The Lost Colony of Roanoke: One Hundred and Fifteen People, One Word, No Answers — North Carolina, 1590

About this episode

In August of 1590, a supply ship finally reached Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina. The governor, John White, had been away for three years — delayed by war, politics, and circumstances always just beyond his control. He had left behind one hundred and fifteen English men, women, and children, including his daughter, his son-in-law, and his infant granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first child born in the Americas to English parents. He landed. He walked through the gate of the palisade wall. The settlement was empty. No people. No bodies. No signs of violent struggle. The houses had been carefully dismantled, the timber removed. The colonists' possessions were buried in chests, as if waiting to be recovered. Whatever happened, it was not a sudden attack in the night. It was a deliberate departure. Carved into the post of the gate, in capital letters: CROATOAN. On a nearby tree: CRO. That is all that remains of them. A word and three letters. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the ambitions and failures that produced the Roanoke Colony, the people who lived on that island and what their lives actually looked like, the theories that have b