Background Info

I feel like everyone has heard of this colony at one point or another in some class, online forum, or other talk. Its pretty interesting though, lets say you have a city and one day everyone’s gone without a trace. Well that’s exactly what happened to the Roanoke Colony. The colony was settled by the English explorer Walter Raleigh in 1585, they had a fair amount of struggles with food supplies and attacks from Native Americans. After a while in 1587 they sent out a ship to get more supplies from England but the war made them take longer than expected so they returned in 1590 but nobody was around, they all vanished. There is no signs or anything to lead us to where they all went even after many people investigated the site. What makes this case weird is that when he returned the colony was fortified with the word Croatoan carved into the wood.

My thoughts

This is honestly so cool to me, well as cool as missing people can be. Its just crazy how a whole settlement of people just vanish. What any normal person would think is that oh they all just died, since medicine wasn’t really a thing back then, but then you’d think you would find graves or some sign of a struggle but no there wasn’t any. No remains or anything. If I had to make a guess its that they just moved, but that wouldn’t explain the carving or why they built up a fort around the colony. None of the details add up and all these years later we still have no clue what happened. One popular theory is that they all joined an Indian tribe called the Croatans but there really is no solid evidence for that.

Sources

• https://sometimes-interesting.com/2012/12/01/roanoke-the-lost-colony/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony
• https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/roanoke-colony-deserted