Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Lost Colony of Roanoke (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. In 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh established an English colony on an island in what is today the state of North Carolina. After a slow start, over 100 people moved to the island to start a new life and established this English outpost at the edge of the new world. But when a ship returned to the island in 1590, what they found shocked them and began a mystery that remains unsolved to this day. Learn more about the lost colony of Roanoke and the puzzle that still challenges. historians on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Did you ever hear about the selfie that solved a murder or the jury that used a Ouija board to speak to a victim?

Starting point is 00:00:55 If that made you pause, you need to listen to Morning Cup of Murder. I'm Karina B. Minas Durfer, and every single day on Morning Cup of Murder, I tell one chilling true crime story tied to that exact day in history. With over 2,500 episodes to binge, you'll never run out of dark stories to start your morning with. Go listen to morning cup of murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. The first colonies established by Europeans in North America were the 16th century equivalent of lunar bases. A bunch of people were sent to live in a place they didn't know or understand, where they were often unprepared for the weather and surrounded by native people who didn't

Starting point is 00:01:37 particularly want them there. Just like with space travel, there were several failures before there was success. Many people are aware of the first permanent English settlement in North America in Jamestown, Virginia, established in 1607. Jamestown may have been the first success, but it was hardly the first attempt. The English claims to North America were first made by Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1578. He was given a very vague charter by Queen Elizabeth I to explore and colonize any, quote, unclaimed Christian kingdoms. He claimed everything north of Spanish, Florida for England.

Starting point is 00:02:14 However, he died sailing back to England in 1883. Gilbert's charter was then split between his brother Adrian Gilbert and his half-brother, the English explorer and sailor Sir Walter Raleigh. Adrian was given Newfoundland and everything to the north, which at the time was considered the Plum Territory because it would have contained the sought-after Northwest Passage. Walter was given everything to the south. No one living there, of course, was consulted on any of this.

Starting point is 00:02:40 The charter expressly stated that for Raleigh to keep his claim, he had to establish a colony by 1591. In 1585, Raleigh sent an expedition of seven ships carrying 600 men to establish his colony to meet the terms of the charter. The first colony was not intended to be a collection of families moving to start a new life. Rather, it was a military operation with the intent of creating a base that could be used to harass Spanish shipping. The expedition encountered problems from the outset. Ships were separated, supplies never arrived, and the colony was established at only a fraction of its size. A resupply ship sent in June was diverted to Newfoundland, unbearded.

Starting point is 00:03:17 to the men of the colony. And this made them heavily reliant on the native people who live nearby. The English spent most of their time trying to find gold and silver, yet came up empty-handed. This meant that they had to rely almost exclusively on the generosity of the Sakotan people. Given how much they depended on locals for their survival, the English managed to antagonize the native population, making life very difficult for them. In 1586, just a year after the colony was established, it was abandoned, and the remaining men left for England with Sir Francis Drake, who had stopped by after a campaign of harassing Spanish ships in the Caribbean. Undaunted by the failure of the first colony, Raleigh attempted to form a second colony. This attempt wasn't going to be a military base.

Starting point is 00:04:01 This was intended to be an actual settlement with families that could grow into a prosperous community. There were 115 people who were selected to found this new colony. Most of the settlers were middle-class people from London, including women and children. The reason why most of them were willing to undergo this journey is that they held out the hope of becoming the new core of a landed gentry class in the Americas. The leader of the new community was John White, who was an artist and cartographer who was part of the previously abandoned colony. The original plan was not necessarily to settle on Roanoke Island again, like the first colony, but rather in Chesapeake Bay. However, when they arrived on the island, the colonists disembarked, and the expeditions navigator wouldn't let them back on the ships. So, Rowanoke Island it was.

Starting point is 00:04:44 The first order of business was repairing the structures created by the first colonial attempt over two years earlier. There were 15 men who had stayed behind from the first colony, and it was found that hostile tribes had killed all 15 of them. Again, like the first colonial attempt, the colonists bungled their relations with nearby native people. They tried to get retribution for the 15 men who were killed, but ended up attacking a group that was actually friendly to them and innocent of the attack. As with the previous group, the settlers had a difficult winter and didn't have enough supply. Otherwise, no one knew they were there as they were supposed to be near Chesapeake Bay, so no passing ships would bother to stop. The only good thing that the settlers could point to was the birth of Virginia Dare,

Starting point is 00:05:27 White's first granddaughter, the first English person born in the New World. In late 1587, the community agreed that John White should sail back to England to plead for more supplies to be sent. So White left the Roanoke Colony on August 27, 1587. When he arrived back in England in November, he found a country preparing for an invasion by Spain. The Spanish Armada was being assembled, and preparation took priority over everything else, including small outposts on the edge of the world. With every ship in England pressed into service, there was to be no immediate return to resupply the colony. White was desperate to get supplies back to Roanoke, so he managed to get permission for two ships not suitable for military combat

Starting point is 00:06:08 to sail back in April of 1888. However, pirates off the coast of Morocco attack the ships, where 12 crew members were killed, and all of the supplies intended for Roanoke were looted. The anticipated battle with the Spanish Armada took place in August 1588, but the prohibition of ships leaving England continued beyond it. It wasn't until 1590, three years after he returned to England for supplies, that John White was able to sail back to Roanoke. He finally arrived back at the colony on August 18, 1590.

Starting point is 00:06:39 When he came ashore, however, what he found was disturbing. There was no one there. Everyone was missing. There were no bodies. There were no signs of a struggle or a fight. They had built a wooden palisade around the settlement. Houses had been carefully dismantled and taken away. Everything which could be moved had been taken,

Starting point is 00:07:00 and all of the boats that the colony had were gone. There were only two clues that were discovered. The first was a tree with the letters C.R. O. carved into it. The next was carved into one of the wooden posts of the palisade. It said Croatouin. White assumed that Croatowin meant that the settlers had moved to the nearby island of Croatowen, which is today known as Hatteras Island. White's plan was simple, set sail immediately for Croatowan Island to find the settlers. However, just as luck was against him on the resupply missions, luck intervened here as well. The ship's anchor cable broke, which endangered the mission. The ship originally

Starting point is 00:07:38 intended to sail to the Caribbean for repairs and then sail back in the spring of 1591 to resume the search. However, that plan got scrapped when a storm blew the ship off course. They wound up just returning to England in November of 1590, having never stopped at Croatowan to find the missing settlers. When White returned to England, he submitted his report to Walter Raleigh that he believed that the settlers had moved to Croatowan Island. Raleigh had every incentive to claim that White's report was fact because so long as everyone thought that the colony still existed, somewhere, his royal charter was still valid. However, by his actions, he seems to have presumed that they were actually dead. In 1595, Raleigh went on his first expedition to the Americas,

Starting point is 00:08:20 and never bothered to actually search for the settlers. He was really searching for the legendary city of El Dorado. In 1602, he sponsored another expedition, but again, the real purpose was to harvest Sassafras, whose price had skyrocketed. The expedition never searched for the settlers anywhere near the island of Croatowan. In 1603, Raleigh was implicated in a plot to remove King James, which ended his royal charter. There was one final expedition in 1603 to find the missing colonists, led by Bartholomew Gilbert. However, he was killed by natives somewhere around Croatowan Island, and the expedition was called off and returned to England. In 1607, a new settlement, Jamestown was established to the north of Roanoke Island. One of the leaders of the settlement,

Starting point is 00:09:05 John Smith was captured by the Powhatan people, and he was then allowed to speak to their leader, Wahan Seneca. Wahan Seneca spoke of a place where people wore European clothing and lived in houses with walls. Smith intended to launch an expedition to look for the community, but it never happened. By 1609, 22 years after the last confirmed contact with the Romano colony, rumors had started to spread back in England that the colony had been massacred back in 1587. But there is no known source for those rumors. After the 1622 massacre in Jamestown, the narrative surrounding the Roanoke Colony was that it had been massacred.

Starting point is 00:09:43 It supported whatever retaliation against local tribes that the English sought after the Jamestown massacre. As time passed, no evidence of the Roanoke Colony ever surfaced. Nothing indicated that they had survived. Nothing indicated that they had been killed. Whatever happened to the 115 people of the Roanoke Colony was simply. a mystery. But where there's a mystery, you will find people trying to solve it. One of the first people to try and solve the riddle was John Lawson. In 1672, Hatterasque and Croatowan islands fused together to form Hatteras Island. Lawson visited Hatteras Island in the early

Starting point is 00:10:20 18th century and met with the Hatteras people who lived there. He found that the Hatteras had influences of English culture, more than what was found in any other known tribe. Moreover, their elders spoke of ancestors that were white, and some members of the tribe had gray eyes, which was unknown amongst native people in the region. Lawson theorized that the Roanoke colonists had moved to Croatowan Island and had assimilated into the Hatteras people. Lawson also searched the original settlement site on Roanoke Island and found some artifacts that were still there. Nothing else really happened until the late 19th century when archaeological digs began on the island. After more than a century of searching, there is yet to be

Starting point is 00:11:01 anything found, which can conclusively point to the 1587 colony as opposed to the 1585 colony, or potentially later arrivals, or items which could have been traded with native people. That has left many professional and amateur historians to theorize what might have happened. One theory is that everyone moved to another location where they were killed. One version is that they went to Croatowan Island and another holds that they went to Chesapeake Bay. Either way, they went somewhere and were killed in a place that no one has ever found. The second theory is one advanced by Lawson. Desperate to survive, the community simply joined up with a local tribe, which they eventually assimilated with. Given that it was decades before any serious attempt was made to find them, by that point a new generation with mixed ancestry wouldn't have had any desire to have been found. The current Hatteras tribe claims ancestry from both the original habitants of Croatohan Island and from the Roanoke settlers.

Starting point is 00:11:57 Another theory holds that they may have attempted a return trip to England and were lost to, at sea. Yet another theory holds that the colonists were the victims of political intrigue, purposely abandoned by Sir Francis Walsingham, principal advisor and spymaster to Queen Elizabeth. According to this theory, Walsingham wanted to discredit Walter Raleigh. He also may have thought the colonists to have been religious separatists who were creating a separate colony that was a threat to the realm. Fiction writers have also joined in providing theories that vampires, demons, and ghosts were responsible for the missing colony. The truth is, no one knows what happened to the lost Roanoke colony. Based on the initial evidence found by John White, it would seem that

Starting point is 00:12:35 these settlers had packed up and moved somewhere else, most probably Croatuan Island. Where they went and what happened to them afterwards is anyone's guess. Unless something is found that can be definitively linked to the 1587 colonists, it is unlikely that the fate of the lost Roanoke colony will ever be resolved. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord.

Starting point is 00:13:16 That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Lost Colony of Roanoke (Encore)

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