There was no happy Thanksgiving for the lost colonists of Roanoke Island
At Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, the Park Service is partnering with the First Colony Foundation to shed light on a mystery that still fascinates us after more than four centuries: What happened to the lost Roanoke Colony? Archeologists working at the settlement site haven’t answered that question yet, but artifacts they’ve dug up tell us interesting things about life on Roanoke Island in the late 1580s.
The first English attempt to create a permanent settlement in the New World came to grief when Sir Walter Raleigh’s little colony on Roanoke Island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks vanished with scarcely a trace sometime between 1587 and 1590. What happened to those unfortunate men, women, and children struggling for a toehold in a vast wilderness far from home remains one of history’s most intriguing mysteries. Were the Roanoke colonists killed by Indians? Did cold and disease do them in? Did they starve to death? Did they lose hope of being rescued, wander off into the woods, and succumb to the many grave perils that lurked there?
Investigators haven’t had much to go on. When relief ships from England finally arrived in 1590, three years after the colonists were last seen, they found only an abandoned village and a few strange carvings on trees. Apparently left for searchers to find, they read “CROATOAN” and “CRO.” Exactly what that meant has never been determined. Indeed, the carvings themselves disappeared centuries ago, and we can’t even be sure where they once stood. Organic material tends to rot quickly in Roanoke Island’s acidic soil, and shoreline erosion has probably erased parts of the original settlement. When Europeans resettled the area many years later, little evidence of the settlement’s existence remained.
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The first English attempt to create a permanent settlement in the New World came to grief when Sir Walter Raleigh’s little colony on Roanoke Island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks vanished with scarcely a trace sometime between 1587 and 1590. What happened to those unfortunate men, women, and children struggling for a toehold in a vast wilderness far from home remains one of history’s most intriguing mysteries. Were the Roanoke colonists killed by Indians? Did cold and disease do them in? Did they starve to death? Did they lose hope of being rescued, wander off into the woods, and succumb to the many grave perils that lurked there?
Investigators haven’t had much to go on. When relief ships from England finally arrived in 1590, three years after the colonists were last seen, they found only an abandoned village and a few strange carvings on trees. Apparently left for searchers to find, they read “CROATOAN” and “CRO.” Exactly what that meant has never been determined. Indeed, the carvings themselves disappeared centuries ago, and we can’t even be sure where they once stood. Organic material tends to rot quickly in Roanoke Island’s acidic soil, and shoreline erosion has probably erased parts of the original settlement. When Europeans resettled the area many years later, little evidence of the settlement’s existence remained.