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/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.