♪
Tonight, one of America's oldest mysteries.
They're gone. The entire colony
is just gone.
A group of English settlers vanish without a trace,
leaving behind only cryptic clues.
The houses had been dismantled, taken down...
And the letters C-R-O carved into a tree.
Now, we'll reveal the top theories
behind their potential fate.
He admits that he had
a group of English colonists killed many years ago.
They could've perished on the small boat.
The colonists survive and they're in Georgia,
taken in by natives.
Can advanced technology finally provide answers?
Something was covered up here.
A small detail that may be hiding a big secret.
What really happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke?
♪♪
July 25th, 1587...
just off the coast of present-day North Carolina,
three ships
carrying English settlers
land on Roanoke Island.
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.
Governor White is determined to do better this time,
and he has more than just his life on the line.
On this expedition was John White's
very pregnant daughter Eleanor
and her husband Ananias Dare,
among other colonists who are there who are
also ready to start their families and settle
in the New World.
On August 18th, 1587,
Eleanor Dare gives birth
to her daughter, Virginia.
The first English child born in North America.
Unfortunately, there's no time to celebrate,
because the colony is running dangerously low
on supplies.
You'd think they would've learned from their last
expedition, but as they start to take inventory,
they realize they're not gonna have enough provisions
- to last through the winter. - 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.
On August 27th,
barely a week after his granddaughter is born,
White volunteers to make
the transatlantic crossing himself.
It was quite a journey, took him two and a half months
to get back.
When they finally arrived back on English soil,
it was November.
Governor White quickly loads five ships with supplies.
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.
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.
White has no choice but to stay in England
indefinitely.
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 18th, 1590,
the third birthday of his granddaughter,
Virginia Dare.
But Governor White doesn't return to his family.
He returns to a mystery.
They're gone. The entire colony
is just gone.
At some point in the previous three years,
everything and everyone
had just disappeared.
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?
White and a few men spend hours searching the site.
They turn up only two clues.
Carved into a fencepost,
White and the English see this word, "Croatoan."
And then carved into a tree,
three letters, C-R-O.
When White sees the word "Croatoan,"
he was actually quite jubilant.
He knows exactly where the colonists have gone.
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.
Now, you might think, based on those carvings,
that there's another option.
That the colonists were attacked by the Croatoans.
But John White doesn't think so.
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.
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.
White returns to his ships,
intending to sail south, to Croatoan.
White has come with two boats,
the Moonlight and the Hopewell.
But the crews are very antsy, and they don't wanna spend
any more time in this hostile territory than they have to.
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've been held captive,
might've been in the midst of a war,
so they had much less enthusiasm than John White.
At first, they're willing to give White
another day or two.
They plan to head to Croatoan
the next morning, August 19th.
But they run into problems.
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.
The waters are very shallow.
The ship could be shipwrecked
and cause an extreme danger for the crew
and others on board the ship.
A desperate White appeals to the crew
of the Moonlight.
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.
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.
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,
they get blown way off course,
and they're forced to return to England.
White attempts to raise the funds
for another search and rescue mission but fails.
One can imagine how devastated John White must've 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.
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.
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.
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 claimed to have European relatives.
Additional proof can be found in architecture.
One expedition reports a Native village
with timber houses built in the English style.
It seems likely that these tribes had
English settlers living amongst them,
working together, inter- marrying, having offspring.
Now, all of this is hearsay, but it is potential evidence
that the Lost Colony moved in with the Croatoans.
The Croatoan Archaeological Society,
led by historian Scott Dawson,
has been excavating the area since 2009.
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.
They found fragments of pottery and dishes,
a copper ring, a brass gun,
and European coins.
But can we say that's absolute proof
that the colonists moved in
with the local indigenous people?
Genealogist Roberta Estes thinks it's possible
and is using cutting-edge technology
to try and prove it.
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.
But the problem with this is
that an absolute match would
have to identify a matching family
back in England.
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.
When 115 colonists go missing
from Roanoke Island in 1590,
the English are eager to re-establish
a presence in the New World,
but it takes them nearly 20 years to try again.
In 1607,
England finally manages
to establish a settlement on the James River
in Virginia.
They call it Jamestown.
Like its predecessor,
Jamestown is also plagued by misfortune.
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.
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 long term,
since they need those animals to survive.
And when those run out, they turn to eating
rats, mice, and snakes.
Then they boil and eat their shoe leather
for sustenance. There is even some evidence
they may have resorted to cannibalism to survive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Smith works with the Jamestown colony's secretary,
William Strachey.
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.
The Powhatan are led by a man named Wahunsenacawh,
more commonly known as Chief Powhatan.
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.
[gunshot]
But he also thinks
the English would be useful allies
in the ongoing conflict
between himself and the other tribes.
Today, Chief Powhatan is best remembered
as the father of Pocahontas.
As the legend goes, Powhatan's men
capture John Smith and order him put to death.
But the quite extraordinary thing
about Pocahontas was she does seem to have been
quite smitten with John Smith,
and she actually pleads with Powhatan
to spare his life.
And so consequently he did.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After John Smith hears Chief Powhatan's confession,
he digs deeper.
Smith asks Chief Powhatan
to prove his bold claim, to essentially,
"Show me where the bodies are."
But Chief Powhatan can't.
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.
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?
The Powhatan theory becomes the official version of events
for the next 200-plus years,
but today's historians question its accuracy.
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.
Smith was specifically talking about the colony
of the 115...
the last Roanoke colony that was established.
But Powhatan could've easily been talking about
the previous colonies that had come
a couple of years earlier.
Remember, there was a 1584 expedition too.
Just male soldiers, 15 of whom
were left behind when that expedition failed,
and that might be who Powhatan killed.
It's certainly true that
a lot of blood was spilled
in this particular chapter of history,
both Native American and English.
But despite Chief Powhatan's account,
we still can't prove that any of it belonged
to the Roanoke colonists.
North Carolina's island-dotted coast
is now an idyllic
and popular tourist destination.
But 400 years ago,
it was largely inhospitable,
as Roanoke's colonists discover.
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.
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.
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.
The colonists originally arrive with three ships.
One returns to England immediately.
One is taken by John White,
and one still remains.
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.
When White finally arrives in 1590,
in addition to finding the community dismantled,
the pinnace is gone.
He presumably would've thought
the colonists had gotten on it
and went somewhere.
Where, he wouldn't've known.
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.
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.
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've perished on this small boat.
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.
Unfortunately, this theory makes
finding evidence almost impossible.
First of all, you're not gonna 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.
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.
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.
They could've 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.
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.
They had survived the crossing one way.
Maybe they had what it took
to make it the other way.
Another European colony also famously made the voyage home,
against even worse odds.
The Roanoke colonists
might've been aware of a very well-known story
published in Europe 25 years prior.
There was a group of marooned French colonists
that shares many similarities to the Roanoke adventure.
It's the kind of story that would've gone viral today,
but even back then, it managed to spread far and wide.
In 1562, the French set out
to establish the Charlesfort settlement,
in what would become South Carolina,
but by the following year,
these colonists also run out of supplies.
Their leader, Admiral Jean Ribault,
sails home for more provisions,
leaving two dozen people behind.
Unfortunately, upon returning to Europe,
Ribault is unexpectedly detained,
leaving the settlers to fend for themselves
in a strange land.
Just like Roanoke.
But unlike Roanoke, this colony has
a much bigger obstacle.
These French settlers don't have access to a boat.
So, in 1563,
the Frenchmen build their own boat.
And against all odds, logic, and reason,
they make it back to Europe.
Just barely, but they do make it.
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."
But the problem may lie in their numbers.
The population of the colony starts off
with just over 100 people.
And because the pinnace was so small,
it's unlikely that all the colonists
were onboard that ship.
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.
But stability is.
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've proved to be very difficult and very hard.
If they made it back,
surely they would've returned to their families.
There would've been some evidence,
but there's nothing to say that they made it home.
Could the remains of the Lost Colony be
buried underwater?
So far, no such shipwreck has been found.
But some researchers remain optimistic.
To date, scientists have only been able
to explore about 35% of the U.S. coastal sea floor.
So there's a lot to go.
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.
For centuries the search for the lost colony of Roanoke
turns up nothing but tantalizing clues
and dead ends.
Then, in the late 1930s,
a treasure trove of new evidence is unearthed,
and, if authentic, it could rewrite history.
By the 20th century, the leading theories
as to what happened to the colonists were that,
number one, they joined with the Croatoans 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 tried to sail back to England.
There is 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.
But in 1937,
a new written account is found,
and it's a bombshell.
November of 1937,
near Edenton, North Carolina,
about 60 miles west of Roanoke Island,
a man named Louis Hammond
is hunting for hickory nuts
along the Chowan River, when he finds a large rock
that's covered in strange inscriptions
that appear to be Old English.
Hammond brings the rock to Emory University
in Atlanta to have a history professor
named Haywood J. Pearce
help him decipher what it says.
Pearce takes one look,
and he can't believe his eyes.
The carved stone purports to be a message
from Eleanor Dare, John White's daughter.
On one side of the stone,
Dare reports the sad fate of her husband,
Ananias Dare,
and their four-year-old daughter, Virginia.
They apparently both die in the year 1591.
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.
On the reverse side, there's an even longer message.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In other words, there may be
a second hand-carved message with more answers.
After reviewing it, Haywood J. Pearce,
the history professor, knows exactly
how important this rock is,
so he buys it from Louis Hammond
and launches this obsessive search
for the second stone.
Pearce 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.
Professor Pearce offers a $500 reward
to anyone who can find the second Dare stone.
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.
Soon enough, Pearce's plan works.
The next stone is found by Bill Eberhardt,
a backwoodsman from northern Georgia.
He brings a 21-pound rock to Emory University
that he claim he found in South Carolina.
Sure enough, it has the names of the dead
that Eleanor Dare mentioned that she carved into it.
But Eberhardt's find doesn't end there.
In total, within less than a year,
Eberhardt finds several dozen more stones.
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.
Together, this evidence has become known
as the Dare Stones.
According to the Dare Stones,
the colonists survive and they're in Georgia,
taken in by natives, and Eleanor's husband passes away.
Eventually Eleanor Dare is married
to a Native American man in 1593.
Together, they have a daughter named Agnes,
and Eleanor dies in 1599.
After Eleanor's death, Griffen Jones
and Agnes Dare leave behind obituaries
for the other survivors as they die off,
but nobody knows what happens
to Agnes or Griffin.
And it's easy to say Professor Pearce was
very excited about these findings.
He hosts a scientific conference
in October of 1940, inviting 34 academic experts
to examine the stones.
A panel of these experts issues a press release
supporting the stone's authenticity.
Pearce submits an article of his findings
to the Saturday Evening Post.
When the article comes out on April 26th, 1941,
it's quite shocking, but not for the reason
Pearce expected, because, according to the article,
the fact-checkers find all kinds of problems with the story.
The Dare Stones are a hoax.
After examining the stones,
a linguist finds several flaws.
They used words which were
not in the English language
at the time, like "trail"
and "reconnoiter."
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.
Then there's the handwriting.
The 47 stones found by Eberhardt
don't match the handwriting on the initial stone
found by Hammond.
And they're carved into a different kind of rock.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
The timing of the 1937 find
is also suspicious.
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 in the middle of the Great Depression,
so it's a wonderful way to lift the spirits
- of the population. - 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.
Is it possible that Eberhardt faked the Dare Stones?
This never occurs to Haywood Pearce.
Eberhardt 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, Eberhardt has a history
of forging and selling fake Native American artifacts.
While the 47 Dare Stones
forged by Eberhardt
have been officially declared fraudulent,
some still believe the original is genuine.
There's still a chance that the original stone
brought in by Louis 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 Eberhardt then took to an extreme.
Either way, apart from the Dare Stones themselves,
there's no evidence that the Lost Colonists
ever ended up in Georgia.
Across four centuries the writings
of Governor John White are the only clue
as to the final destination
of the Lost Colony of Roanoke.
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.
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.
White also leaves behind
one other potential piece of evidence.
A hand-drawn map.
The Virginea Pars map is
arguably the finest piece of 16th-century
North American cartography there is.
There were three expeditions to Roanoke.
White made this map during the 1585-6
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.
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.
In 2012, a research group
called the First Colony Foundation
examines White's map for new clues.
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.
They see a faint brown shadow,
which seems to have been overlooked.
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.
They notify the British Museum,
which takes the original copy of the Virginea 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.
On maps of the era,
an X is often used to mark the location of a fort.
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. - But obviously John White
knows about it, and, in theory,
when he comes back with his Roanoke colony,
as their governor, he might've told
the colonists about the fort.
Could this be where they head
when things turn ugly on Roanoke Island?
The X is about 50 miles west of Roanoke inland,
along the Albemarle Sound.
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.
Did the colonists follow White's instructions?
A team is quickly sent to excavate the area.
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.
And it's not long before Site X unveils
a treasure trove of new clues.
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
did 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.
Archaeologists expand their search
to a second location nearby.
They name it Site Y.
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.
The First Colony Foundation continues their hunt
through annual digs, led by historians,
scientists, and archaeologists.
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.
We will know that we have a location for 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's.
But until we find more evidence,
more hard evidence, we're essentially
looking for a needle in a haystack.
" CROATOAN."
A strange word found in a strange place,
carved into a tree near the abandoned
Roanoke colony in 1590.
But it may not be the only time
this word is tied to tragedy.
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.
The theory speculates that, when the colonists
carve 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.
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.
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.
The word seems to resurface in 1849.
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."
There's another story about the word
tied to an alleged incident in 1888.
The old west outlaw Black Bart
is a notorious stagecoach robber,
and he's eventually brought to justice
and serves four years.
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?
The parallels don't end there.
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.
The ship was found abandoned,
and the word "Croatoan" was apparently
written in the logbook.
Ambrose Bierce is a famous horror author
who disappears in 1913 or 1914,
on his way to Mexico.
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.
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.
could there be an ominous link between these incidents?
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.
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?
Of course, the idea of an evil spirit
associated with the word "Croatoan,"
causing all these problems,
is regrettably still a legend.
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.
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.
Perhaps one day soon,
the lost colony of Roanoke
will finally be found.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching
"History's Greatest Mysteries."
♪♪
White's first mission is