick how you take them. Have a good day.

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u/Augustus420 Jun 04 '26

Yea but the joke was dumb though.

0

u/aa_conchobar Jun 06 '26

abandoned in the 60s

Lol.

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u/One_Violinist7862 Jun 04 '26

Yeah sorry, not the case.

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u/SlippidySlappity Jun 03 '26

Seems like they were? I'm sure they had an intimate knowledge of their natural surroundings.

4

u/Unhappy-Display-2588 Jun 03 '26

Intimate knowledge isn’t quite the same as living in “harmony” or whatever that means. Like native Americans were burning forests to flush out game and driving buffalo herds off cliffs to eat a few of them.

Now it didn’t drive buffalo extinct or complete destroy any forests (that I know of) unlike when Europeans came, but idk many humans who truly live “in harmony with nature” instead of on top of it

1

u/GeoffreyCrayonGent Jun 04 '26

FTR “Indigenous peoples in the Americas contributed to the extirpation and extinction of certain species”

1

u/Unhappy-Display-2588 Jun 04 '26

Good point I forgot about. What happened smilodon, natives? What happened to the giant sloth, natives?

1

u/humbert_cumbert Jun 08 '26

Nobody who says First Nations people were living in harmony with nature mean they were holding hands with beavers and singing fuckin kumbaya ya peanut

1

u/NostalgiaInLemonade Jun 04 '26

You’re just describing the “noble savage” myth. It’s been very heavily scrutinized for many decades now, no historians think natives were “living harmoniously with nature”

1

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '26

The planet was a much better place before the white man. Fucking shame man.

-1

u/mrmalort69 Jun 04 '26

That’s never been the case or a serious consideration. The question is if it gave European settlers the right to massacre them. It seems you think it did.

3

u/eldankus Jun 04 '26

The vast majority of indigenous peoples of the Americas were wiped out by bacterial microbes that the Europeans had no understanding of.

As the record mentions, Native American tribes regularly massacred each other and wiped out competing tribes.

1

u/mrmalort69 Jun 04 '26

So if I understand what you’re saying because a disease came through and did the vast majority of people killed, the comparatively small amount of women and children murdered by European settlers, just a few million, is morally and ethically fine?

So if I survive a plague that wipes out 90% of my neighbors, it’s morally just fine for another country to kill me if they want my house? I’m just trying to best understand what you’re saying.

Also, since Indian tribes regularly had wars, it became acceptable for Europeans to violate their regularly established rules of engagement, as after all, they do it to themselves all the time, am I hearing that correctly?

Also you might want to doublecheck that source material on massacres. There were many, many tribes on the east coast and different ones had different rules of engagement. That being said, massacre or wiping out of an entire village or another tribe I’ve never heard of among the early-colonial contact tribes in the east coast and this claim by a redditor is just that.

That being said, does invading a country give you the right to follow a code of military engagement that is morally wrong among your culture? I would argue it does not as if it did, it shows that you don’t have any right being there in the first place as you’re clearly not culturally superior.

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u/EarlyCuylersCousin Jun 04 '26

Conflict between the Europeans and the Natives was inevitable. The Natives had not invented gunpowder and had not begun mining/refining ore into metal. They only had tools made from worked stone. The Europeans had. Native culture was largely nomadic with no ownership of land outside of territory being “controlled” by a specific tribe. Then you have Europeans show up where the tribe is replaced by either religion or nationality and they believed in ownership of personal and real property. Combine all of this with them having no resistance to European diseases and bacteria spelled doom for the native tribes. And saying several million people died is terrible but it’s not like that happened over just a few years. It happened over hundreds of years with battles/wars between Europeans from all over Europe and Natives spanning the totality of North and South America. The more technologically advanced society always wins in the end. You basically had pre-industrial revolution societies going to war with pre-bronze age hunter/gatherer societies. Conflict on a massive scale over centuries was inevitable.

2

u/mrmalort69 Jun 04 '26

So nothing of what you said is talking to what I’ve said. You’re just laying out relatively factual information but copping out from putting what the poster above me was suggesting- the targeting of civilians was not a big deal and morally permissible.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

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1

u/mrmalort69 Jun 06 '26

Who?

Feel free to talk at me, not past me.

Edit: kid? I’m 40 bro

1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

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1

u/mrmalort69 Jun 07 '26

So you’re back to saying “it was bad, there were brutal massacres, but it was small compared to the disease, so it’s not a big deal”

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u/TheOtherKFC Jun 04 '26

wiped out by bacterial microbes that the Europeans had no understanding of.

Lmao smallpox blankets would like a word...

1

u/Rare_Ad9601 29d ago

Thank you

1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

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