The Lost Colony of Roanoke

In 1587, a group of settlers land off the coast of North Carolina on Roanoke Island to establish the first English Colony in America. But only a few years later, the 115 men, women and children seemingly vanish without a trace, leaving only cryptic clues. The search to find out their fate has endured for over 400 years. Can new technology finally tell us what happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke? Thank you to our experts who contributed to this episode: Andrew Lawler, Forrest Burgess, Nancy Strickland Fields, Peter Mancall, Kimberly Brock, and Andy Gabriel Powell. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow History’s Greatest Mysteries to never miss an episode! History’s Greatest Mysteries is a History Channel Original Podcast, brought to you by Rewind Studios. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Rewind Studios Originals, Hidden History and Government That Doesn’t Suck, wherever you get your podcasts! Follow us on Social Instagram: @RewindStudios https://www.instagram.com/rewindstudiosTikTok: @RewindStudios https://www.tiktok.com/@rewindstudios See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And now a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind.

• 0:08Speaker 00

  It's one of America's oldest mysteries. A group of English settlers vanished without a trace, leaving behind only cryptic clues. Now we'll reveal the top theories behind their potential fate. Can we solve this mystery? Or will it forever go unanswered? Let's find out what really happened to the lost colony of Roanoke. Welcome to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios. Each episode, we take a deep dive into some of the greatest unanswered questions from

• 0:50Speaker 00

  history, backed by some of the foremost experts on the subject. Today, we're exploring the lost colony of Roanoke, an entire colony of English settlers who disappeared without a trace, and the only thing they left behind was a single word carved into a tree. This episode, you'll be hearing from six experts with extensive knowledge about Roanoke. They'll go through six wild theories about what could have happened, and if this mystery has a solution.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  July 25, 1587, just off the coast of present-day North Carolina, three ships carrying English settlers land on Roanoke Island.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  About 115 men, women, and children, along with John White, the governor, arrived off the coast of North Carolina. Their goal was to create the first permanent English settlement in the New World. Two years earlier, the English sent a group of mostly soldiers to try and colonize Roanoke, but it ends in disaster with severe food shortages, attacks from the hostile Native American population there, many die, and they barely escape just getting back to England.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Governor White is determined to do better this time, and he has more than just his life on the line.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  On this expedition was John White's very pregnant daughter, Eleanor, and her husband, Ananias Dare, among other colonists who were there who were also ready to start their families and settle in the New World.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  On August 18, 1587, Eleanor Dare gives birth to her daughter, Virginia, the first English child born in North America.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, there's no time to celebrate because the colony is already running dangerously low on supplies.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  You'd think they would have learned from their last expedition, but as they started to take inventory, they realized they're not going to have enough provisions to last through the winter.

• 2:52Speaker 04

  The plan had been start growing their own crops and farming livestock, but there's just not enough time. So someone has to go back to England and secure more provisions.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  On August 27, barely a week after his granddaughter was born, White volunteers to make the transatlantic crossing himself.

• 3:11Speaker 05

  It was quite a journey. It took him two and a half months to get back. When they finally arrived back on English soil, it was November.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Governor White quickly loads five ships with supplies.

• 3:23Speaker 05

  They are pretty much ready to sail, but the problem with this is there is a stay of all shipping commanded by Queen Elizabeth I because the Spanish Armada are making the most untimely arrival.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  England is on the brink of war with Spain. That means that Queen Elizabeth's hands are tied, and her money is more focused on war efforts than a failing colony.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  White has no choice but to stay in England until the Queen's order is lifted.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, at the colony, they expect White to return in six months. And of course, they don't know about the war news, but you can imagine their sinking feeling as six months go by, and then a year, and then two years. Ultimately, it takes White three full years to return to the coast of North Carolina. When he does, it's August 18, 1590, the third birthday of his granddaughter, Virginia Dare.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  But Governor White doesn't return to his family. He returns to a mystery.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  They're gone. The entire colony is just gone. At some point in the previous three years, everything and everyone had just disappeared.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  There's no evidence that there was any kind of battle. There's no evidence of bones or bodies that might indicate an altercation between the colonists and the indigenous people. What's weird is that there's basically nothing left behind, and the town isn't so much abandoned, it's been dismantled. All of the buildings have been carefully taken apart, the tools, the boats, the provisions, it's all been taken away. The big mystery is, where did they all go?

• 5:01Speaker 00

  White and a few men spend hours searching the site. They turn up only two clues.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Carved into a fence post, White and the English see this word, Croatoan. And then carved into a tree, three letters, C-R-O.

• 5:17Speaker 05

  When White sees the word Croatoan, he's actually quite jubilant. He knows exactly where the colonists have gone.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  The Croatoans are a tribe located just directly south of Roanoke. John White assumes this was a full-scale relocation by the colonists to live with the tribe.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Which brings us to theory number one. The colonists were saved by the Croatoans.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Now, you might think, based on those carvings, that there's another option, that the colonists were attacked by the Croatoans.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  But John White doesn't think so.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  First of all, there's the careful dismantling of the town, and you don't do that if you're under attack. And secondly, White and the colonists have a plan for what to do if they are under attack.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Prior to leaving, John White gave explicit instructions to the colony, if they were in distress or if they were in danger, to carve a Maltese cross on a tree, but there's no Maltese cross.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  The Maltese cross is a distinctive symbol that uses pointed arrows for each part of the cross instead of straight lines. There's no way White would have missed it, so he returns to his ships intending to sail south to Croatoan.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  White has come with two boats, the Moonlight and the Hopewell, but the crews are very antsy, and they don't want to spend any more time in this hostile territory than they have to.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Imagine it from their perspective. These are people who'd signed up on a resupply ship to come over to a place that they thought was going to be safe. These people had not been hired to go in search of lost colonists, who as far as they knew, might have been held captive, might have been in the midst of a war, so they had much less enthusiasm than John White.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  At first, they're willing to give White another day or two. They plan to head to Croatoan the next morning, August 19.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  But they run into problems.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  The Hopewell's anchor cable breaks, and there's no way that they can risk going out into the treacherous waters of the North Carolina Inner Banks.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  The waters are very shallow. The ship could be shipwrecked and cause an extreme danger for the crew and others on board the ship.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  But White is desperate to find his people. He wants to forge ahead. Unfortunately, not everyone feels the same way.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  The crew of the second ship, the Moonlight, are not willing to risk their lives in order to find the lost colonists. They don't have as much invested in this as John White does. Certainly, he's thinking of his family. They're just thinking about making it back to England safely before the brutal Atlantic winter sets in.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  So the Moonlight goes back to England, but White is able to get a small team to agree to repair the Hopewell, sail to the Caribbean for the winter, and then return to North Carolina in the spring to resume the search.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  But it's as if this guy was cursed. After White and the crew repair the Hopewell, they set sail for the Caribbean, but then a freak storm comes up, get blown way off course, and they're forced to return to England.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Despite all these setbacks, White's not giving up. He attempts to raise the funds for another search and rescue mission, but fails.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  One can imagine how devastated John White must have felt. He's so close to finding his family. He's only 40 miles away, but he can't make it to them. And after three years, he passes away, never to return, and never to know the fate of what happened to the colony.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  News of the lost colony spreads throughout Europe, and while White is never able to find out what happened, ships begin to visit the area again some seven years after his death.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  Occasionally, other European ships visit the Outer Banks during the 1600s, but once we reach the 1700s, it's a pretty heavily traveled area, and no one ever actually sees the missing colonists.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  But they do find evidence that perhaps they have blended in with the local tribes, just as White believed. One expedition reports native tribespeople with European features, fair complexions, light-colored hair and eyes, and some even claim to have European relatives.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Additional proof can be found in architecture.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  One expedition reports a native village with timber houses built in the English style.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  It seems likely that these tribes had English settlers living amongst them, working together, intermarrying, having offspring. Now, all of this is hearsay, but it is potential evidence that the lost colony moved in with the Croatoans.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  The Croatoan Archaeological Society, led by historian Scott Dawson, has been excavating the area since 2009.

• 9:56Speaker 06

  So the archaeologists who have dug on what is now Hatteras Island have found fascinating artifacts that definitely are made in the time of the lost colonists. They found the hilt of a rapier, that is a kind of sword that was used during Elizabethan times.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  They found fragments of pottery and dishes, a copper ring, a brass gun, and European coins.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  But can we say that's absolute proof that the colonists moved in with the local indigenous people?

• 10:24Speaker 00

  Genealogist Roberta Estes thinks it's possible and is using cutting-edge technology to try and prove it.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  What she's doing is tracing Y-chromosome DNA, analyzing people in the area of Hatteras Island who may have mixed Native European ancestry and who share surnames with the Roanoke colonists. Estes has turned up a number of intriguing candidates. These people may just have the right background to be descended from the lost colony, living proof that the colonists survived and mixed with the Croatoans.

• 10:54Speaker 05

  But the problem with this is, to get an absolute match, we have to identify a matching family back in England.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  If Estes can find a match, a confirmed descendant of a lost colonist and a Croatoan native, that'll be it. It won't be the lost colony anymore. But for now, it remains just a theory.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  So while this idea is promising, it's not the only possibility, which brings us to theory number two, that something went wrong and the colonists were killed by indigenous people.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  In 1607, England finally manages to establish a settlement on the James River in Virginia. They call it Jamestown.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Like Roanoke, Jamestown is also plagued by misfortune.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  The English can't seem to catch a break. Once again, they don't have enough to eat early on. They arrive too late in the year to plant crops.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  The English are starving. Food shortages get worse and worse and worse. The English resort to some fairly terrible behavior. First, they slaughter and kill their own animals. This is not a very good strategy for the long term since they need those animals to survive.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  And when those run out, they turn to eating rats, mice, and snakes. Then they boil and eat their shoe leather for sustenance. There's even some evidence they may have resorted to cannibalism to survive.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Within three years, only 60 of the original 214 Jamestown settlers are still alive, including a well-known figure in American history, Captain John Smith.

• 12:31Speaker 06

  John Smith was such a fascinating guy. He served as a mercenary. He was captured by the Turks, sold into slavery, and then eventually made his way to England by way of Russia. Then he ends up in the New World and becomes the leader of the new colony at Jamestown.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  He is the first English explorer to map the Chesapeake Bay. He then explores the coast of New England and gives the region its name. His books and maps aid English colonization efforts for decades to come.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  While he's struggling to keep his colony afloat in Virginia, he's also got a burning curiosity to solve the mystery of the Roanoke colonists. And it doesn't hurt that England's King James has issued an order to launch an investigation.

• 13:17Speaker 00

  So John Smith starts looking into it with Jamestown's secretary, William Strachey.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  In his journals, we can see William Strachey's research into the case. Operating on the assumption that Native American tribes might be the only people left who know what happened, Strachey dives deep into a nearby local indigenous population called the Powhatan.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  The Powhatan are led by a man named Wahun Seneca, more commonly known as Chief Powhatan.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Chief Powhatan has a love-hate relationship with the English. On one hand, he views them as a threat to his people and their way of life. But he also thinks the English would be useful allies in the ongoing conflict between himself and the other tribes.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  Today, Chief Powhatan is best remembered as the father of Pocahontas.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  As the legend goes, Powhatan's men captured John Smith and ordered him put to death.

• 14:13Speaker 05

  But the quite extraordinary thing about Pocahontas was she does seem to have been quite smitten with John Smith. And she actually pleaded with Powhatan to spare his life. And so consequently, he did.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  But Chief Powhatan may not have always been so lenient because, according to Smith and Strachey's investigation, he might be responsible for the destruction of the Roanoke colony.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Chief Powhatan speaks to William Strachey, and he admits that he had a group of English colonists killed many years ago. According to him, instead of migrating south to live with the Croatoan, the Roanoke colonists head north, and they stay with a different tribe called the Chesapeake.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  The Chesapeake are rivals with the Powhatan because they refuse to bend the knee to Chief Powhatan's authority and join the Confederation. So when he gets word that the colonists are possibly allying with the Chesapeake, he claims that this fulfills a prophecy he's received.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  He's been warned that a great nation from the East is coming to overthrow his empire, unless he kills them first. So that's exactly what he does.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  After John Smith hears Chief Powhatan's confession, he digs deeper.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Smith asks Chief Powhatan to prove his bold claim, to essentially, "Show me where the bodies are." But Chief Powhatan can't.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Powhatan couldn't show him where the bodies were. But what he did do is show him items from previous colonies. And he showed them a mortar and pestle and a couple of other objects. But again, these could not be confirmed as coming directly from the lost colony.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  But when Smith sends back his report to King James, the evidence is enough to convince him that this is what happened. And if that's what the king believes, then case closed, right?

• 16:05Speaker 00

  The Powhatan theory becomes the official version of events for the next 200-plus years. But today's historians question its accuracy.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Some argue that the settlers that Chief Powhatan boasts of killing aren't the Roanoke colonists at all. Instead, he's referring to a different set of people, and the confusion happens because of the language barrier.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Smith was specifically talking about the colony of the 115, the last Roanoke colony that was established. But Powhatan could have easily been talking about the previous colonies that had come a couple of years earlier.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Remember, there was a 1584 Expedition II, just male soldiers, 15 of whom were left behind when that expedition failed. And that might be who Powhatan killed.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  It's certainly true that a lot of blood was spilled in this particular chapter of history, both Native American and English.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  But despite Chief Powhatan's account, we still can't prove that any of it belonged to the Roanoke colonists.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  So put this one down as another theory that seems possible but may never be proven, which means we have to keep looking for another answer. This next theory asks, what if the lost colonists decided to risk it all and lost everything in the process?

• 17:31Speaker 00

  So far, we've examined whether the lost colonists of Roanoke either assimilated with the area's indigenous people or were killed by them. But there are still other possibilities to explore, which brings us to theory number three, that the colonists tried to flee somewhere much further away, but didn't make it.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  When John White leaves in 1587, conditions among the colony were dire. Food was limited, and the farming was not taking hold as they had hoped.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  There was a famine going on. There was clearly a great deal of bad weather. And they're struggling with skirmishes with Native American Indians.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  We know they're not there when White returns three years later. So pretty much every theory about what happened to them starts with a relocation. They have to go somewhere else. But Roanoke is an island. So if they want to flee, they'll have to cross a body of water. Luckily, while they don't have enough food to eat, they do have a boat.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  The colonists originally arrive with three ships. One returns to England immediately. One is taken by John White, and one still remains.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  The boat they have left is called a pinnace, which is a small, nimble, flat-bottomed boat, mostly used for short trips and errands. You use it when your main vessel is too cumbersome or the water's too shallow.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  When White finally arrives in 1590, in addition to finding the community dismantled, the pinnace is gone. He presumably would have thought the colonists had gotten on it and went somewhere where he wouldn't have known.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  The point of them having this boat is for fishing or island hopping, foraging, or small-scale exploration. It's not meant to be a long-haul ship.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  But in a dire emergency with no other options, this has to be their Plan A. It's either get on the boat or die.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And this is where the theorists really start speculating about where they may have gone on this small boat. But this fails to take into account one other possibility that I think is definitely an option, that they could have perished on this small boat.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  This is very noteworthy. So far, throughout history, really, all 400-plus years, searching for the lost colonists has been largely limited to land. But I think it's just as likely that the answers are in the water.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, this theory makes finding evidence almost impossible.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  First of all, you're not going to see any trace of what happened unless somebody's randomly diving or scanning the bottom of some body of water and lucks into a one in a billion discovery.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  It's complicated to even know where to begin to look for wreckage for the colonists. We don't know where they left from. We don't know how far they sailed out. We don't even know where they're going.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  If the colonists had decided that it was time to sail somewhere, the most logical place to go would be to sail back to England.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  They could have taken a short trip to some other spot in the New World, but the New World isn't working out for them. So they valiantly try to go home.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Think about it. You are stranded with no food and no hope in a violent, strange new land. What do you do? You try to make it back home to a place you're familiar with, even if it means risking death.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  They had survived the crossing one way. Maybe they had what it took to make it the other way.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Another European colony also famously made the voyage home against even worse odds.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  The Roanoke colonists might have been aware of a very well-known story published in Europe 25 years prior. There was a group of maroon French colonists that shares many similarities to the Roanoke Adventure. It's the kind of story that would have gone viral today, but even back then, it managed to spread far and wide.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  In 1562, the French set out to establish the Charles Four Settlement in what would become South Carolina. But by the following year, these colonists also run out of supplies.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  Their leader, Admiral Jean Rebeau, sails home for more provisions, leaving two dozen people behind. Unfortunately, upon returning to Europe, Rebeau is unexpectedly detained, leaving the settlers to fend for themselves in a strange land, just like Roanoke.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  But unlike Roanoke, this colony has a much bigger obstacle.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  These French settlers don't have access to a boat.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  So in 1563, the Frenchmen build their own boat.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  And against all odds, logic and reason, they make it back to Europe. Just barely, but they do make it.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  The colonists are probably thinking, if the French can make it on a boat they built themselves, then surely we can make it with a boat that we have on hand.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  But for the Roanoke colonists, the problem may lie in their numbers.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  The population of the colony starts off with just over 100 people.

• 22:49Speaker 05

  And because the pinnace was so small, it's unlikely that all the colonists were on board that ship.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  But depending on when the colonists flee, some months have passed without supplies. Between starvation, disease, and native attacks, there may be far less than 100 survivors to board the boat. Capacity might not have been an issue.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  But stability is.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  For any crew crossing the Atlantic, it was challenging at best. These colonists didn't have instruments, they were facing rough waters, and they also were facing challenging weather. In addition to that, this is not a seafaring boat. This is a shoreline boat. And with rough seas and the complications of the water surrounding the outer banks, it would have proved to be very difficult and very hard. If they made it back, surely they would have returned to their families. There would have been some evidence, but there's nothing to say that they made it home.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  Could the remains of the lost colony be buried underwater? So far, no such shipwreck can be found, but some researchers remain optimistic.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  To date, scientists have only been able to explore about 35% of the US coastal seafloor. So there's a lot to go.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  Maybe someday with advances in technology, we'll find the remains of the lost colonists who make it off the island, but don't survive the journey home.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  It's another tantalizing possibility that's incredibly hard to verify. So let's dive into theory number four, that the colonists did flee, but they stuck to land.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  By the 20th century, the leading theories as to what happened to the colonists were that number one, they joined with the Proatoans to the south, and number two, they had gone north to the Chesapeake where they were murdered by Powhatan's people. Another possibility is quite simple, that they'd tried to sail back to England. There's just so little evidence. There's almost nothing that has survived, and we haven't even located the site of the colony. Roanoke Island is about the size of Manhattan, and we don't even know where they lived on that island. The primary surviving written source for the bulk of the information that we have on the colony is from John White's diary. And of course, he wasn't there for the disappearance.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  But in 1937, a new written account is found, and it's a bombshell.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  In November of 1937, near Edenton, North Carolina, about 60 miles west of Roanoke Island, a man named Lewis Hammond is hunting for hickory nuts along the Chowan River. When he finds a large rock, it's covered in strange inscriptions that appear to be Old English.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Hammond brings the rock to Emory University in Atlanta to have a history professor named Haywood J. Pierce help him decipher what it says. Pierce takes one look, and he can't believe his eyes.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  The carved stone purports to be a message from Eleanor Dare, John White's daughter.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  On one side of the stone, Dare report the sad fate of her husband, Ananias Dare, and their four-year-old daughter, Virginia. They apparently both die in the year 1591.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Below that, Dare instructs whoever finds the stone to bring it to Governor White. She wants her father to know what happened to her family, and making the stone carving is the best way she knows how to do that.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  On the reverse side, there's an even longer message.

• 26:17Speaker 04

  Eleanor describes the initial departure from Roanoke and the route they've taken so far. They travel west about 50 miles and end up close to the spot where the stone is found.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Next, she writes that after a miserable period of illness, starvation, and violent attacks from local tribes, the population of the colony, which starts off with just over 100 people, dwindles down to just seven souls.

• 26:42Speaker 05

  I've looked at this stone in great detail. It makes for a great story. It makes for a very plausible story. The problem is, is there's no record of where they went.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  But she does provide a hint of a clue. After the seven colonists bury the remains of their peers, Dare writes that she's inscribed their names on a grave marker somewhere, along with further details of recent events.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  In other words, there may be a second hand-carved message with more answers.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  After reviewing it, Haywood J. Pierce, the history professor, knows exactly how important this rock is. So he buys it from Lewis Hammond and launches this obsessive search for the second stone.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Pierce believes finding the second stone will authenticate the first stone, effectively solving the Roanoke mystery and earning himself a permanent spot in the history books as well.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  Professor Pierce offers a $500 reward to anyone who can find the second Dare stone.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  By today's inflation, that's $10,000. During that time, the country was still in the Great Depression, so we know the hunt was on.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Soon enough, Pierce's plan works.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  The next stone is found by Bill Eberhart, a backwoodsman from northern Georgia.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  He brings a 21-pound rock to Emory University that he claims he found in South Carolina. Sure enough, it has the names of the dead that Eleanor Dare mentioned that she carved into it.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  But Eberhart's find doesn't end there.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  In total, within less than a year, Eberhart finds several dozen more stones.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  Taken together, they finally paint a clear picture of what happened to the Roanoke survivors. It's an incredible tale. They eventually make it to safety after a 500-mile journey to Georgia.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  Together, this evidence has become known as the Dare Stones.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  According to the Dare Stones, the colonists survive, and they're in Georgia, taken in by natives, and Eleanor's husband passes away.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Eventually, Eleanor Dare is married to a Native American man in 1593. Together, they have a daughter named Agnes, and Eleanor dies in 1599.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  After Eleanor's death, Griffin Jones and Agnes Dare leave behind obituaries for the other survivors as they die off. But nobody knows what happens to Agnes or Griffin.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  And it's easy to say Professor Pierce was very excited about these findings.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  He hosts a scientific conference in October of 1940, inviting 34 academic experts to examine the stones.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  A panel of these experts issues a press release supporting the stone's authenticity.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  Pierce submits an article of his findings to the Saturday Evening Post.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  When the article comes out on April 26, 1941, it's quite shocking, but not for the reason Pierce expected, because according to the article, the fact-checkers find all kinds of problems with the story. The Dare Stones are a hoax.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  After examining the stones, a linguist finds several flaws.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  They used words which were not in the English language at the time, like "trail" and "reconnoitre." One of these stones even purports to list names of people, but those names don't appear on the ship's manifest. They seem to be just fabrications.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Then there's the handwriting. The 47 stones found by Eberhart don't match the handwriting on the initial stone found by Hammond.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  And they're carved into a different kind of rock. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  It's not just these stones that fall under scrutiny either. The timing of the original 1937 find is also suspicious.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  In 1937, it's the 350-year anniversary of the lost colony. There's a lot of fanfare built up around this anniversary and the celebration. It's also an interesting time because the country is the middle of the Great Depression. So it's a wonderful way to lift the spirits of the population.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  In modern terms, Roanoke could be described as having a moment. So if somebody were trying to make money off some bogus artifacts, this would be the time.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Is it possible that Eberhart faked the Dare Stones?

• 31:03Speaker 01

  This never occurs to Heywood Pierce. Eberhart, to him, is just some manual laborer with a third-grade education. There's no way he could produce such authentic forgeries. Come to find out, Eberhart has a history of forging and selling fake Native American artifacts.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  While the 47 Dare Stones forged by Eberhart have been officially declared fraudulent, some still believe the original is genuine.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  There's still a chance that the original stone brought in by Lewis Hammond could be the 400-year-old work of Eleanor Dare. Then again, Hammond may have just been looking to make a quick buck and earn 15 minutes of fame through a scam of his own, which Eberhart then took to an extreme.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  Either way, apart from the Dare Stones themselves, there's no evidence that the lost colonists ever ended up in Georgia.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Of all our theories so far, this one's the easiest to rule out. But coming up, we'll explore two final theories that could explain what happened to the lost colony of Roanoke.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  Although there's no proof that the lost colonists of Roanoke made it to Georgia, there is the possibility that they managed to survive somewhere else, which we're covering in theory number five, that they established a secret fort. And the breadcrumbs for this theory come from the writings of Governor John White.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  John White leaves behind a journal that's very extensive. But just like the rest of us, he's in the dark about what happened to the colonists after they leave.

• 32:42Speaker 05

  Although he was governor of the colony, he was first and foremost a painter by trade. And it's because of his drawings and his incredible paintings that he produced during his time on Roanoke Island that we know a great deal about what life was like amongst the Native American Indian population.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  White also leaves behind one other potential piece of evidence, a hand-drawn map.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  The Virginia Pars Map is arguably the finest piece of 16th-century North American cartography there is.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  There were three expeditions to Roanoke. White made this map during the 1585-1586 Sir Walter Raleigh expedition a few years before the lost colonists. The map shows Roanoke Island, the colonists' eventual landing spot and its surrounding areas in great detail.

• 33:32Speaker 05

  It's incredibly accurate. You can still look at that map today, over 400 years later, and define all of the key estuaries, the lakes, the islands. It's a remarkable map.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  In 2012, a research group called the First Colony Foundation examines White's map for new clues.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  The First Colony Foundation, they don't even start by actually looking at the original. They go over a high-quality reproduction of the map, and something jumps out at them, a small detail that may be hiding a big secret.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  They see a faint brown shadow which seems to have been overlooked.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  This could just be a topographical outline, but the team thinks it might instead be a patch. Something was covered up here. Maybe a spot where John White accidentally spills a blob of paint, makes an error, and it's just covered up with a piece of parchment. Or maybe it's something more. There's only one way to find out.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  They notify the British Museum, which takes the original copy of the Virginia Pars Map and scans it using advanced imaging technology. And sure enough, under the patch is not an errant paint blob, but what appears to be a large X symbol.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  On maps of the era, an X is often used to mark the location of a fort.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  The question is, what does this image of a fort mean? Was it, in fact, something that was built on a previous expedition? Or maybe it was an idea that simply never came to fruition? We don't know.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  But obviously, John White knows about it. And in theory, when he comes back with his Roanoke colony as their governor, he might have told the colonists about the fort. Could this be where they head when things turn ugly on Roanoke Island?

• 35:25Speaker 00

  The X is about 50 miles west of Roanoke inland, along the Albemarle Sound.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  This goes right along with the passage in John White's journal where he instructs the colonists to go west in case of an emergency.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Finally, a theory that can be tested. After this discovery, an excavation team is sent to the area.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  The dig site gets one of the coolest names you'll ever find in archaeology. They call it Site X, a reference to the pop culture idea of buried pirate treasure.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  And it's not long before Site X unveils a treasure trove of new clues.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  There are pottery shards and pieces of weapons dating back to the Tudor era, the exact period when this mystery begins. English artifacts from the period of the Roanoke colonists definitely exist at this site. The problem is, which English group do these artifacts belong to? They can't be dated precisely enough to tell. They could be from the lost colony, or the Walter Raleigh expedition, or various other smaller teams that have visited the area before.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  Archaeologists expand their search to a second location nearby. They name it Site Y.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  At Site Y, there have also been finds of European artifacts. But again, the trouble is trying to tell whether they belong to the lost colonists or to later English settlers. They're not yet definitive. We need more evidence.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  The First Colony Foundation continues their hunt through annual digs led by historians, scientists, and archaeologists.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  And whatever they find is fully analyzed in a nearby laboratory. They're confident they know where the lost colony of Roanoke ended up, and it's right here. Now, they just have to prove it with that one elusive artifact that can establish the link.

• 37:15Speaker 05

  We will know that we have a location of the lost colony when we find something that is irrefutably a personal effect of one of the lost colonists. It has to be a necklace or a ring that might have a name or note or something that positively identifies it as a lost colonist. But until we find more evidence, more hard evidence, we're essentially looking for a needle in a haystack.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  It certainly seems to be the likeliest place they'll find something, at least on Earth. Because for our final theory, number six, we're getting a bit out there and examining if the lost colonists were abducted by supernatural forces. And it all ties back to the single word the colonists had carved into a tree: Croatoan.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Believe it or not, there's a theory out there that the word "Croatoan" turns up in several desperate places in history, not just with the lost colony, not by a long shot.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  The theory speculates that when the colonists carved that word, it's not a simple message of their whereabouts. It's a cry of fear. Because in this case, according to the theory, "Croatoan" doesn't mean "the friendly native tribe" or "the name of an island."

• 38:36Speaker 01

  It refers to some kind of supernatural force that is out for blood. John White assumes that the carvings "Croatoan" and "C-R-O" means "we've gone 40 miles south to live with our indigenous friends." He goes home devastated, unable to find his daughter or granddaughter. But we can assume that he has some degree of hope that maybe they were able to survive and perhaps even thrive with some help of the locals.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  But John White might be very troubled to learn what allegedly unfolds over the years. Because according to some reports, the next time "Croatoan" shows up in history, it appears to be a dire warning.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  The word seems to resurface in 1849.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Shortly before his death, the great author Edgar Allan Poe goes missing. He eventually shows up in a state of total delirium. And what happened to Poe remains another great historical mystery. But something at that time causes him incredible distress that may have even driven him mad or may have contributed to his death. Allegedly, one of the last coherent things he says is the word "Croatoan."

• 39:44Speaker 00

  There's another story about the word tied to an alleged incident in 1888.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  The Old West outlaw Black Bart is a notorious stagecoach robber, and he's eventually brought to justice and serves four years.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  But before he gets out, it's rumored that he carves the word "Croatoan" into the wall of his cell. And after his release in early 1888, he's never seen or heard from again. Is this word somehow killing people, making them disappear? What's going on?

• 40:15Speaker 00

  The parallels don't end there.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  In 1921, a ship called the Carroll A. Deering crashes off the coast of North Carolina. The entire crew goes missing. Not found dead, just totally missing.

• 40:28Speaker 05

  The ship was found abandoned, and the word "Croatoan" was apparently written in the logbook.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Ambrose Bierce is a famous horror author who disappears in 1913 or 1914 on his way to Mexico.

• 40:41Speaker 04

  But one rumor has it that the last bed he was known to have slept in had the word "Croatoan" carved into one of its posts.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  And this is a doozy. Amelia Earhart famously disappears during an ill-fated flight over the Pacific Ocean in 1937. But the Croatoan theorists believe that she leaves behind a journal with the word scribbled in it. It's unclear how or when this rumor started, but it continues to be widely reported.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  It's certainly a haunting possibility. Could there be some truth to the Croatoan theory?

• 41:15Speaker 04

  In the mythology of the colonists' Native American neighbors, "Croatoan" is the name of a vengeful spirit that inhabits their island and punishes those who displease him.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  He can transform them into animals, trees, or rocks, or just kill them. Is this what those other historical references mean? Is there some vengeful spirit called "Croatoan" that has been out there transforming and killing people over these past 400 years?

• 41:47Speaker 05

  Of course, the idea of an evil spirit associated with the word "Croatoan" causing all these problems is, regrettably, still a legend.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Besides, if the spirit did transform the lost colonists, why did it then bother to dismantle their houses? Much more likely, the colonists flee on their own. But what happens to them next is still anyone's guess.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  It's the oldest missing persons case in America, and yet today, there are more people dedicated to solving it than ever before. They're searching land, sea, and even DNA to find the answer, not to mention the spirit realm. It feels like we're inching closer and closer to solving this mystery. For now, though, we still can't conclusively say what happened to the lost colony of Roanoke, and we may never be able to. But that's what makes stories like this so compelling, because sometimes the best ending is one with endless possibilities.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  Thanks so much for listening to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios. Join us next time for a deep dive into another mystery and all the theories behind it.