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\nTwo decades before Jamestown, settlers arrived in what is now North Carolina. What happened to them is a mystery, but there are some clues.<\/h4>\n
FROM THE ENGLISH ship Hopewell anchored off the coast of what is now North Carolina, Governor John White watched with elation as a column of smoke rose into the summer dusk.<\/p>\n
The plume from Roanoke Island \u201cput us in good hope that some of the colony were there expecting my return out of England,\u201d he wrote later. Three years had passed since the governor had set out from the first English settlement in the New World on what was to be a brief resupply mission, leaving behind more than a hundred men, women, and children. But his return voyage had been delayed again and again by the outbreak of war with Spain. At last, on August 18, 1590, White and a party of sailors waded ashore on Roanoke Island. According to White\u2019s account of events, they spotted fresh footprints but met no one. As the men climbed a sandy bank, they encountered a tree with the carved letters \u201cC R O.\u201d This was, the governor explained, a prearranged code. If the settlers were to leave the island, they should carve their destination into a tree or post. Adding a cross would mean they left in an emergency.<\/p>\n
Reaching the abandoned settlement, the governor spotted a post on which \u201cin fair capital letters was graven CROATOAN without any cross or sign of distress.\u201d Yet the post itself was part of a defensive palisade thrown up after White had left\u2014a clear sign that the settlers had prepared for an enemy attack.<\/p>\n
Croatoan was the name of both a barrier island to the south and the indigenous people who lived there, Carolina Algonquian speakers closely allied with the European newcomers. One of their young men, Manteo, had traveled twice to London and served as an essential guide, interpreter, and diplomat for the English.<\/p>\n
White desperately wanted to reach Croatoan, a mere 50 miles to the south\u2014though he also mentions that the colonists originally intended to move 50 miles inland. A series of setbacks and lack of provisions scuttled his plan to continue the search. On returning to England, he found Sir Walter Raleigh, the colony\u2019s wealthy patron, busy organizing a new venture in Ireland. Without deep pockets to finance a transatlantic expedition on his own, White never returned to the New World. The 115 colonists\u2014including Eleanor and Virginia Dare, White\u2019s daughter and infant grandchild\u2014were all but forgotten, marooned on a distant shore.<\/p>\n
Two decades later the English established their first permanent beachhead in the Americas, a hundred miles to the north on the James River, in what is now Virginia. Captain John Smith, the leader of the Jamestown colony, heard from the Indians that men wearing European clothes were living on the Carolina mainland west of Roanoke and Croatoan Islands. Tales of mass slaughter and an enslaved \u201cyoung maid\u201d circulated in London and Jamestown. Search parties, however, never found any physical proof of the colonists\u2019 fate.<\/p>\n
And so it would go for the next 400 years, as one investigation after another into what had happened on Roanoke Island proved fruitless. The absence of evidence spawned wild speculation, hoaxes, and countless conspiracy theories. But in recent years a series of finds at archaeological digs\u2014and a chance discovery at the British Museum\u2014have revealed tantalizing new clues that suggest what happened to the settlers after White departed. Historians, meanwhile, are starting to recognize that Roanoke was more than a passing failure. The effort was, in essence, the Apollo program of Elizabethan England, spanning six years and three major voyages.<\/p>\n
The first, in 1584, was a reconnaissance mission. The following year an all-male contingent\u2014with White as expedition artist\u2014defied Spanish claims to North America and arrived on Roanoke hoping to find gold, valuable pharmaceuticals, and a shortcut to the Pacific. Instead they made enemies of their Native American hosts by assassinating their leader. Ragged and hungry, the men caught a ride home less than a year later with a fleet commanded by Sir Francis Drake. The following spring, in 1587, White led a third expedition made up primarily of middle-class Londoners, including his pregnant daughter, Eleanor Dare, as well as 16 other women and nearly a dozen children.<\/p>\n
All told, more than a score of oceangoing ships carried hundreds of people across the 16th-century equivalent of interplanetary space. The bold venture dwarfed in size and scope the later\u2014and more renowned\u2014forays to Jamestown and Plymouth, birthed the first corporation in English America, and forged the link between England and the mid-Atlantic coast of North America that seeded both the British Empire and the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe profound significance of Raleigh\u2019s Virginia voyages to the history and culture of the modern world is often forgotten or undervalued,\u201d writes Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum. The museum houses White\u2019s extraordinary paintings, which helped shape Europeans\u2019 conception of the New World and its inhabitants.<\/p>\n
Despite the governor\u2019s belief that the settlers went to Croatoan, searchers found no evidence there until after 1993, when a hurricane exposed large amounts of pottery and other remnants of a Native American village.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe English lost it, so I guess it\u2019s up to us to find it again,\u201d Mark Horton says cheerily. The archaeologist from the University of Bristol stands on the lip of a rectangular hole shaded by gnarled live oaks. Just over the wooded dune, Pamlico Sound laps rhythmically against the North Carolina beach.<\/p>\n
In the 1580s a nearby inlet made this an ideal spot to gather scallops and oysters, and catch turtles and fish. Patches of fertile soil were suitable for growing corn, squash, and beans. When the inlet closed a century or so after White left, this became part of Hatteras Island, a long boomerang of blowing sand and maritime forest angled deep into the Atlantic.<\/p>\n
A local organization, the Croatoan Archaeological Society, sponsors an annual dig led by Horton. Since 2013, the team has uncovered a variety of Old World objects mixed in with Native American artifacts in the heart of a village. They include the remains of what appears to be a gentleman\u2019s dress sword called a rapier, along with some scraps of European copper, the barrel of a gun, lead shot, and a piece of drawing slate with its lead pencil.<\/p>\n
Horton suspects the slate might have belonged to White, who may have used it to make sketches of the local people. The haul is one of the New World\u2019s few troves of arguably Elizabethan artifacts, all in the very place Governor White had believed the lost colonists had gone.<\/p>\n
Though nearing retirement age, Horton has the pudgy red cheeks and keen enthusiasm of an English schoolboy. As we talk, a team member nearby hands a bucket heavy with muck to a volunteer, who pours it into a box with a fine-mesh screen. She hoses down the material and swiftly plucks out a minuscule baby blue bead made in Italy. Later that day a thin, round object surfaces that was manufactured in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1648 to weigh the silver in a Hungarian coin called a ducat. By the mid- to late 17th century the new global economy encompassed even isolated Croatoan Island.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would never argue that they all end up here,\u201d Horton says of the colonists. \u201cBut this is where they would be welcomed and supported. I suspect they would have sent the women and children here; it\u2019s almost certain this would be where Virginia Dare turns up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet most of the objects that appear Elizabethan were found among other material, such as tiny glass beads and broken pottery that likely date to more than a half century after White\u2019s failed rescue attempt. \u201cIt\u2019s deeply problematic that this stuff turns up two generations later,\u201d Horton admits. He suggests that the older Elizabethan objects may have been kept by the children or grandchildren of abandoned settlers who may have assimilated with the Croatoan. But even some members of the excavation team suspect the material could have arrived through trade with later English settlements.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, animal bones from trash heaps suggest an abrupt dietary switch from fish and turtles to deer and birds\u2014evidence that could hint at indigenous people using European guns early in the contact period, guns the lost colonists may have provided.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no doubt, however, about the age and authenticity of the watercolors White made during his stint as expedition artist in 1585. Among these is a colorful map of eastern North Carolina, gaily decorated with English ships and Indian canoes. The chart, based on careful measurements by the expedition\u2019s brilliant scientist Thomas Harriot, is also remarkably accurate.<\/p>\n
Brent Lane, who taught heritage economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, grew up fascinated by Lost Colony legends and owns a modern copy of White\u2019s watercolor map. In 2011 he became curious about two faint patches on his copy. The British Museum initially was slow to respond to his request to probe what lay under the original\u2019s coverings. He persisted.<\/p>\n
When the curators put the painting on a light table three months later, the star-shaped symbol of a fort appeared under one patch. The location of the fort was just as startling: It lay not on Roanoke Island but some 50 miles away, at the head of Albemarle Sound\u2014matching White\u2019s mention that the colonists planned to relocate \u201cfifty miles into the main.\u201d And on top of this patch was the barely perceptible outline of a fort as well, drawn in what may have been invisible ink made with urine\u2014a hint that the patch was meant to conceal a secret rather than fix an error.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery generation in the last 400 years has taken this search on,\u201d Lane told a crowded press conference announcing the discovery. But \u201cnone of them had this clue. This is really a solid lead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Archaeologists from the First Colony Foundation, a North Carolina nonprofit devoted to Roanoke-related archaeology, set out to investigate the area indicated on the chart. They focused on a piece of land beside a cove perfect for hiding a ship from Spanish scouts. In a nod to the cloak-and-dagger nature of the find, they named it Site X.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo social media!\u201d barks archaeologist Nicholas Luccketti when I arrive at the site one hot summer morning, having promised not to reveal its precise location. \u201cNo Facebook, no tweeting, no texting!\u201d Workers in a half dozen trenches are tossing dirt into buckets that in turn are dumped into mesh screens where the dirt is closely examined for the smallest artifacts.<\/p>\n
Luccketti, a short, stocky Virginian, is on edge. He fears some of the excavation volunteers have tipped off potential looters. Since work began in 2012, the team has retrieved L-shaped bits of metal, possibly used for stretching out a tent or animal skin, as well as an aglet, a tiny tube used to secure the end of a wool lace. A brass buckle and lead seal also could date to Elizabethan times.<\/p>\n
The archaeologist believes his ace in the hole is a few dozen broken bits of pottery. Standing at a plastic table in the middle of the field, he pulls a triangular piece of green pottery from a plastic bag. The outer surface is green and smooth, and the inner side pink and rougher. The ceramic was manufactured on the boundary between Surrey and Hampshire Counties in southern England and is therefore called Border ware. To be honest, it\u2019s not much to look at. Luccketti reads my mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe mundane nature of this is what makes it important,\u201d he says. \u201cIf it was a pretty object, then the Indians might collect it.\u201d In other words, this English pottery was probably left where it fell rather than reused by Native Americans. Luccketti feels sure I\u2019m holding part of a bowl used by a lost colonist. \u201cWe think this was where they came after Governor White left,\u201d he concludes confidently.<\/p>\n
His conviction hinges on a logical but arcane argument. At early English settlements such as Jamestown, Border ware made up a hefty percentage of the pottery, but over time that percentage rapidly declined. By the time the English colonists arrived in the Site X area about 1660, Border ware was relatively rare. Yet here it\u2019s common.<\/p>\n
Other archaeologists remain skeptical. They insist that Luccketti must come up with other lines of evidence\u2014such as the grave of an Elizabethan colonist\u2014to clinch his case. When I see Luccketti in late 2017, after a final excavation at Site X, he\u2019s not as sanguine.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t know exactly what we\u2019ve got here,\u201d the archaeologist says ruefully. \u201cIt remains a bit of an enigma.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Throughout colonial North America, most of the English captured by Indians or who deserted refused to return, even if given the chance. Unlike Europeans, Native Americans in the colonial era typically welcomed men, women, and children of any origin into their ranks. Though some warrior-age men were killed and others enslaved, the vast majority were accepted as full members of the tribe.<\/p>\n
In such small-scale societies, there was power in numbers, and newcomers were swiftly taught Indian language and skills that replaced their European ways. If the lost colonists followed this path and assimilated quickly into Carolina Algonquian society, as many historians believe, they may have left evidence in the form of DNA in their descendants.<\/p>\n
When explorer John Lawson visited the area in 1701, he heard that the Hatteras Indians claimed that \u201cseveral of their ancestors were white people \u2026 the truth of which is confirmed by gray eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians, and no others.\u201d He assumed that the lost colonists \u201cconform\u2019d themselves to the manners of their Indian relations.\u201d<\/p>\n
During the past decade, Michigan-based computer scientist Roberta Estes has been gathering genetic data to test Lawson\u2019s theory. \u201cYou can use DNA to look through a periscope that goes far back in history,\u201d she says. But the image remains stubbornly fuzzy.<\/p>\n
Since no one has pinpointed modern English descended from colonist relatives, Estes has nothing to compare with her samples from current-day descendants of eastern North Carolinians. Extracting DNA from 16th-century bones on Roanoke Island, Hatteras, or at Site X could provide a reliable link between the settlers and their descendants, but that genetic material remains elusive.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want people to come away with the idea that DNA is a magic bullet,\u201d adds Estes, a dark-haired woman with indigenous ancestors. \u201cBut it could solve some of this mystery by inferring that the colonists survived.\u201d New pieces of the puzzle, including English genealogical records and excavated human remains that yield DNA, could emerge in time.<\/p>\n
On Hatteras, some members of old families maintain that their ancestors were Native Americans. Real estate records indicate that a small community of Indians remained on the island as late as 1788, two centuries after the Roanoke settlers arrived, but there is no sign of Indian traditions that persisted into the 20th century. Estes also has yet to find evidence of Native American DNA among today\u2019s long-term inhabitants.<\/p>\n
Some of the Indians, however, moved to the mainland swamps to the west to join Algonquian cousins known in the 18th century as the Machapunga. This area, still boggy backcountry more plentiful in wildlife than people, is where John Smith was told Europeans could be found. Incoming Europeans and Africans subsequently mixed with the Machapunga. In the mid-19th century, racial purity laws designated most nonwhite North Carolinians as black. That had the effect of obliterating the intricate distinctions of mixed ethnicities that still characterize the people in the state\u2019s thinly populated east.<\/p>\n
Early in the 20th century a visiting anthropologist identified a group of people called the Machapunga living on the mainland. Though they\u2019d lost their native tongue and were considered black, they retained distinctive Algonquian ways of cooking and making baskets and nets. By the 1920s, drawn by better opportunities, a hundred or so of this group had moved to Manteo, the seat of Dare County, on Roanoke Island. \u201cToday, the ancestry of these people is so predominately Negroid that any Indian blood is thoroughly disguised,\u201d another anthropologist wrote about Manteo\u2019s Machapunga in 1960.<\/p>\n
If the lost colonists melted into the Croatoan and then the Machapunga, their fate is rich with historical irony. By the late 19th century, a popular myth imagined Virginia Dare as a beautiful blond-haired and blue-eyed virgin in a wilderness filled with dark savages. She also was a powerful symbol of white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. If she lived to have a family of her own, the most likely descendants of this fancied forest damsel are the African Americans now living within a few miles of her birthplace.<\/p>\n
That would mean that even before the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, the American melting pot already was bubbling with a diverse genetic mixture of English and Native Americans\u2014and possibly Africans as well. Sir Francis Drake liberated hundreds of black slaves, likely including Muslims, in Caribbean raids in 1586. Many historians argue that he dropped them at Roanoke Island when he rescued the all-male colony and that they intermingled with Carolina Algonquian society.<\/p>\n
One rainy spring morning I visit the chief of the Roanoke-Hatteras tribe. Marilyn Berry Morrison meets me at the door of her suburban home in Chesapeake, Virginia. Though she looks African-American, her Indian-print dress and intricate ponytails braided in leather straps proclaim her identity.<\/p>\n
\u201cI claim Native American based on tradition,\u201d Morrison explains, though she doesn\u2019t deny her mixed white and black heritage. Her tribe has yet to win state or federal status, and family DNA consists of only a smattering of Indian genes. She\u2019s nevertheless adamant that her parents and grandparents retained Algonquian ways to fish, heal, and cook.<\/p>\n
I ask her about the link to the Roanoke settlers. \u201cWe were the Lost Colony,\u201d she responds. \u201cOur surnames, like \u2018Berry,\u2019 appear on the colonists\u2019 list. We are the original melting pot.\u201d<\/p>\n
But hers is not a sweet tale of openhearted assimilation. \u201cWe killed the men and took the women and children,\u201d she adds matter-of-factly.<\/p>\n
Morrison pulls out a thick family album and flips through the pages. Her ancestors\u2019 skin colors range from ivory to ebony. My eyes fall on one name that lacks a photograph. \u201cShe was my great-great-grandmother,\u201d Morrison says. \u201cShe was from Roanoke Island.\u201d Her name was Virginia Dare Bowser Tillet.<\/p>\n
Leaving Morrison\u2019s house, it occurs to me that our 400-year-old obsession with the Lost Colony isn\u2019t just about what happened to a group of English migrants on a remote island. In a nation fractured by views on race, gender, and immigration, we\u2019re still struggling with what it means to be American. Maybe, I think, we\u2019re all latter-day John Whites, searching for clues in our distant past to guide us through an unsettling present and into the uncertain future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two decades before Jamestown, settlers arrived in what is now North Carolina. What happened to them is a mystery, but there are some clues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-geographic"],"yoast_head":"\n