Empire: World History - 272. Solving The Mystery of America's Lost Colony

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Have archaeologists finally solved the 400 year mystery of the lost American colonists? Who orchestrated historical hoaxes in the 1930s and did they get away with it? How has the history of the Roanoke Colony been reappropriated by the right-wing? Anita and William are joined by archaeologist Mark Horton to exclusively discuss his exciting new discovery through his work on the Roanoke dig site this year… ----------------- Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, our exclusive newsletter, and access to our members’ chatroom on Discord! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. ----------------- Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Welcome to this episode of Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durhampool. And we're all in sort of back-of-the-bus mode because we've got one of our naughty guests back on, who we absolutely adored. I mean, honestly, could not love this man more.

Mark Horton, archaeologist extraordinaire, who you might remember last time was on, talking about Darien, the attempt of the Scots to found their own empire. Can I just say you got me into all sorts of trouble because you made me laugh so much. I had a heaving post bag from people off the north who said, why are you finding this so bloody funny?

It's a great tragedy. What's wrong with you? But you said it funny. It's not my four, you said it funny, but it was a very funny and very marvellous episode. Remind them Anita what it was that was funny. Oh, well, I mean, the thing was, it was Mark gave this list of reasons why this colonisation attempt may not have been successful, and among them were the fact that they took leather cannons.

I mean, already, I know military person, but I don't see how that was a good idea. And they took to trade with the natives bonnets and bibles as if they were going to get anything. for that stuff. So the whole thing, it was just not great. Big potential market for bonnets, even today in Panama. I mean, honestly, you knew exactly what they were up to. It was a planning snuffoo, as we say in the trade, which Mark told really well. Anyway, welcome Mark. Oh, thank you. All right, we are here to talk about a very different subject, one that we have covered on this podcast

before, but Mark is going to have a whole new perspective on this. and it comes straight from the dirt of truth and reality. So, Willie, do you want to give people an idea of what it is we're talking about? I'd love to open this, because weirdly enough, what Mark has dug the same sort of time as he was digging it, I have one of the opening scenes of my book, The Anarchy, about the subject we're about to talk about, which is the first English attempts to found a colony in North America. And this is a period which immediately predates the founding of the East India Company. The East India Company, which as we know went on to be the largest commercial organization in history,

it controlled half the world's trade, started off as this very unpromising idea of basically trying to keep up with the Dutch who'd already found a route to the spice trade. And, you know, looking back, all Victorian historians looked on this decade when Rally is going off to found settlements in North America and other Protestant plantations are being founded in Ireland, which is what we did with Jane O'Meyer in our Irish series earlier in the year, and when the British ultimately start their progress towards India, all the Victorians depict as this sort of inevitable progress to world domination. In reality, it was a period of enormous setbacks and half the attempts that the British were making to break into what was then a world dominated by the Portuguese and the Spanish were often

extremely unsuccessful. There was a search for the Northwest Passage to the Spice Islands that ended disastrously, not in the Malacca's, but instead on the edge of the Arctic Circle, with all these galleons stuck fast in pack ice with their sort of battered hulls, punctured by icebergs and pike-wielding crews mauled by polar bears. And that's the immediate background to this attempt by Swal to Rale, to outsmart the French and the Spanish, and to go to the north of where they were, and to found a colony in south of Chesapeake Bay, in an area which, of course, he named Virginia after the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth. And the story that's normally told is that the colony survived barely a year, was abandoned in June 1586 after the relief fleet arrived to find

the settlement deserted. And a shipload of eager new colonists jumped ashore to find both the stuccade and the houses within completely dismantled. And nothing. And nothing. And, you know, to indicate the fate of the settlers except a single skeleton and the name of Croatowans, carved in capital letters on a tree, and there was simply no sign of the 90 men, 17 women, and 11 children whom rarely had left there only two years earlier. It was as if the settlers had vanished into thin air. Now, that is the background against which we're going to be talking about Mark's new discoveries, which completely rewrite that story, which is all very exciting. It's an empire scoop.

Yes, it's a scoop, but also the story, when you say the story, the story kind of, you know, was big at the time, and then it kind of fades a little bit into the background, but then it becomes a huge Victorian issue because of this man called George Bancroft, who publishes a history of the United States. This is an absolute study in, one might say, racism, because it has every racist trope in it, you know,

that there are savages who massacred these people and took them away, and it pays specific interest. in this little girl called Virginia Dare, a little white child, who's apparently taken off by the savages and raised among savagery. And it really caught the public imagination. And Mark, it kind of coloured archaeological research as well, didn't it? Absolutely. I mean, you would have thought this founding story about America, historians, archaeologists would actually go to Coeterne Island, the initials on the tree, and actually go and look for them. blindingly obvious. They obfuscated it a bit by saying, well, the Kroatern would try, but John White, who'd done the map, actually put Kroirn on his map. So we know exactly where the island is, is Hathras Island. So why did it take, as it were, until the 21st century

for an archaeologist to go and look for where they might have actually ended up? So just to clarify, the idea preferred by the racists, as you put it, is that the savages wiped out these poor, innocent settlers fresh from England. But your theory is that they actually just went somewhere else and there was look for them. That's right. I mean, you've got to realize the racist view is all connected with manifest destiny. And the notion, the white man has the right to colonise and settle the consulate of North America. And it's an inconvenient truth that there are already people living there. And what's even more inconvenient is the notion that Virginia Dare,

who is actually held up as the great icon of Manifest Destiny, and she's often shown as this sort of wonderful girl in flowing robes and so forth, this white icon, could actually have sex with a Native American. And her descendants would be Native Americans. That was just too much for these. racist historians. So let's just lay out the story and flesh it out a little bit more. You mentioned John White. Just tell us exactly who John White was, who marked the place on the map. So John White was an artist in Queen Elizabeth's court and also probably a contemporary of Nicholas Hilliard

and a miniaturist. And this is not irrelevant as the story emerges. So John White went out in the a major military expedition. This is the 1585 as the expedition's artist. And he did a series of unbelievable pictures, exquisite pictures that rarely set the scene of how you should represent Native Americans for the next two, three hundred years. The folios are in the British Museum, some of the finest, the most important things in the British Museum, actually. And then when it then came to set up a Sattler colony, the one that was rescued, was rescued by Francis Drake in 1585. So, Settler Colony went out in 1586 with women and children, including his own daughter, Eleanor Dare, who was married to Anasizus Dare, who was one of the colonists.

So John White went back as the governor of this third colony, the settlers colony. And while he was there, his daughter gave birth to Virginia, named Virginia, obviously after the Virgin Queen. and unfortunately, or we don't quite know the circumstances, John White's own account, so they ran out of food. So he then returned back to England to get more food for the colony. But unfortunately, he came back in 1588, 58, 57, 1588, when the armada was being planned and it was not possible, as it were, for ships to leave England. So he didn't get back till 1590, and then he found the colony abandoned with,

this CRO on a tree and Croturn written on the palisade of the abandoned fort. Unfortunately, he couldn't get back. He knew they were in Crotone Island. He'd mapped it earlier, but he was all a pirate ship, basically, who wanted to go a pirating. And we should explain that at this point, the British are making a lot of their money on what we would call piracy, which they called licensed privateering. and the British Crown would give out a license to a bunch of pirates who, in the name of the Virgin Queen, would go and raid horrible Catholic ships as the Protestant English saw it. And we're going to hear more of this when we have an episode on Panama.

But huge amounts of cash get taken from Spanish and Portuguese vessels at this period, particularly silver from the Panama mines, and diverted to Charing Cross and Whitehall. That's right. So the captain of the ship wouldn't let him go and find his daughter on the Island and Crow return, but he then went for pirating unsuccessfully. And so we know about all this because John White then retired to Ireland and wrote a lengthy letter to Richard Hacklett, who was the main documentary of these Elizabethan voyages at the time. He's the one witness of the founding of the East India Company in 1599, which is the same sort of period. So he just wrote this letter, which was then quietly forgotten about.

John White included a critical detail. He said that this was a pre-assigned secret token, and if they put a cross underneath the letters, then they'd left in distress. If there was no cross, then they'd gone to this place voluntarily. And there was no cross. And Mark, I mean, how did you get onto this? Because it's all very well to say there was this letter which was forgotten about. Is this your archival research, or does someone point you towards it and suggest you do the dig? What's the backstory to your involvement in this? this extraordinary tale. The stuff is well known and I've always been interested in pioneer colonies. We did some work in Bermuda and St. Kitts and St. Lucia. Unlike you to choose a very nice Caribbean island to do your digs in. That's right. Sorry, don't mock the man. He's in Birmingham now. He puts in the work as well. At a National Trust rally. He puts the hard graft in as well. But critically, I thought, well, the lost colony is the biggest nutcrack of all. Let's go and see if we can investigate it. So there was an enthusiast called Scott Dawson, who was living, basically a school teacher on the island,

and he's descendant from the very first European settlers, English settlers on the island on Ateros. And he was obsessed and wrote a little book about it, saying that, you know, why are we looking for all these things? So I went and visited him, and he said, well, I will organise a dig. So we set up a community archaeology program called the Croatian Archaeological. society, and we had great fun. And since 2008, I've been working with Scott and local community because all these sites are on local people's private property. And so you have to work through the local community to get access to people's land. Otherwise, you will get nowhere. And the white map shows where all the villages are on the island. And so it's really just a question of

going to those villages and seeing as any archaeology. And when did you do this, Mark? When was this. We started in 2008, but I suppose the real breakthrough came when we managed to secure access to a site called Cape Crete in 2012. And that enabled me to really look at this site in detail, brought students from Bristol University, and we undertook British-style excavations. The key thing was really careful recovery of the archaeology. So every little tiny, any piece of grain, every tiny bead, every, as it were, a tiny bit of shell. We sieve these sites using mosquito mesh with a hose. So everything is recovered.

And so we then have buckets and buckets of residue that then Scott and his volunteers spend their winter months going through checking for any tiny bees or artifact that might be in there. Right. Now, before we reveal the reveal, let's just do a tiny bit more of what you were up against because you are pushing against not just sort of mounds of soil, but also collective rewritten memory. Now, in the 1930s, there was a particular play which muddies the waters with this. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Well, it was the play in the aftermath. So in 1937, there was a

play called The Lost Colony, written by a Pulitzer winning playwright, by the leading playwright in America at the time, a man called Paul Green. And he staged an open. air drama called The Lost Colony on the site of what was presumed to be the colony on Roanoke, whether it was or not is a matter of debate. And actually, in the years since, a performance has been held every year annually. The first season had 50,000 people attending. Roosevelt attended, the president, attended himself, had a huge amount of publicity. Now, Green was quite a libertarian, even for the 1930s.

and he ended the play with the colonists going off into the wilderness. And he speculated that some might have been killed, some might have starved, and some might have even been assimilated into the local villages, looked after by the Indians. Did he suggest it in such a paternalistic way that they were looked after, or was there that they were taken and kind of forced? No, no, no, no. It was a very paternalistic thing that they would have been looked after.

So this was not a racist play? It was not a racist play. Well, it was like, I mean, the actors were blacked up as Indians, all that kind of stuff. So until about three years ago, actually. So, yeah, there was a certain amount of racism in the play about these savage Indians and things who were various battle scenes and so forth between the Indians, which had been played out. But it ultimately had a liberal view. But this was too much for what might describe as the racist historians that were very much

dominant in America in the 1930s. There's a group of historians named as the Dunninnites. This is named after a historian called William Dunning. Indeed, there was even a prize named after William Dunning. And this was buttressing the idea of white racial superiority, black inferiority, manifest destiny, and so on and so forth. A lot of the historians, as it were, followed that view in particular, and it's difficult to recognize this, particularly in California.

In Berkeley, of all places, like the most liberal place that you could go to your planet earth these days. Was the absolute hotbed of this, as it were, racism. And particularly connected to, you know, they were sympathized to the clan, the Klu Klux Klan. And I suppose connected to this was isolationism. This is in 1937, an idea of supporting Nazi Germany as a sub-examian. These historians literally wanders around with Hitler-style mustaches to demonstrate their own

as a allegiance to a right-wing racist cause, because they saw Nazi ideas about racial purity is very much the same as theirs in terms of the issue of black people in their society. Miscegenation was the word of the era, wasn't it? You do not mix bloods. And it's worth pointing out that miscegenation was illegal. And of course, we have got the Jim Crow, laws, which are also based on all sorts of discriminatory ideas. So the very nation that the first English in America could have ended up being looked after by Native Americans. Indeed, their descendants today are probably to be found amongst the Native Americans. An idea that was, as it were, tentatively suggested in Paul Green's play was, of course, completely unacceptable to them. And so they

had to come up with a stratagem to undermine this notion of what John White has said with the initials on the tree and what was being promoted with this fabulously popular play. The stratagem is evil and awful and we should we should introduce one of the prime movies or prime actors in this in this subterfuge and it's a man called Herbert Bolton who is Herbert E. Bolton to give him his proper title. Is he actually a Berkeley historian? He was the leading Berkeley historian of his day. There was a building even named after him in Berkeley until only about three years ago when they worked out that he was a true racist. So what did he do? What did he do? What did he do? So he was the curator of the Bancroft Library. But he had

a dark side to himself as a trickster and a hoaxer. And he'd previously, maybe a few months earlier, had perpetuated possibly the most famous hoax in American history, which is Drake's plate of brass, that through the meticulous research of a historian called Melissa Darby, who I would be working with on this, has unearthed exactly the link to Bolton. And this was Drake's landing, which they were determined had to be in San Francisco because of the whole English racism story, and had faked this plate of brass where, where, where, Great said he claimed this land as New Albion. And it's a pretty palpable fake and was believed religiously by everyone until 1977.

When it was then examined scientifically, metallurgically, worked out to be a bit of rolled late Victorian brass plate. It could not have been Elizabethan. Can I just say this is a tomato, tomato, potato, potato, potato, you say trickster. I say absolute fraudulent shit. I mean, this is a man who's just trying to mislead. academic, isn't he? And he was doing this because there was a rival historian, a Mexican historian, who was claiming that Drake hadn't landed in San Francisco at all, but up in Oregon. And having had all various, you know, tricentineries and statues and postage stamps and everything else,

they had to undermine this testimony by creating this historical fraud. Bolton and I also made a greater money out of it as a historical consultant because he had to be a historical consultant because he was the person everyone went to to actually translate it and so forth. It's a fabulous story. So this is the founding myth of North America based on not one but two enormous fakes. So tell us the second fake. So having successfully, as it were, defrauded the world with the play to brass, it was a very simple thing to go and defraud the world with this darestone, as it became known.

And the story goes that a few months after the opening of the play, a fruit dealer, a grocer, basically, was wandering in the forest up the Chowan River, which is made the Alba Mar Creek behind Roanoke Island, collecting hickory knucks, where he stumbled upon this quartzite stone with this inscription that he didn't have any idea of what it was. His name was Ellie Hammond. So he didn't know what it was, but there was a well-known Elizabethan historian called Pierce, Hewerpiers, Jr., who was in Emory University, had just been employed at Emory University.

He was a Duninite and connected again to the Bolton cojorie. And so the stone was taken to him to decipher, more money, changed hands and so forth. And the stone, he was declared to be genuine, a great, enormous enthusiasm behind the discovery of not just one but two great Elizabethan, history is within a few months of each other. What did they decipher? What did this bunch of hoodlums decide it said?

So it's still there. You can still see the stone. And it describes how the savages have murdered all but seven of the colonists, including, of course, Virginia Dare and Anastisdéir. And this stone was signed Eleanor Dare, basically said that, please if everyone finds this stone, we've gone for walkies, and please give it to my father. And the significance of this, just to emphasize this, for those that haven't taken in this point,

is that Virginia Dare is the first white girl born in North America. Is that right? Yes. So the historians have to kill her off. By savages. Kill her off by savages because she can't be in a relationship with them. She can't be sort of, you know, living with them. She can't be perfectly happy, you know, having been actually in many ways saved by them.

There's no food. Dad doesn't come back. He popped off for nappies. He hasn't come back for them. three years, they had to do something. That story, that's not going to hold. It's got to be that they were all killed. And also, can I just also had, to have a grieving mother leave that inscription and say, please tell my father. All of it is so, sort of, you know, melodramatic. It's designed to pull on the heartstrings and hate strings of anyone who already believes that these people

are savages. And just to put it out there, that v.daired.com was an active right-wing blog started in 1999, backed by Trump supporters, until it was shut down in 2024. So this is not some distant bit of sort of racist history. This is something that still sits at the foundational myths of America. And Trump's ideology and the Marga movement and underpinning notions of racism and immigration and everything else. So did Herbert Bolton go out in the dead of night and scatter this stone? Where did this stone come from? This fake stone, this piece of nonsense. Where did it come from? Ellie Hammond was actually George Hammond, who was one of Bolton's students and who actually succeeded Bolton as the curator of the Bancroft Library, the main library in Berkeley.

And she managed to prove this because she's got their signatures. So when it was handed over to Emory University, it had to be notarized. And so he signed it. And she's also on earth the signature of George Hammond. So what George Hammond did was change his early on the Tattered Old Driving licence because you had to have some form of identity and to change the LE to George and left the surname the same. So if you now look at these two documents, you immediately realise that it was George Hammond

who was masquerading as his fruit dealer in cahoots with Hayward Pierce, who then validated the whole thing. So the three of them were involved, Bolton, Pierce and Hammond in this constitution. Look, we're going to take a break, but what we have here is a conspiracy fraud. It's extraordinary. Historical conspiracy. Welcome back. So Mark, tell us about the unmasking of this, because I mean, presumably this is a massive deal. This is the foundational moment of America and all these racists have muddied the waters. Is it your work? Or who has found? So Melissa's been doing most of the work. She lives in Oregon. And she's got onto this really by trying to unearth the

plater brass fraud and who was actually behind it. And then realized that the Dirstome was perpetuated in a couple of months of the plate of grass. The two frauds must be related. I mean, she just published this in the North Carolina Historical Journal. I should say after enormous trouble that all the Californian historical journals now all rejected this research and refused to publish it. So even today, there is a sense of racism. in historical circles in America. But on what ground? So let's just do the thing that I do,

which is let's look at the other side. What is the reason that they are giving for rejecting it? Are they, you know, just saying this is just completely unacceptable for which reason? They didn't give any reasons. So she shows them the signatures, she shows them the licence, she shows them all of that, the timeline, everything is that.

And they say, well, no, we don't want to have a look at it. That's right. That's it. Okay. Now we need to dig into your dirt a bit more because... I wouldn't advise it, Anita. Yeah, no, he's a friend who was, I'm not going to do that. But can we talk about the excavation at Cape Creek Village and what that taught you

and how you back up Melissa's findings? I mean, the Darestorne had just put everyone on the wrong track. So I thought, well, actually the way to find these lost colonists is to excavate Native American villages of the right period and then see whether we can find material culture associated with Elizabethan colonists in the, as it were, middens, the rubbish heaps of these Native American villages. Very simple methodology. And they have huge middens, meters high, full of stuff, lots of shells, lots of bone and everything else, all in these places.

So the Cape Creek site was a particularly useful and important one because it was occupied until around 1700. So as we went down through the layers, you know, archaeologists go down horizontally, going down through time. The first thing we noticed in the 17th century levels was these were Native Americans, they were living with lots of Native American pottery, timber buildings, all that kind of thing, although we noticed persistently stuff that only Europeans would have. So we, for example, had pins, dress pins. We had dress clasps. Not impossible, though, that these could be traded.

That's right. And in fact, we have really good evidence for trade, because what we've found, was three coin weights, dated 1643. These are weights that peddlers, ad-chinerant traders would carry around with them to work out the, as it were, the purity of a coin. So you put a coin weight on one side of a balance and a bit of gold or something on the other, and you could work out its value or its authenticity or whatever. So we found three coin weights. So clearly they were in contact with Jamestown. We found brass, for example, sheep brass that was clearly coming in as part of these imports. We found lots of beads,

which are also part of this trade. But we also found gun barrels, musket balls that they were making. We found presumably evidence for gunpowder. We found the fact that they were shooting deer because we could see the fracture marks on their deer bones. So they had firearms. They were wearing European clothes, but they were also Native Americans clearly. And what's the nature of the settlement that you're digging? I mean, Are you digging a settlement or digging a midden on the edge of a settlement? Oh, we're digging both. So we dug the settlement area, which was an area full of post holes.

Implying something more substantial than wigwams, you'll say. Yes, absolutely. No, no. These are very substantial buildings that they're putting up and being rebuilt on new locations. There's almost too many post holes to actually work out the plan because they're all one on top of another, as it were. And then behind off the edge of the sand dune is the midden deposits where all they threw all their rubbish down. So some of these artefacts are found in the settlement. And for an archaeologist, finding a midden, just for those who haven't worked on a dig, is the gold dust,

because that's where you find all the leftovers and all the goodies. Yes. Imagine that our rubbish will be, hopefully, God willing, if we're around that long. But they'll be digging around in our trash as well to tell our story. So just think of that when you throw stuff away. That's what's going to happen. So absolutely. So everyone was saying, oh, no, it can't be.

Because they are, you know, they could trade it from James Town. They like European clothes. The site is quite unlike any other Native American sites in the region. And the post holes, are they implying something quite different from other Native American sites? I mean, are they rectangular buildings as opposed to sort of round? They're probably rectangular buildings. We get evidence of DORB, for example. Which is not what the Native Americans did.

It's what Europeans did. So, I mean, that's the conclusion that you're finding is that, you know, look, this is so specifically English. It isn't as a result. You know, trade doesn't explain that, doesn't explain the post holes, doesn't explain the construction of these buildings. It doesn't explain the things that we're finding here. That's right, isn't it? I'm just trying to make it very clear that that's what you're saying. Absolutely. And we do have one historical, I know you being historians who like history, there's one historical account written by somebody called John Lawson in the early 1700s who traveled along the outer banks

And he described the people on Hatteras Island as people who could read from the book, who had grey eyes and wore European clothes. But were basically, in his view, Native Americans. Oh, mixed race. And he describes also how they have this story about this ghost ship called Water Rally that was wrecked upon these shores. And so it's all garbled. And it's 120 years later, a garbled version of. of the arrival of the lost colonists. So as you're finding this stuff out,

and your heart must be beating faster and faster and faster, and you, Melissa must be getting into a frenzy of phone calls about this stuff, are you getting pushback even then from people saying, you know what? No, we can explain this. This is trade. This is something else. I don't know why you're drawing these conclusions. Talk a little bit more about that.

I mean, what was that like? And is it from your society or people outside the society that you've set up? Who is pushing back? It's basically the North Carolina, I mustn't say too, frankly, but there have been various other attempts to look for the site on the Albemarle, the Chowen River, right next door to where the Darestone was discovered. And this is the famous Site X, and there's an organization called the First Colony Foundation that's been doing investigations, and has claimed to have found late 16th and 17th century material in the Albemarle on this mysterious and unlocated site.

called Sightex. Just so I understand, these guys have found material which indicates what? What's their theory? Well, they found pottery called borderware, which is the type of pottery that dates from the late 16th into the late 17th century. It's made in the Surrey borderlands, Surrey Sussex border. It's green glazed pottery. And it's found all over Jamestown and so forth, for example.

And it's a bit of a sort of evidence of European settlement. The trouble is you can't date borderware. between these dates. There's very little typological change between the late 16th and into the 17th century. And we know there's a later columnist called Nathaniel Bat was very active in this area in the 1640s. So there's no reason why, you know, that stuff isn't, as it were, generation, two generations later than the date that they claim. I've written down a thing which I need to ask about a hammer scale. Can you tell me what a hammer scale is and why it's significant? So we're happy at this point to say, well, okay, it could be trade, it could be settlement, we haven't found the smoking gun, everyone says, the only way you're going to ever find if you dig up a burial and do the DNA.

But we have strong ethical issues about that. Digging up Native American remains is very tricky for all sorts of ethical and legal reasons in America. But you haven't actually found the Native American remains, or you think you know where they are? Well, let's say there have been records of them on the island in the past, but one wouldn't want to go hunting for them for ethical reasons. So, you know, that particular line of argument is certainly closed down to us. Other people have tried to look at modern DNA, but of course, finding, as it were, a direct ancestral link back to the lost colonists using ancestral DNA is also rather hard, given the scale of English settlement that's happened since the 17th and 18th centuries. And also the difficulty of dating at what point any intermarriage if it did happen, happened. So we were basically hunging around for smoking gun.

And this came about this last summer in one of these famous buckets of deposit. So we'd excavated through the 18th century, 17th century layers, through a great big thick shell midden that contained no European material in it at all, or maybe a little bit of door. Which, again, just to clarify, shell-midden is the mussels or the oysters or whatever they're eating. And so you have a bunch of people living on the coast just putting their shells at the edge of their rubbish dump. That's correct. And then underneath that, we found a pit. So got a good thick sort of properly sealed. Underneath that, we found a pit. And in that pit, Scott, when he went through the buckets, found hammer scale, huge quantities, significant quantities of hammer scale. Not all of us know what a hammer scale is. So come on, explain. So hammer scale is the bits of metal that come off when you strike iron, bar iron or reworking.

Basically, if you go to a blacksmith shop, the floor will be covered in hammer scale. As you strike the iron, little bits, little splinters come off. Shrapnel. It's blacksmithing shrapnel. Okay, got it. And it looks like scales of a fish, really, but metal. And it's magnetic. So you can spot it really quickly.

You put a magnet on and out the stuff comes. To get Hammerscale, you have to heat the iron red hot, almost white hot. So you have to have a furnace, you have to have bellows, you have to really do intense, as it were, metallurgical activity. None of which is indigenous. None of which is indigenous. Wow. Okay. And so this cannot be traded because this is Hammerscale as a result of smithing activities. And we're very certain that we've got radiocarbon dates that this pit has radiocarine.

carbon dates from the late 16th, early 17th century. This is very, very exciting. This is as close as you can get to that smoking gun. So the presence of metal working in the late 16th, early 17th century. So whoever was there was working. Now, one of the sites we excavated earlier on, which is another late 16th century site, contained a slab of bar iron. We know from Richard Hacklett's discourse on colonial plantations,

that they would have taken this bar iron with them, they would have taken blacksmiths with them, they would have taken shipwrites and so forth, all of whom would have been metallurgists. So just to again clarify, so Hacklet is writing in a sense a kit that colonists take out with them and it's a to-do list or what you miss pack if you're...

Flat pack colony. Exactly. That's what it is, right? Exactly now. I am just blown away by this. And this is in the last year? You found all this stuff? This is the last year, yes.

Bloody hell. So a combination with Melissa's, brilliant work on the Darestone and the fact that we've got, you know, this smoking gun evidence in there with the clear evidence that they're making iron, they're forging iron. Of course, the next question is why are they forging it, which I'm sure you're going to ask me. Why are they forging it? So this is really intriguing. Well, maybe to make nails to build their houses.

And do these post holes come with associated nails? We find a few nails in the deposits. So that is possible. And they're European-style nails? Well, they're nails. You don't get it. Got a pointy bit and a bit to hit. Okay.

All right, okay. And so the really intriguing thing is, are they actually making nails for shipbuilding? And this is the really exclusive idea. European-style. But were they, actually? All they had was a couple of, what are the knowns, pinnaces, which are just like, sort of large yachts, really, in size, 10 metres long, something like that maximum, certainly not...

How do you know that, because from the nails? From the historical sources. So we know they were left with two pinuses. And they could easily have disassembled those pinnaces, because of course it had all the nautical kit on it and rebuild the plaintiff sources of oak on the islands and so forth and could rebuild there in order to escape. And of course, if they might then have been lost at sea,

we have no knowledge, obviously they never made it to any historical sources. But you think this is, is odd, but we have two very well-documented cases of people abandoned who then build their own boats to go home. Both in 1609, the Sea Venture, these were the people shipwrecked on Bermuda. Bermuda was meant to be rather improbably a Puritan colony, wasn't it? That's right, but it was discovered in this shipwreck, these people who were resupplying James Town in 1609, and they realised it on this uninhabited. Bitted Island was wonderful, but they wanted to get home. So they then built a ship,

salvage what they could from the sea venture, and built a ship and sailed back, set on to Jamestown. So Mark, rewrite the story then. So we start with the story at the beginning of this episode of colonies left on Roanoke Island. And when finally the rescue fleet comes, there's no one there and they've disappeared. Now, in your version, after what you've Doug and what you've found. What's your best guess for what happened to these guys? So they load all their stuff on board, these small boats, and go to Hatteras Island. They have good reasons why they want to go to Hatteras Island. And it's where Mannyo, who was their great supporter. He was a Native American, and he came back. He met Queen Elizabeth,

was brought back to England. He was bilingual. He spoke Algonquian language, but also he spoke English, he was baptized, and he was their great friend and supporter. And he was the chief or sub-chief of the tribe of the Cro-Torans on Cro-Tern. So the key thing about Cape Hatteras is that it sticks out into Atlantic. So any ship that's coming back to Europe has to go past Cape Hatteras because it sticks out, you've got the Gulf Stream that comes out and then goes eastwards across the Atlantic. So Cape Hatteras is exactly the place where you want to go. because you can sit there on the huge sand dunes lookout to sail, light a fire if the English coming to rescue you. Robinson Crusoe stuff, exactly. Absolutely. So you got friendly Native

Americans who look after you. You light your fires. You have lookouts watching for ships coming. If it's Spanish, you go and hide. If it's the English coming to rescue you, you go and light a big fire. Okay, so I've had this question in the back of my head. It's now going to come out of my mouth. Indians have oral history. Is there an oral history that talks of settlers coming in to an Indian village and assimilating with the local people. I mean, these stories get passed down for, you know, hundreds, thousands of years. Is this story in the oral tradition anywhere, in any of the tribes, anywhere near this place? Not really. It's obviously in Lawson's account where he picked up the oral history in

1700, but it seems that the Croatone Indians were largely wiped out in the course of the 18th century, They played a part in the French Indian Wars. They were resettled. And there's a tribe called the Lumbay, who live up in the interior of North Carolina, who claimed descent from the lost colonists. But we suspect that it was probably mostly created in the 19th century to give them, as it were, an advantage to the English authorities so they could get better education and so forth. And Mark, what is your strategy now?

If you found that there's great institutional inertia rejecting your findings or ignoring your findings, are you planning to do a documentary, write a book? Because this is a really important discovery. Yeah, absolutely. We did a documentary, which recently was shown on PBS for the Discovery Channel, was then shown on PBS. But that was pre-hammer scale. So I do think that time is now right, that we need to tie in this whole interpretation,

the racist misinterpretation and the reluctance in even modern America to accept that the old first English were assimilated to Native American communities. I mean, it rewrites the origin history of America. I am shook. And I am, seriously, this is an extraordinary story. And we feel kind of privileged to have you on so soon after the event to talk about these things. Look, it is always such a great privilege. And we're going to have you on to talk about the Panama Canal as well,

because that's another place where you've been a diggin. Some extraordinary stories have come from that. But thank you so very much. That's about it from us. Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Duremple.