Posted on 02/01/2009 4:59:35 PM PST by Vendek
“We found the houses taken down and the place very strongly enclosed with a high palisade of great trees, with curtains and flankers very fortlike, and one of the chief trees or posts at the right side of the entrance had the bark taken off, and five feet from the ground in fair capital letters was graven CROATAN, without any cross or sign of distress. We entered the palisade, where we found many bars of iron, two pigs of lead, four fowlers, iron sacker-shot and such like heavy things, thrown here and there, almost overgrown with grass and weeds.” -- John White, Second Voyage, 1590.
On July 22, 1587, 116 men, women and children landed on Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina, the second English settlement sponsored by Walter Raleigh. Raleigh's enterprise was launched under a charter granted by Elizabeth I to discover and colonize the “remote heathen and barbarous lands of North America.”
Three years passed before the artist-explorer Governor John White could return with supplies for Roanoke in 1590, primarily because of the Spanish Armada. The colonists had disappeared, among them White's grand-daughter Virginia Dare, first child of English parentage born in the New World.
The mystery of the “lost colony” has endured for four centuries; theories of what happened abound, of which these are most potent:
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.erroluys.com ...
I’m pretty sure they all died.
This is one mystery that has such a finite amount of clues, it can't be solved as-is.
But I'd sure like to know.
Personally I think they intermingled and were absorbed by the indians.
The “CROATAN” meant something. I don’t know what. We went to the Croatan? The Croatan killed us? The Croatan took us captive?
Early case of alien abduction.
Aliens from the planet Croatan did it.
Link?
Croatan does have an eastern indian sound to it.
Don’t need a link, it was 500 years ago. I gurantee they’ve all died. LOL
Regarding the DNA, when they have a sample of the Indian (Lumbee, etc.) and see an anglo mix, what will they compare it to? Are there known descendants/relatives of the original 116 around today? If not, an anglo mix (highly probably) does not necessarily mean mix with the Roanoke settlers.
We know that various mixes arose. Groups like the melungeons are still around. I’ve also read about groups of natives that didn’t quite fit with surrounding tribes.
Because if they didn’t, they’d be 460+ years old by now.
Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk.
I posed this to my 7th graders this year. They decided the colonists attempted to move to the Coatoan, as the sign implied, but that the 50 mile distance was to dangerous on foot. The kids posed that the colonists attempted to build a vessel or vessels to take them the 50 miles and were lost in a storm. This would explain why no trace was discovered and why many articles were left behind. I thought it was a pretty good bit of reasoning for 12 year olds form working class Queens.
The Spanish (and the rest of Europe) were pretty nearly always engaged in the eternal war against the dreaded Turks in the Balkans.
Croatians were regularly used in the Turkish military ~ whether as cannon fodder or just haulers of wood and drawers of water, they were there.
Consequently they were regularly taken prisoner by Christian forces ~ and since Croatians were Christians they were not immediately killed.
Croatians also ended up in the Turkish fleets in the Mediterranean. Most of their opposition there came from Spain. They took POWs, including Croatians, to South Carolina (Carolana in those days). The smart ones promptly escaped and fled North to Albermarle Sound, et al.
And all of that seems to be a pretty far fetched background to "Croatan". That is, until you find out that Captain John Smith, the first Governor of the Jamestown colony, had been a Turkish POW. He spoke Turkish, and the belief was that every tribal group up and down the coast of North America had one or two Turkish speaking former Spanish POWs available for communication.
Smith was picked to be Governor because of that belief ~ and given the ease with which he was able to get about I believe it to be true.
There were also, at the time of the English landing in what is now Virginia, well over 20,000 persons of European descent already living in what is now Maryland.
How they got there and who they were is a doggone good question. The "record" is clear that they were totally illiterate. No doubt the archives in the Prado have some information about these folks ~ every now and then something new pops up there ~ e.g. Columbus' "first" First Voyage in 1486!
Zeros fault...
Guess I’ll just have to take your word for it. :)
“The “record” is clear that they were totally illiterate”
First victims of public education? (humor)
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