The Lost Colony of Roanoke (1587): What Happened to the 115 Settlers.

What happened at Roanoke, in a paragraph.

Sir Walter Raleigh's 1587 colonial expedition, captained by John White, established a settlement on Roanoke Island in late July of that year, intending it to be the first English permanent colony in the New World. The settlement comprised 117 individuals at landing (numbers vary slightly between contemporary sources), among them White's daughter Eleanor Dare and her newborn Virginia Dare, who is the first English child known to have been born in the Americas. Within weeks of arrival, the colony's situation was precarious enough that the settlers urged White to return to England to expedite resupply. He sailed in late August 1587. He intended to return within months. The intervening Anglo-Spanish war and the Spanish Armada crisis kept him in England for three years. When White returned to Roanoke Island on August 18, 1590, the settlement was empty. The houses had been dismantled (a deliberate act, not a sign of attack). Trunks White had left buried were dug up and looted. The single word "CROATOAN" was carved into the upright of the palisade gate; the letters "CRO" were carved into a tree nearby. There were no signs of violence: no bodies, no graves, no crosses (the colonists had agreed before White's departure that a Maltese cross would indicate distress). White interpreted the carving as a signal that the colonists had relocated to the nearby island then called Croatoan (modern Hatteras Island), home of the friendly Croatoan people led by Manteo. A storm and a mutinous crew prevented him from sailing the short distance to investigate. He never returned to the New World. The colony has been unaccounted for in the documentary record from that moment to the present. The questions of what happened to the colonists, whether any survived, and where they ended up are open in the literal sense: no skeletal remains, no individual identification, and no contemporary document confirms a single colonist's fate.

The documented record.

The 1587 expedition

The 1587 expedition was the third English voyage to Roanoke, following an earlier exploratory voyage in 1584 and an attempted military-style outpost in 1585–1586. Verified The 1587 colony was deliberately designed differently: it included women and children and was intended as a permanent agricultural settlement, with a target landing site on the Chesapeake Bay (more defensible against Spanish attack from Florida). The fleet's pilot, Simon Fernandes, refused to continue past Roanoke Island and forced the colonists ashore at the abandoned 1585 fort site. The colonists' departure-place became their landing-place by his decision [1].

The colony's makeup is well-documented from White's manuscript "A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia" and from supporting Raleigh-company records. Verified 117 people are named or attested in landing rolls, including 91 men, 17 women, and 9 children. Eleanor Dare gave birth to Virginia Dare on August 18, 1587. Margery Harvie gave birth to a son a few days later. Both births are recorded in White's journal [1][2].

White's departure and three-year absence

White sailed from Roanoke on August 27, 1587, planning a brief resupply mission. The Anglo-Spanish naval conflict that culminated in the Spanish Armada of 1588 absorbed every available English ship; Queen Elizabeth ordered no vessel to leave port. Verified White attempted twice in 1588 to return with smaller privateering ships, but both attempts were turned back by Spanish encounters before reaching the Outer Banks. He did not sail again for Roanoke until early 1590, on a privateering fleet under captain Abraham Cocke that combined the Roanoke resupply with raids on Spanish shipping in the Caribbean [1][3].

The August 1590 return

White's fleet arrived off the Outer Banks on August 15, 1590, and reached Roanoke Island on August 18. The first sign that the colony was no longer in place was a column of smoke from inland that, on investigation, turned out to be a natural brush fire. Verified The fort and houses were standing but empty. The houses had been taken down systematically and the timber used to construct a palisade around the building footprints — a defensive arrangement, evidently completed before the colonists departed. White's own description, in a letter to Richard Hakluyt published in 1593, reports [3]:

"From thence we returned by the water side, round about the North point of the Iland, untill we came to the place where I left our Colony in the yeere 1587. In all this way we saw in the sand the print of the Salvages feet of 2 or 3 sorts troden the night, and as we entered up the sandie banke upon a tree, in the very browe thereof were curiously carved these faire Romane letters CRO: which letters presently we knew to signifie the place, where I should find the planters seated, according to a secret token agreed upon betweene them & me at my last departure from them...

"...we found five Chests, that had bene carefully hidden of the Planters, and of the same chests three were my owne, and about the place many of my things spoyled and broken, and my bookes torne from the covers, the frames of some of my pictures and Mappes rotten and spoyled with rayne, and my armour almost eaten through with rust; this could bee no other but the deede of the Savages our enemies at Croatoan, who had watched the departure of our men to Croatoan; and assoone as they were departed dig'd up every place where they suspected any thing to be buried."

The "secret token" White refers to was that, if the colonists relocated under duress, they would carve a Maltese cross beneath the destination's name. There was no cross. White interpreted the absence as a sign that the relocation had been peaceful. A worsening storm and refusal by the privateering crew to continue the search forced the fleet to depart for England before reaching Croatoan Island. Verified [3]

Croatoan as a real and identifiable destination

Croatoan was the name in 1587 for the island chain that today includes Hatteras Island and parts of Ocracoke. The Croatoan people, an Algonquian-speaking community closely related to the Hatteras Indians of later contact, were known to the English from the 1584 expedition. Verified Their leader Manteo had traveled to England with the 1584 expedition, returned, and remained in friendly contact with the colony at the time of White's departure. The Croatoan settlement on Hatteras Island has been archaeologically located near present-day Buxton, NC, and continues to produce material from the period [4].

The 1607–1612 Jamestown searches

When Jamestown was founded in 1607, only twenty years after the Roanoke departure, English colonists were instructed by London to investigate the fate of the Lost Colony. Verified Captain John Smith, John Strachey, and others recorded reports from Powhatan informants of English-speaking people living among inland tribes in the Chesapeake-Tar River region. The Strachey account, drawing on Indian informants, specifically reported that Chief Powhatan claimed to have ordered the killing of "the men, women, and children of the first plantation at Roanoake" after an unspecified period of cohabitation with the inland Chesapeake tribe. Strachey also reported that two-story English-style stone houses had been observed inland and that some captives had been spared and incorporated [5]. The reliability of these chain-of-translation reports has been the subject of continuing historical debate.

Archaeological work, 1990–2026

Modern archaeological investigation of the Lost Colony's fate has produced material findings at two principal sites: Verified

• The "Site X" project in Bertie County, NC (inland, near the head of Albemarle Sound). Beginning with the 2011 reexamination of John White's "La Virginea Pars" map at the British Museum — which revealed under multispectral imaging a four-pointed star concealed beneath a patch of paper, indicating an intended fortified site — the First Colony Foundation has identified at the corresponding ground location a scatter of late-16th-century English ceramic shards, a Border ware sherd, and other artifacts consistent with English presence in the late 1580s or 1590s [6][7].
• The Cape Creek site on Hatteras Island (the Croatoan settlement). Excavations led by Mark Horton (University of Bristol) and Scott Dawson have produced a 16th-century English signet ring, a slate writing tablet, gun parts, and Tudor-era ceramics in stratigraphic contexts that are mixed with Native material — consistent with a population in which English and Croatoan individuals were coresident over a sustained period [8][9].

Neither site has produced human remains identifiable as a Roanoke colonist. Both produce material that is consistent with the presence of Roanoke colonists. Neither produces material that excludes other interpretations.

The Dare Stones (cautionary)

Between 1937 and 1941, approximately forty stones inscribed with messages purportedly from Eleanor Dare were "found" in North and South Carolina and Georgia, the first by a tourist named Louis Hammond in 1937. Disputed Most of the stones were exposed as a hoax in 1941 by reporter Boyden Sparkes writing for The Saturday Evening Post; they had been planted by a Brenau College stonecutter named Bill Eberhardt. The first ("Hammond") stone, however, has had its forgery status reopened in recent years; petrographic analysis published in 2016 by Brenau geologist Edward Schrader argued that the first stone could not be excluded on physical grounds, though most historians remain skeptical. The stones are part of the historiographic record and worth noting; they are not evidence of the colony's fate [10].

The proposed explanations.

The integration hypothesis

The most-supported explanation in current scholarship is that the colonists, facing imminent food shortage and abandonment by their supply line, divided into groups and either relocated to Croatoan Island to live among the Croatoan people, or moved inland to live with one of the smaller, allied Algonquian tribes. The Cape Creek archaeology, the "Site X" findings, the Jamestown-era Powhatan testimony, and 18th- and 19th-century oral traditions among the Lumbee and Hatteras peoples of "grey-eyed Indians" and English-speaking ancestors all sit within this explanation. Claimed The integration explanation can accommodate the CROATOAN carving, the deliberate dismantling of the houses, the absence of distress signals, and the inland Tudor artifacts. It does not require a single fate for all 115 settlers; it can accommodate a divided departure [11].

The massacre hypothesis

The earliest documented explanation, from the 1607–1612 Strachey-Smith reports, is that Powhatan or another inland power ordered the colonists killed some years after their departure from Roanoke. Claimed This explanation accommodates the Jamestown-era testimony directly but does not, in the historian David Beers Quinn's careful framing, fit the deliberate-dismantling-of-the-fort record at Roanoke: a colony attacked at Roanoke would not have left the orderly site White described. A two-stage scenario — orderly relocation, followed by later violence at a second location — is the form of the massacre hypothesis taken most seriously [12].

The Spanish hypothesis

A minority hypothesis, occasionally revived in the 20th century, is that Spanish forces from the Florida garrison at St. Augustine raided and destroyed or captured the colony. Disputed Spanish naval records have been searched in the 20th century by historians including Paul Hoffman; the Spanish were aware that an English colony existed somewhere on the southeast coast (1588 Spanish reports place it at the Chesapeake) and did send a reconnaissance vessel under Vicente González that briefly investigated the Chesapeake in 1588. No Spanish document confirms an attack on Roanoke. The hypothesis remains alive primarily because of the gap in what Spanish records survive, not because of positive evidence [13].

The shipwreck hypothesis

A small subset of analysts have proposed that the colonists attempted to sail back to England in the pinnace they had been left, were lost at sea, and that the "CROATOAN" carving represented a sub-group who relocated. Disputed The hypothesis is consistent with the deliberate-departure picture at Roanoke but is otherwise speculative; no maritime evidence of such a voyage has been found.

The unanswered questions.

Individual colonist identifications

No human remains have been identified as belonging to any of the 115 colonists. Unverified The Lost Colony DNA Project, a long-running effort coordinated with Family Tree DNA and several university genetics labs, has been collecting Y-chromosome and autosomal DNA from individuals with documented or family-tradition descent from coastal Carolina Indigenous communities and from European populations consistent with the colonist surname rosters. As of 2026 the project has produced patterns consistent with European admixture in some Hatteras and Lumbee community samples, but no individual line has been confirmed back to a named colonist [14].

The full meaning of the CROATOAN carving

White interpreted CROATOAN as a directional signal: the colonists had relocated to that island. A second possibility, raised in the 20th century, is that the carving indicated relations with the Croatoan people more broadly, not necessarily a physical relocation to the island. A third possibility, occasionally raised, is that the carving was a Croatoan act rather than a colonist act — a claim or attribution of the site — though this fits less well with the orderly dismantling. The carving itself was destroyed during White's brief 1590 visit (the tree was not preserved); only White's written description survives. Disputed

The Bertie County "Site X"

The 2011 multispectral discovery of the hidden fort symbol on the La Virginea Pars map was a significant documentary finding; the surface and shovel-test artifacts subsequently recovered are consistent with English late-Tudor presence; full excavation has been incremental. Whether the site represents an organized post-Roanoke settlement attempt by a colony subgroup, a brief stopover, or an unrelated later English presence (an early trader or trapper) is not yet settled by the recovered material [6][7]. Disputed

The Cape Creek population history

The Cape Creek site clearly demonstrates a period in which English-made objects were in everyday use among Croatoan residents. The question of whether the objects arrived via trade or via the actual presence of colonists living there is, with mixed contexts and no remains, archaeologically difficult to resolve. The 16th-century gold ring, the slate writing tablet, and a copper Tudor-era buckle are highly suggestive but not, by themselves, evidence of co-residence [8][9]. Disputed

Primary material.

• The British Museum holds John White's original watercolor paintings of the 1585 expedition, and crucially the "La Virginea Pars" map (1585) whose multispectral re-examination in 2011 revealed the hidden fortification symbol. The map is digitized at the museum's online collection.
• Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1589, expanded 1598–1600) reproduces White's narrative of the 1587 expedition and 1590 return, including the CROATOAN passage. The Hakluyt text is the principal English-language primary source.
• The First Colony Foundation (firstcolonyfoundation.org) is the lead archaeological organization at Site X and publishes field-season reports and artifact catalogs.
• The Croatoan Archaeological Society and Cape Creek Project publish on the Hatteras Island excavations.
• The North Carolina Office of State Archaeology maintains the site files for the Roanoke Island fort and adjacent sites.
• The William Strachey manuscript (1612), "The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania," and Captain John Smith's writings constitute the Jamestown-era documentary evidence of inland Powhatan testimony.

The sequence.

1. April 1584 First English expedition (Amadas and Barlowe) to the Outer Banks; friendly contact with the Croatoan people; Manteo travels to England.
2. 1585—1586 First Roanoke colony, military in character, abandoned after Drake's evacuation following a year of conflict with neighboring tribes.
3. May 8, 1587 John White's expedition of about 117 colonists sails from Plymouth.
4. July 22, 1587 Colonists land at Roanoke Island after Fernandes refuses to continue to the Chesapeake.
5. August 18, 1587 Virginia Dare born to Eleanor Dare and Ananias Dare; first English child born in the Americas.
6. August 27, 1587 John White departs for England to expedite resupply.
7. 1588 Spanish Armada crisis; all English shipping requisitioned. White's two attempts to return are turned back.
8. March 1590 White finally sails with privateering fleet under Abraham Cocke.
9. August 18, 1590 White returns to Roanoke and finds the colony empty, with CROATOAN carved on the palisade and CRO on a tree. Storm and crew refusal prevent his crossing to Croatoan Island.
10. 1607—1612 Jamestown colonists, under instructions from London, gather intelligence from Powhatan informants regarding the Lost Colony. Strachey records the "killing of the men, women, and children" claim.
11. 1701 John Lawson, in his A New Voyage to Carolina, records Hatteras people saying that "several of their ancestors were white people" and that some of the men had grey eyes.
12. 1937—1941 The Dare Stones surface, beginning with the Hammond stone. Most are exposed as a hoax in 1941.
13. 1990s onward Modern archaeology resumes; Lost Colony DNA Project begins.
14. May 2011 Multispectral examination of the La Virginea Pars map at the British Museum reveals the hidden four-pointed fort symbol indicating "Site X."
15. 2012—2026 First Colony Foundation excavates Site X in Bertie County, recovering English ceramics and other late-Tudor material.
16. 2013—present Cape Creek excavations on Hatteras Island recover signet ring, slate, gun parts, and other Tudor-era English material in mixed Croatoan contexts.

Cases on this archive that connect.

More related files coming. Planned: The Lost Colony of Greenland (Norse abandonment, 1400s); the Sodder Children disappearance (1945); the early Jamestown "Starving Time" of 1609–1610 as documentary context for Powhatan-era inland testimony.

Full bibliography.

1. White, John, manuscript narrative of the 1587 voyage, reproduced in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1598–1600 edition, Vol. III.
2. Hariot, Thomas, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, London, 1588. The principal contemporary description of the Roanoke region.
3. White, John, "The fifth voyage of Master John White into the West Indies and parts of America called Virginia, in the yeere 1590," letter to Richard Hakluyt, in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, 1600 edition.
4. Dawson, Scott, The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island, The History Press, 2020. Documentary and archaeological synthesis of the Croatoan/Hatteras connection.
5. Strachey, William, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, written 1612, first published in modern edition by the Hakluyt Society, 1953.
6. British Museum, La Virginea Pars (John White, 1585), Object number 1906,0509.1.3, with 2011 multispectral imaging report.
7. First Colony Foundation, Site X field reports, 2012–2026. firstcolonyfoundation.org.
8. Horton, Mark and Dawson, Scott, "Cape Creek Excavations, Hatteras Island," Croatoan Archaeological Society field reports, 2013–present.
9. Croatoan Archaeological Society, signet ring and Tudor-era ceramics catalog, 2014–2024.
10. Sparkes, Boyden, "Writ on Rock," The Saturday Evening Post, April 26, 1941. The Dare Stones exposé.
11. Quinn, David Beers, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1606, University of North Carolina Press, 1985. The standard scholarly synthesis.
12. Quinn, David Beers, The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590, two volumes, Hakluyt Society, 1955. The standard primary-source compilation.
13. Hoffman, Paul E., Spain and the Roanoke Voyages, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1987.
14. Lost Colony DNA Project, status reports 2007–present. Coordinated with Family Tree DNA and university genetics laboratories.
15. Lawson, John, A New Voyage to Carolina, London, 1709. The Hatteras "grey-eyed Indians" reference.