The Roanoke Colony

Summary

In July 1587 about 115 English men, women and children settled on Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina. When their governor, John White, returned in August 1590 the settlement was empty, and the name of a nearby island, CROATOAN, was carved on a post at its entrance.

White had agreed a signal with the settlers before he left: the name of the place they had moved to, with a cross above it if they had left in distress. There was no cross. Storms and lost anchors stopped him reaching Croatoan, and no European is recorded as seeing the colonists again.

The colonists did not vanish without a word. They left the message they had promised to leave. What happened to them afterwards is the open question, and four centuries of searching have produced a tree-ring record of drought, a set of inscribed stones that are nearly all forgeries, a brass ring once thought to be gold, a patch on a map, and excavations whose results are still disputed.

What is documented

The colony. The 1587 venture, sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh, was the second English attempt to settle Roanoke Island. A military colony under Ralph Lane had held the island from 1585 until June 1586, and a garrison of fifteen men left there by Sir Richard Grenville in 1586 was gone by the time the new party arrived. The 1587 party was different: it included families. It was led by John White, an artist who had drawn the region's people and wildlife on the 1585 expedition, and it was bound for the Chesapeake Bay. The fleet's pilot, Simon Fernandes, landed the settlers at Roanoke on 22 July 1587 and would not carry them further.

The settlers. They included White's daughter Eleanor and her husband Ananias Dare, whose daughter Virginia, born on 18 August 1587, is recorded as the first child born to English parents in the Americas. The count is imprecise, because the list of settlers Richard Hakluyt printed includes White himself and at least one man who died before White sailed. The National Park Service gives 117 as the number who made the voyage. The historian David Beers Quinn put the number left on the island at 114, including two children born there and two Native men, Manteo and Towaye, who had come back from England with the fleet. One of the settlers, George Howe, was killed on 28 July, six days after the landing.

The departure and the signal. The settlers pressed White, their governor, to return to England to speak for them and bring supplies. He sailed on 27 August 1587. By his later account they were then preparing to move about fifty miles inland. They agreed that if they moved they would carve the name of the place they had gone to, and that if they were in distress they would "carve over the letters or name, a Crosse".

The delay. England and Spain were at war, and in 1588 the fleet being readied for Roanoke was kept back for the defence against the Armada. White was allowed two small vessels, the Brave and the Roe, which sailed on 22 April 1588. On 6 May they were attacked and plundered by French ships and turned back. White did not reach the American coast again until August 1590, with a privateering fleet.

The return. On 15 August 1590 the ships anchored off Hatorask, and the men saw smoke rising on Roanoke Island. On 17 August one of two boats crossing to the island was overturned by a breaking sea, and seven of the eleven men in it drowned, among them Captain Edward Spicer. On 18 August, Virginia Dare's third birthday, White landed and walked to the settlement.

What he found. On a tree at the top of the sandy bank were carved "these faire Romane letters C R O". The houses had been taken down, and the site had been "very strongly enclosed with a high palisado of great trees". On one of the main posts at the right of the entrance, five feet from the ground, was carved "CROATOAN without any crosse or signe of distresse". Five chests the settlers had hidden, three of them White's own, had been dug up; his books were torn from their covers and his armour almost rusted through. White blamed local people hostile to the English, who he supposed had watched "the departure of our men to Croatoan".

How White read it. Croatoan was an island to the south, part of today's Hatteras Island, and the home of Manteo, whose people had been friendly to the English. White wrote that he "greatly joyed" to have found "a certaine token of their safe being at Croatoan".

Why he went no further. The ship's captain agreed to sail for Croatoan, but a cable broke as the anchor was being raised and more ground tackle was lost, leaving one cable and one anchor of the four they had carried. Food was short and the fresh water had been lost. The plan became to winter in the West Indies and come back in the spring. The winds drove the fleet towards England instead, and it arrived on 24 October 1590. There is no record that White ever returned.

After 1590. No European is recorded as seeing the colonists again. After Jamestown was founded in 1607, John Smith and others looked for them without success. William Strachey, secretary of the Jamestown colony, wrote in about 1612 that Powhatan, the paramount chief of the Virginia Algonquians, had ordered the Roanoke settlers killed; his manuscript was not printed until 1849. In 1709 the explorer John Lawson recorded that the Hatteras people said "several of their Ancestors were white People, and could talk in a Book", and that grey eyes were common among them.

Archaeology on Roanoke Island. Excavations by J. C. Harrington from 1946 to 1948 showed that the earthwork at Fort Raleigh is a sixteenth-century work, and it was reconstructed in 1950. Later excavation located, just west of it, the metallurgical workshop run by Joachim Gans and Thomas Hariot during the 1585 to 1586 colony. Nothing found on the island has been securely tied to the 1587 settlers, and the houses White found dismantled have never been located.

Hatteras Island. In 1998 an East Carolina University excavation led by David Phelps, at a Native village site on Hatteras, found a worn signet ring engraved with a lion. A jeweller declared it gold, and a heraldry expert linked it to the Kendall family, connected with Raleigh's voyages. In 2017 X-ray fluorescence analysis at the university found it was brass, with no gold at all. Mark Horton, formerly of the University of Bristol and now of the Royal Agricultural University, has excavated on Hatteras with the Croatoan Archaeological Society. The finds reported include parts of rapiers and firearms and, announced in 2025, iron hammerscale, a by-product of forging, found beneath layers the team dates to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. In March 2026 researchers working with the society presented a musket ball found lodged in a deer's jaw; one of them said that "we can't say who shot it". The hammerscale had not been published in a peer-reviewed journal when it was announced, and the registry has found no peer-reviewed publication of these results since.

The map patch and Site X. In 2012, at the request of the First Colony Foundation, Kim Sloan of the British Museum examined two paper patches on White's map La Virginea Pars. Beneath one, at the western end of Albemarle Sound, is a symbol for a fort. The foundation then excavated near the confluence of Salmon Creek and the Chowan River in Bertie County, a place it called Site X, and reported English pottery of possible sixteenth-century date. It argues that small groups of colonists lived among the Chowanoke. It also states plainly that it did not find a fort, and that it has "no smoking gun".

The drought. In 1998 the dendrochronologist David Stahle and colleagues published tree-ring records from Virginia in Science. They reported that the colonists disappeared during the most extreme drought in 800 years, from 1587 to 1589.

The Dare Stones. In 1937 a tourist, Louis Hammond, brought Emory University a stone he said he had found near Edenton, inscribed as a message from Eleanor Dare recording deaths among the colonists in 1591. From 1939 a Georgia stonecutter, Bill Eberhardt, supplied dozens more. In the Saturday Evening Post of 26 April 1941 the reporter Boyden Sparkes exposed the later stones, noting anachronistic language, spelling too consistent for the period, and hidden acrostics. The first stone has never been authenticated. It was dismissed along with the others, but it has never been conclusively disproved: a 2016 examination commissioned by Brenau University, which holds the stones, suggested to some experts that it may be authentic, and other historians and linguists disagree.

Leading explanations

These are not exclusive. The colonists may have divided, and different groups may have met different fates.

Relocation and absorption into Native communities (the most widely favoured view; not established). The carving points to Croatoan, and White's own note of the plan to move inland points to the mainland. Horton argues that the settlers, or many of them, went to Hatteras and were absorbed by the Croatoan. The First Colony Foundation argues for small groups dispersed among the Chowanoke on the mainland. James Horn, president of Jamestown Rediscovery, has suggested both: a small group waiting at Croatoan for White while the rest moved inland. Lawson's report is consistent with absorption, but it was recorded more than a century later. The archaeology offered for both versions consists of European objects that could also have reached Native communities through the 1585 colony, later trade or later contact, and neither version has yet been published with securely dated evidence that settles it.

Removal to the Chesapeake and death at Powhatan's order (David Beers Quinn's hypothesis; contested). Quinn argued that the main body went on to the Chesapeake, their original destination, lived among the Chesapeake people, and was killed on Powhatan's order about the time Jamestown was founded. The hypothesis rests on Strachey and on Samuel Purchas, both writing at second hand. No archaeological trace has been found, and many historians are sceptical.

Death from drought, hunger or disease (plausible for some or all; the drought is established, its effect is not). The tree-ring record shows the colony's first years coincided with a severe drought, and Stahle and colleagues argued that it can be implicated in the colony's fate. It is evidence of hardship, not of what happened.

Current status

Unsolved. The documents establish where the colonists said they were going and that they left without a sign of distress. Nothing since has shown where they went, how many survived, or for how long. The record would change with securely dated, published evidence: a domestic English assemblage from 1587 to the 1590s that can be told apart from the 1585 colony and from later trade goods, or human remains linked to documented colonist families. Peer-reviewed publication of the Hatteras and Chowan River excavations is the next test.

Last reviewed: September 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.