Part 2 of our short series on the lost colony of Roanoke, deeply indebted to James Horn’s book A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America, finds the group of about 100 Englishmen confronted with a conflict with their neighbors, the Secotans, in the summer of 1585. A few small battles were fought between the two groups, and their chief Wingina was killed. Ralph Lane, captain of the English colonists, decided to abandon the colony, sensing that the Secotans would redouble their efforts to drive away the intruders now that their chief had been killed. In June, all but 15 of the men left Roanoke on a ship sent by their patron Walter Ralegh that had been sent to see how they were doing.
So ended Roanoke mark 1. Roanoake mark 2 followed close on its heels, however, as the sponsors organized by Ralegh immediately made a second attempt to set up a colony. The problem, they felt, with the first try had been that it had not been set near deep waters that could accomodate shipping, and its ground was not fertile enough. They quickly recruited new colonists to settle farther north on the Chesapeake Bay, and appointed John White to lead them.
This would be a mixed group of men and women (and nine children), as the sponsors felt that the soldiers they sent the first time had likely been too aggressive with the local peoples. Average citizens would also be more likely to farm and start creating trade goods to send back to England than the soldiers, who had been mostly looking for gold and other types of easy plunder. The new colonists left in May 1586 and arrived in America in mid-July.
They had their ship’s captain stop briefly at Roanoke Island, site of the first colony, to check on the 15 men who had stayed behind and likely take them along on the trip farther upriver to the Chesapeake Bay. But once they stopped at Roanoke, the captain, Fernandes, suddenly refused to take them upriver, claiming he and his men were missing the privateering season in the Caribbean and had no further time to waste in the mid-Atlantic. Stranded on Roanoke, the new settlers suffered attacks from the Secotans, who saw history repeating itself.
The colonists decided that John White should sail back to England with Fernandes and get more supplies and more people from the colony’s sponsors, and let them know that the plan of moving upriver was going to be delayed. Ideally, with more people and supplies they might be able to make the move, but for now, they would relocate inland, where they could find more food over the winter (White would be back in the spring).
White left. He would not return for three years. In his absence, the colony disappeared.
We have no records, so far, left by the men, women, and children he left on Roanoke Island, except for one word White found carved on a tree at the original settlement when he did return in 1589: Croatoan. Baffled and grieving, White and his group searched for the colonists, especially his daughter, Eleanor Dare, who had given birth to his grand-daughter Virginia Dare—the first English person known to have been born in America—in his absence, to no avail.
What happened, they asked themselves? White had been prevented from returning to the colony by the Spanish Armada attack on England in 1588, when no ship was able to leave an English port. The Armada episode was just one part of the shipping and privateering war between Spain and England that was played out in the Americas. Perhaps the colony had been attacked by the Spanish. But Croatoan did not sound like a Spanish name… the more likely scenario, they felt, was slaughter by the hostile local people.
And so Roanoke mark 2 ended, and to this day most people are not told about some very clear and persuasive evidence pointing to the real fate of the colonists that was reported by the men of Jamestown just a few decades later.
The Historic Present 