What Happened To The Lost Colony?

In 1587, 20 years before the English colony at Jamestown was founded, other Englishmen and women landed on Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina. What happened to these 90 men, 17 women and nine children has intrigued historians for centuries.

For John Smith and his fellow Jamestown settlers, the fate of the Lost Colony was no mere historical curiosity. The Jamestown settlers believed, quite reasonably, that if they could figure out how and why the colonists disappeared, it might help them figure out how they could survive and prosper in the New World.

Even before Jamestown was settled, however, other Englishmen were eager to learn what happened in Roanoke. The most eager was John White, who had been the governor of the Roanoke colony.

John White’s Search

White was a superb artist; his drawings of American Indian life have been a valuable resource for anthropologists and historians. White was not, however, an ideal expedition leader.

For one thing, the ships carrying White and his fellow colonists were supposed to take them to the Chesapeake Bay, not far from where Jamestown would eventually take root. That area seemed a more promising place to settle than Roanoke because the soil was better and because previous Englishmen who had landed at Roanoke Island had antagonized the local Indigenous population. But the ship’s pilot landed at Roanoke and decided not to continue north, possibly because he was a privateer who was more interested in attacking Spanish ships than transporting colonists. White agreed that the colonists could stay in Roanoke, at least temporarily.

After a month there, White then decided to leave with the ships rather than stay with the fledgling colony. This was a surprising move since the colonists included his daughter, Eleanor, and his granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in America. According to White, the colonists insisted he return to England to secure additional supplies. It is also possible the colonists had lost faith in him as their leader. In any case, White did not return for three years, by which time the colonists had disappeared.

The delayed return was not really White’s fault. The force behind the Roanoke venture was Sir Walter Raleigh, who was so favored by Queen Elizabeth that she granted him an exclusive patent to colonize America. By the time White returned to England, however, Raleigh had fallen out of the queen’s favor and was reluctant to put more money into the venture. Furthermore, the Spanish Armada was on its way to attack England. Elizabeth ordered all ships capable of fighting the Spanish, including the ships White was putting together to return to Roanoke, to stay put. Even after the Armada was defeated, Elizabeth was reluctant to let ships go. So it was not until 1590 that White finally returned to Roanoke Island to find — or rather, not find — his colony.

The colonists had vanished, but they had left clues to their whereabouts: They had carved “CROATOAN” on a post and “CRO” on a nearby tree. The carvings have led some, including White, to suspect the colonists had gone to nearby Croatoan Island, now called Hatteras Island, though the entire colony could not have stayed long on the small island. White remained hopeful because he had instructed the colonists to carve a cross if they were in trouble, and there was no cross with the carved letters. Bad weather and the desire of the captain of one of the ships to do some privateering prevented White from searching further and forced him to return to England.

Back in England, Raleigh’s status with the queen continued to deteriorate, and he turned his sights to the South American coast. In 1602, Raleigh finally sent a party to search for the Roanoke colonists, but the search turned up nothing new.

The Search Continues

The search resumed after Jamestown was settled in 1607. John Smith, Jamestown’s early leader, heard from the Powhatan chiefs Wahunsonacock and Opechancanough about people who wore clothing and built houses like those of the English. Smith led expeditions in search of the lost colonists but never found them.

Back in England, the writer William Strachey also heard about English-style houses that predated Jamestown. A visiting Powhatan named Machumps reported to Strachey that the lost colonists had lived peacefully with Native Americans until they were attacked by Wahunsonacock’s warriors around the time settlers arrived at Jamestown in 1607. Only a few colonists, Strachey was told, had survived the attack. The English in Jamestown and their backers in England largely believed these reports.

Numerous historians have since attempted to solve the mystery of Roanoke, including David Beers Quinn, who in the 1970s argued that the colonists had headed toward the Chesapeake, their original destination, and lived with friendly American Indians until the Powhatan attack. Decades later, James Horn, who was Colonial Williamsburg’s chief historian and then a vice president before becoming president and chief officer of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, argued that the colonists had moved west rather than north. Horn suggested most of the colonists left Roanoke Island soon after White sailed to England, perhaps fearing a Spanish attack. They lived with various Native Americans, including the Tuscaroras and Chowanocs, thus accounting for the various reports of them in different areas. The colonists did not forget their English ways but adapted to the ways of the people with whom they lived. The 1607 Powhatan attack, Horn posited, may have been prompted by fears that a new English settlement would reverse Powhatan territorial gains in the region.

“The settlers and their Indian kin were victims of fighting along an unstable border zone,” wrote Horn in his 2010 book, A Kingdom Strange. “In the broad scheme of regional rivalries, Opechancanough’s raid reflected deep-seated antagonisms among three major peoples vying for dominance, the Powhatans, Tuscaroras, and Chowanocs.”

Wahunsonacock, Horn concluded, was “unwilling to take any chances of the Jamestown colonists joining forces with the Roanoke English,” so he “ordered his warriors to track down as many of White’s colonists as they could find and kill them.”

Subsequent discoveries have buttressed Horn’s argument that the settlers moved inland. The work has been spearheaded by the First Colony Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 2004 and whose directors include Horn and other acclaimed historians and archaeologists with a range of expertise. In 2012, a curator at the British Museum, which holds a collection of John White’s drawings, placed one of White’s maps on a light box and discovered a hidden symbol of a fort. Perhaps White marked the map to indicate to the settlers where they might move and then hid the symbol in case the map fell into the hands of the Spanish. Archaeologists explored the area of the fort symbol — near where Salmon Creek opens into Albemarle Sound — and at two sites found artifacts from the Elizabethan period that confirmed English people had been there around the right time. Other artifacts were found elsewhere to the west of Roanoke Island.

Archaeologists and historians will undoubtedly continue to investigate what happened to the lost colonists, but after the latest discoveries, the colonists can no longer be considered entirely lost. 

Further Reading

• Thomas Harriot. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Frankfort, 1590. Reprint, Dover, 1972. Harriot accompanied a 1585 expedition to Roanoke and produced this report, which includes John White’s drawings.
• Richard Hakluyt. The Third and Last Volume of the Voyages, Navigations, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation. London, 1600. Reprint, Viking, 1965. What we know about the Lost Colony and other early British expeditions to America is largely thanks to Hakluyt, who collected the narratives, letters and reminiscences of Sir Walter Raleigh, John White, and others.
• David Beers Quinn. England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620. Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. No one devoted more time and pages to the mystery of the Lost Colony, or to the British explorations and settlements in general, than Quinn. He sometimes went way out on a limb, as when he suggested the British came to America before Columbus, but he presented clearly the evidence on which he based his theories.
• David Stick. Roanoke Island: The Beginnings of English America. University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Stick’s is one of a number of readable histories to appear around the settlement’s 400th anniversary.
• Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony. Rowman & Allanheld, 1984. Kupperman presented many of David Beers Quinn’s ideas in a less academic, more popular style.
• Ivor Noël Hume. The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Towne: An Archaeological and Historical Odyssey. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Colonial Williamsburg’s renowned archaeologist wrote an informative and entertaining history covering the period from Roanoke to Jamestown.
• Lee Miller. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony. Arcade, 2001. Miller blamed the colony’s failure on conspiracies in England and presented linguistic and cultural evidence suggesting the colonists ended up scattered among various tribes.
• James Horn. A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Basic Books, 2010. Horn’s work is deeply researched and compellingly written.
• Andrew Lawler. The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Doubleday, 2018. Lawler chronicled the work of historians, archaeologists and others and argued persuasively that unsupported theories flourished in part because of an unwillingness to accept that the colonists assimilated with American Indians.
• Eric Klingelhofer, editor. Excavating the Lost Colony Mystery: The Map, the Search, the Discovery. University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Klingelhofer’s book includes accounts of the latest research, with contributions from archaeologists and historians.