The Unsolved Mystery of the Lost Colony of Roanoke; or, They Clearly Just Moved, They Even Left You A Note, Jesus Christ Lads Use Some Common Sense
The tale of the lost colony of Roanoke is one of the oldest and most famous unsolved mysteries in United States history. Luckily, I, a Scot with minimal knowledge of American history and absolutely no interest in doing any level of in-depth research, have arrived to solve this mystery once and for all.
Turns out, there’s not much of a mystery. As with so much of history, it boils down to one white man being a moron.
So, Roanoke Island is an island off the coast of North Carolina, which became home to some of the earliest English colonists in the US. This was early on in the extended European invasion of the continent, when they were already committing some minor atrocities on the Native Americans but hadn’t gone in for full-scale genocide quite yet.
The first couple of waves of colonists hadn’t had the best of luck, what with the fact that they were essentially attempting to move into someone else’s house without asking. Famous genociding bastard Sir Walter Raleigh led the first wave, showing up, doing a bit of wanton violence, and then having to leave after struggling to find food and dealing with attacks from the people who already lived there (because they’d been stealing their food and attacking them). Great work, lads.
In 1587, a new group of 100 colonists moved to Roanoke Island for a bit of light genocide of their own. This group contained entire families with children, who were ready to settle and live a full and successful life on the island pre-established to have minimal resources and neighbours who actively hated them.
It’s worth noting that the earliest English colonists in North America had to move there because they were too fucking bonkers for England at the time.
“Welcome to our new home, the island that explicitly hates us”
After a few months, shockingly, the colonists ran into some troubles. Namely, there were minimal resources and the natives hated them.
As a solution, the governor, John White, a Wise and Smart Man (he was god’s greatest fucking idiot), decided to return to England to pick up some supplies.
Which was… I mean. Long term? Terrible plan. Was he planning to bring back enough supplies to last them until forever? Was he planning to return to England every time they ran out? What is your plan here, John? This is idiotic.
Anyway, John ended up getting delayed by shenanigans (a war, I think? I feel like there was a war) and was gone for THREE YEARS.
Yeah, cool, great work John. Your colony of mad puritans with no farming skills are probably going to be fine for that length of time.
When he finally got back – you’re going to want to hold onto your butts here, lads, because this is going to floor you – the colony was gone.
AYE NO SHIT JOHN WHAT DID YOU THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN?
Naturally, John was stunned and confused by their disappearance, because he had no grasp of object permanence and thought that things temporarily stopped existing when he wasn’t looking directly at them.
The only clue to their mysterious and completely unexpected disappearance was a note.
Like. They literally left a note. Come on, John, they’re trying to work with you here.
The note, which was carved into a post, contained a single word: Croatoan. Very mysterious, no? A strange word, the only possible clue to what had happened to the colonists. What could it possibly mean?
“There is no way of knowing what this word means because I, an idiot, cannot read.”
Well I’m glad you asked, John. It’s literally just the name of the island next door. There was a tribe of people who lived there, called the Croatoans.
Once John worked out this tricky puzzle, he of course hopped back onto his boat and sailed to Croatoan island to check up on his colony. Right?
Just kidding, of course he didn’t, he was a fucking idiot.
Apparently, it was a bit windy that day, which hampered John’s trip to Croatoan, so instead he took a cursory glance around the immediate area, went “nope, they’re not here” and accepted that they’d vanished into thin air forever.
They left you a fucking note, John.
A few years later, famous bastard Sir Walter Raleigh came back over and engaged in an in-depth search for the lost colonists of Roanoke, including the island of Croatoan, finding nothing and concluding, like John, that they had, in fact, vanished into thin air.
EXCEPT THAT HE FUCKING DIDN’T, DID HE? Walter later admitted that his search for the colonists was actually a cover for his deeply bonkers search for the lost city of El Dorado, and that he hadn’t really put any effort at all into actually looking for the lost colony. A fun bonus to his nonsense was that his report of his search for El Dorado was so ridiculously exaggerated that multiple other people tried to follow in his footsteps and died horribly. Later, he was arrested for treason and eventually executed, so that’s nice.
Seriously. Fuck that guy.
Look at this berufféd bastard; absolute bellend.
In the years that followed, multiple others embarked on their own searches for the lost colonists of Roanoke. In 1603, a man called Bartholomew Gilbert led a search party that were all immediately killed, so great work there. John Smith, in the meantime, continued to meander uselessly and go “eh, probably just vanished though”.
The main theories about what happened to the colonists, in the following years, seemed to boil down to: a) they were all murdered by native Americans (which was, delightfully, used as an excuse to do further genocide against the locals who were, frankly, just minding their own goddamn business), b) they disappeared into thin air, never to be seen again (John, you lazy bastard), c) they moved away from the resourceless hell island and went somewhere else (very likely, come on), or d) something to do with zombies?
I mean. We can’t prove it wasn’t zombies.
Personally, I’m going for a hard no on this one, but you can draw your own conclusions.
For the most part, though, the quest to discover what happened to the lost colony of Roanoke was eventually abandoned as a mystery that would never be solved.
But then, almost one hundred full years later, a historian called John Lawson (we will call him Competent John to distinguish him from John White, utterly useless scrote) FINALLY went to Hatteras, previously known as Croatoan, to see what he could find.
And WHAT DID HE FIND? Well, he found that a lot of the ancestors of the Croatoan Native Americans (the Hatteras) had blonde hair and grey eyes, much like the Roanoke colonists. And when asked, they were like “oh yeah, we had a bunch of those guys come and live with us”. The modern-day Hatteras-Roanoke tribe actively identify as descendants of both the Croatoans and the Roanoke colonists. A further investigation found English coins and firearms in the area.
And yet, people are still like “oh no, whatever could have happened to the colonists? A mystery. An enigma. A question that will never be answered. A puzzle that we can never solve.”
Get a fucking grip, John White.