115 People Vanished and Left One Word Carved in a Post. The Lost Colony of Roanoke.

On August 18, 1590, a man named John White walked through the woods on an island off the coast of what is now North Carolina, looking for his family.

It was his granddaughter's third birthday. He had not seen her since she was nine days old.

Three years earlier, he had left more than a hundred English men, women and children on this island. His daughter. Her husband. Their baby girl. He had promised to come back with supplies.

He found the settlement. The wall was still standing. But the houses inside had been taken apart. The people were gone. And carved into one of the posts by the entrance was a single word.

CROATOAN.

He never saw any of them again. And more than four hundred years later, no one knows for certain what happened to them.

This is the Lost Colony of Roanoke.

England's first try

To understand the Lost Colony, you need to know it was not the first English group on Roanoke Island.

In 1584, Queen Elizabeth the First gave Sir Walter Raleigh a charter to explore and settle land in North America. England was far behind Spain in the race for the New World, and Raleigh wanted a foothold. Partly for glory. Partly as a base for English ships to attack Spanish treasure fleets.

In 1585, he sent a military expedition. About a hundred and seven men were left on Roanoke Island, a low, wooded island tucked behind the Outer Banks, under the command of Ralph Lane.

It went badly. One of their supply ships had wrecked on arrival, ruining much of their food. Relations with the local Native peoples went from cautious to hostile. In 1586, Lane's men attacked a local leader named Wingina and killed him. Promised supplies did not arrive.

When the English privateer Francis Drake stopped by in June 1586, Lane and his men had had enough. They left with Drake and sailed home.

About two weeks later, the supply fleet finally arrived and found the island empty. Its commander, Richard Grenville, left fifteen men behind to hold the English claim.

Those fifteen men would not survive. According to later accounts from the Croatan people, mainland tribes attacked them. None of them were ever seen alive again.

The 1587 colony

The second attempt was different. It was not a military outpost. It was meant to be a real town.

In January 1587, Raleigh approved a new charter for the "Cittie of Raleigh." Its governor would be John White, an artist who had been on the 1585 voyage and made famous watercolor paintings of the Native people and wildlife of the region.

About a hundred and fifteen people signed up. Mostly ordinary middle-class Londoners. Men, women and children. Families. Among them were White's own daughter, Eleanor, and her husband, Ananias Dare. Eleanor was pregnant.

They also brought back two Native men, Manteo and Towaye. Manteo was from Croatoan, an island to the south, and had become an important ally and go-between for the English.

The colonists were not supposed to stay on Roanoke. Their real destination was the Chesapeake Bay, farther north, which was thought to have better land and a better harbor. Roanoke was only supposed to be a stop to check on Grenville's fifteen men.

But when they arrived in July 1587, the man in charge of the ships, a pilot named Simon Fernandes, refused to take them any farther. The colonists were put ashore at Roanoke and left there.

They found no sign of the fifteen men, except the bones of one of them.

A bad start

Things went wrong almost immediately.

Within days of landing, one of the colonists, George Howe, went out alone to catch crabs in the shallows. He was attacked and killed by Native warriors from the mainland.

In August, White led a strike against a village he believed belonged to the attackers. It turned out to be the wrong people. His men attacked a group of Croatans, their own allies, who were in the area gathering food.

The colonists were short of supplies. The season was late for planting. Modern tree-ring studies show that 1587 had one of the worst droughts in the region in eight hundred years.

On August 18, 1587, Eleanor Dare gave birth to a daughter. They named her Virginia. She was the first English child born in the Americas.

A few days later, the colonists made a decision. They needed someone to go back to England, explain how desperate things were, and come back fast with supplies and more people. They chose their governor. John White.

He did not want to go. He did not want to leave his daughter and his newborn granddaughter. But they insisted.

Before he left, they agreed on a signal. If they had to leave Roanoke, they would carve the name of the place they had gone on a tree or a post. And if they left because they were in danger, they would carve a cross above it.

On August 27, 1587, John White sailed for England. Virginia Dare was nine days old.

Three lost years

White reached England in November. He expected to be back across the Atlantic within months.

Instead, he walked into a war.

Spain was preparing a massive fleet, the Armada, to invade England. Queen Elizabeth ordered every useful ship to stay home and defend the country. A fleet Raleigh had prepared to resupply the colony was held in port.

In April 1588, White managed to get two small ships out. They did not make it. Off the coast of Morocco, French ships attacked them. Around two dozen men were killed, and the supplies were stolen. The ships were forced back to England.

The Armada was defeated that summer. But the restrictions on shipping stayed in place. It took White until 1590 to find another way across. He finally got passage on a privateering expedition, a group of armed ships hunting Spanish treasure, which agreed to stop at Roanoke on the way.

Three years after he left, he was going back.

August 1590

The ships reached the Outer Banks in August 1590.

On August 15, White and the sailors saw smoke rising from Roanoke Island. It looked like a sign that people were there.

Getting ashore was dangerous. The water was rough. One of the boats overturned, and seven men drowned.

On the morning of August 18, Virginia Dare's third birthday, White and the search party finally reached the island. As they walked through the woods, they found fresh footprints in the sand. But no people.

On a tree near the shore, they found three letters carved: C, R, O.

Then they reached the settlement.

What White found

The colonists had built a palisade, a wall of tall wooden posts, around the settlement while he was gone.

The houses inside had been taken down. Not burned. Taken apart, carefully, as if someone planned to move them. Anything portable had been removed.

Near the entrance, on one of the posts, someone had carved a single word in capital letters. CROATOAN.

White looked for the cross. The danger signal they had agreed on.

There was none.

Nearby, he found chests that had been buried and later dug up and broken open. Some of them were his own. His books, his maps, his paintings, rotted and ruined by the rain.

There were no bodies. No graves. No signs of a battle. The boats the colonists had kept were gone.

To White, it seemed clear. The colonists had moved to Croatoan, the island to the south, where Manteo's people lived and were friendly to the English. They had left the word to tell him where to find them. There was no cross, so they had not left in danger.

He was relieved. He would sail to Croatoan in the morning.

The storm

That night, the weather turned.

The ship's anchor cable snapped. They lost an anchor. The ship had only one cable and one anchor left. The crew argued that trying to reach Croatoan in that weather would risk wrecking the ship.

They decided to sail south to the Caribbean for the winter and come back in the spring. But storms blew them off course toward the Azores, and in the end, the ship went home to England.

John White never returned to America. He spent his last years in Ireland. In one of his last letters, he wrote that he had given up hope and left the colonists to God.

The search that never really happened

You would think someone would have gone looking. They mostly did not.

Raleigh made gestures toward searching. But his 1595 voyage was really a hunt for the legendary golden city of El Dorado, and it sailed past the Outer Banks. A 1602 voyage he funded spent most of its time collecting sassafras to sell. In 1603, Raleigh was arrested for treason, and his claim to Virginia collapsed.

When the English finally founded Jamestown in 1607, the colonists there heard rumors. John Smith was told about places inland where people dressed like Europeans lived. In 1609, the Virginia Company reported that the Roanoke colonists had been killed by the powerful leader Wahunsenacawh, known to the English as Powhatan. But nobody knows where that claim came from, and historians treat it with caution.

A hundred years later, in 1701, an explorer named John Lawson visited the people of Hatteras Island, which had once been Croatoan. He wrote that some of them had gray eyes, and that they told him their ancestors included white people who could "talk in a book."

What archaeology has found

In modern times, archaeologists have kept looking.

On Hatteras Island, researchers including Mark Horton have found European objects at a Native village site, including part of a sword and part of a gun. A ring found in 1998 was first reported as gold with an English family crest. Later testing showed it was brass, and the crest could not be confirmed.

Inland, in Bertie County, North Carolina, there is a place researchers call "Site X." In 2011, the British Museum examined one of John White's own maps and found a patch hiding a small fort symbol in that area. Digs there turned up English pottery from the right period. Some researchers think this is a sign that some colonists moved inland. Others point out the pieces could have come from later traders.

Nothing found so far is conclusive. No grave. No inscription. No body.

What we still don't know

So where did they go?

The leading theories are these. That they did what the carving said, went to Croatoan, and over time blended into the Native community there. That they split up, with some going to Croatoan and others moving inland. That they tried to reach the Chesapeake and were killed. Or that they tried to sail home in a small boat and were lost at sea.

There is evidence that points toward each. There is no proof of any.

What we know for certain is this. More than a hundred people, including women, children and a little girl named Virginia Dare, took apart their houses, packed what they could carry, carved one word into a post, and left. They did not carve a cross.

And the one man who could have followed them was stopped by a broken anchor cable and a storm.

What do you think happened to the Lost Colony? Did they find a new home on Croatoan, or did something go wrong after that word was carved?