Sir Walter Raleigh received a 1584 royal charter from Elizabeth I granting him exclusive English colonisation rights to the North American Atlantic coast between Spanish-controlled Florida and French-controlled Canada. The 1585 first Raleigh expedition under Sir Richard Grenville had landed at Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks of modern North Carolina. The 1585 colonists abandoned the site in June 1586 after a year of food shortages, hostility from the local Algonquian peoples (Croatoan and Secotan), and the lucky arrival of Francis Drake’s returning Caribbean fleet.
The 1587 second colonisation attempt — led by the painter and amateur naturalist John White as governor — was meant to settle further north on Chesapeake Bay. The pilot of the supply ship Simon Fernandes refused to continue past Roanoke. The 115 colonists, including 17 women and 11 children, landed at the same island the previous group had abandoned. The site had a single surviving fort.
White’s granddaughter Virginia Dare was born to her mother Eleanor (White’s daughter) on 18 August 1587 — the first English child born in North America.
The supply trip
White returned to England in late summer 1587 to organise supplies and reinforcements. The voyage took six weeks. He reached Southampton in November 1587.
What he could not have anticipated was the Spanish Armada of 1588. Queen Elizabeth had forbidden any ocean-going merchant ships from leaving English ports through 1588 and most of 1589 — every available vessel was reserved for the naval campaign against Spain. White could not return.
In April 1588 he managed to secure two small unfit vessels that the navy had not requisitioned. Both were attacked by French privateers in the Bay of Biscay within weeks of leaving Plymouth and forced back to England. Whatever supplies White had been carrying for the Roanoke colony were lost.
It was 1590 before White could secure passage on a Caribbean-bound privateer that agreed to detour to Roanoke. He arrived at the Outer Banks on 15 August 1590 — three years after he had left.
18 August 1590
White went ashore on 18 August 1590 — his granddaughter Virginia Dare’s third birthday. The expedition party included approximately 20 of the privateer’s crew.
The settlement was empty. The houses had been dismantled into their constituent timbers. The fort palisade was still standing. Heavier equipment — chests, ironwork, and some cannon — had been carefully buried in a row of pits in the area inside the palisade. White recognised some of the buried items as his own personal possessions, including his books and scientific instruments. The books had been damaged by water in the buried chests.
Carved into a post of the palisade was the single word: CROATOAN. Carved into a tree nearby was the abbreviation CRO. There was no cross — the colonists had agreed with White before he left that they would carve a cross above the location-name if they were leaving under duress.
White concluded that the colonists had moved approximately 50 miles south to Croatoan Island (modern Hatteras Island), where the friendly Croatoan tribe under the chief Manteo had previously offered them shelter. He intended to sail south the next day to confirm.
The weather had different intentions. A storm broke that night. The privateer captain insisted on leaving the coast immediately rather than risking the loss of the ship to the Outer Banks shoals. White was overruled. The ship sailed for the Caribbean on 28 August 1590.
White never returned to North America. He spent the rest of his life trying to organise another rescue voyage from England. Raleigh’s interest in the Roanoke colony had collapsed with the assumption that the colonists were already lost. White died in poverty at Newtown, Ireland, in approximately 1593, aged about 53.
What may have happened
Modern historical-archaeological consensus on the fate of the 115 Roanoke colonists has gradually consolidated around assimilation into the Croatoan tribe at Hatteras Island.
Two lines of evidence support the assimilation reading. The first is Croatoan oral history — recorded by the surveyor John Lawson in 1701 — describing the 17th-century Croatoan population at Hatteras Island as including descendants who claimed European ancestry, used some words of English vocabulary, and showed European-derived physical features (specifically grey eyes, which the Lawson narrative records).
The second is archaeology. The 1998–2007 excavations at the Cape Creek site on Hatteras Island, led by Mark Horton of the University of Bristol, recovered a 17th-century rapier hilt, an English-made signet ring with an Elizabethan-period family crest, English copper pendants of a specifically pre-1600 type, and a assemblage of European-manufactured iron items in Croatoan-period stratigraphic contexts. The Cape Creek finds are consistent with — though they do not conclusively prove — the assimilation of English colonists into the Croatoan population.
The competing alternative explanations include destruction by hostile Algonquian peoples (specifically the Secotan or the powerful Powhatan confederacy to the north), Spanish military raid from Florida, or an attempt to sail to England in their pinnace that failed at sea. None has archaeological support.
A 2012 reinterpretation of John White’s 1585 map by the British Museum identified a concealed mark — under a small patch where the original map was patched with paper — at a location near the Chowan River about 50 miles inland from Roanoke. The concealed mark is in the form of a fort. The interpretation is that some of the colonists may have moved inland to a planned alternative site and that White had deliberately concealed the location on his map to protect it from Spanish intelligence. The subsequent ground-penetrating-radar surveys at the proposed inland site (Site X, near Edenton) have produced equivocal results. The inland-fort hypothesis remains plausible but unconfirmed.
The 115 colonists’ fate has not been resolved. Virginia Dare’s grave has not been located. The Lost Colony has remained an open historical question for 436 years.