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In 1587, John White and a group of approximately 115 English settlers landed on Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina. The colony they sought to establish marked the second attempt to create a long-term presence in the New World under the direction of Sir Walter Raleigh, who instructed them to establish a city bearing his name in the vicinity of the Chesapeake Bay. However, much like the earlier failed effort under Governor Ralph Lane in 1585, White and his fellow colonists soon began to face challenges that included strained relations with the region’s Indigenous inhabitants. With hopes...

August 18 marks the anniversary of one of the greatest enduring mysteries of US colonial history: the Lost Colony of Roanoke. While the bizarre incident is often dubbed "America's oldest unsolved mystery," we now have a pretty good idea of what occurred (it just took 400 or so years to get a clear idea). In 1587, colonizers from England, ...led by John White, landed on Roanoke Island just off the eastern coast of North America, in what is now Dare County, North Carolina. It was the second attempt to set up a permanent colony, the first having failed two years...

MERRY HILL, N.C. — Under a blistering sun, Nicholas M. Luccketti swatted at mosquitoes as he watched his archaeology team at work in a shallow pit on a hillside above the shimmering waters of Albemarle Sound. On a table in the shade, a pile of plastic bags filled with artifacts was growing. Fragments of earthenware and pottery. A mashed metal rivet. A piece of a hand-wrought nail. They call the spot Site X. Down a dusty road winding through soybean fields, the clearing lies between two cypress swamps teeming with venomous snakes. It is a suitably mysterious name for a...

MERRY HILL, N.C. — Under a blistering sun, Nicholas M. Luccketti swatted at mosquitoes as he watched his archaeology team at work in a shallow pit on a hillside above the shimmering waters of Albemarle Sound. On a table in the shade, a pile of plastic bags filled with artifacts was growing. Fragments of earthenware and pottery. A mashed metal rivet. A piece of a hand-wrought nail. They call the spot Site X. Down a dusty road winding through soybean fields, the clearing lies between two cypress swamps teeming with venomous snakes. It is a suitably mysterious name for a...

It's one of the nation's great mysteries: The first permanent colony of English settlers in what would become the U.S., founded in North Carolina in 1587 by Sir Walter Raleigh, disappeared three years later with virtually no trace. Now, archaeologists hope a new search for the Lost Colony will unearth clues about what happened to 117 men, women and children who vanished and were never seen again. The First Colony Foundation, a group of archaeologists, is partnering with the National Park Service for a series of digs beginning this week at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. "This dig includes...

Luccketti's presentation in late January at the Isle of Wight County Museum in Smithfield focused on the "possible relocation" of some of the Roanoke Island colonists to a site in eastern North Carolina named Site X. But he said others from the Lost Colony, maybe even a large group, might have migrated to somewhere near Site X. "Now we have things pointing us in the right direction," he said. "We have Site X. We've got the map (Virginea Pars). We have a published article by a very prominent, deceased North Carolina historian Tom Parramore." Explorers, historians and archaeologists have been...

Virginia Dare was born on August 18, 1587 at Roanoke Island in colonial Virginia (present-day North Carolina). Virginia Dare was the first English-born child in the Americas. She was the daughter of Ananias Dare and Eleanor Dare and the granddaughter of Governor John White. Ananias Dare served on the twelve-member board of directors for the Roanoke Colony. Virginia’s mother Eleanor was the daughter of Governor John White. The name Virginia was chosen to signify that she was the first English child born in Virginia. She was baptized into the Church of England on August 24, 1587 and was the first...

Remote-sensing techniques have unearthed clues to the fate of settlers who mysteriously disappeared. It's a mystery that has intrigued Americans for centuries: What happened to the lost colonists of North Carolina's Roanoke Island? (See "America's Lost Colony.") The settlers, who arrived in 1587, disappeared in 1590, leaving behind only two clues: the words "Croatoan" carved into a fort's gatepost and "Cro" etched into a tree.Theories about the disappearance have ranged from an annihilating disease to a violent rampage by local Native American tribes. Previous digs have turned up some information and artifacts from the original colonists but very little about...

A new look at a 425-year-old map has yielded a tantalising clue about the fate of the Lost Colony, the settlers who disappeared from Britain's Roanoke Island in the late 16th century. Experts from the First Colony Foundation and the British Museum in London discussed their findings Thursday at a scholarly meeting on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their focus: the "Virginia Pars" map of Virginia and North Carolina created by explorer John White in the 1580s and owned by the British Museum since 1866. "We believe that this evidence provides conclusive proof that...

A new look at a 425-year-old map has yielded a tantalizing clue about the fate of the Lost Colony, the settlers who disappeared from North Carolina's Roanoke Island in the late 16th century. Experts from the First Colony Foundation and the British Museum in London discussed their findings Thursday at a scholarly meeting on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their focus: the "Virginea Pars" map of Virginia and North Carolina created by explorer John White in the 1580s and owned by the British Museum since 1866. "We believe that this evidence provides conclusive proof...

t is a mystery that has perplexed historians for more than 400 years - what ever became of the 120 settlers who tried to establish England's first colony on the north-east coast of America? Queen Elizabeth I and famed explorer Sir Walter Raleigh had hoped the expedition in the 1580s would create a capital in the New World, but something went terribly wrong. The men, women and children simply vanished - possibly massacred by native American Indians - any evidence of a settlement disappeared and the infamous 'lost colony' became rooted in American folklore. But solving the centuries-old mystery may...

Sam Sumner retired as a schoolteacher, left his Hawaii home and recently moved to North Carolina, all for the purpose of solving the mystery of the Lost Colony. The answer lies not in Buxton where experts and amateur sleuths have searched for decades, he says, but at Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge in Currituck County, a site that leaves experts skeptical. A 1923 map in the lobby of Mackay Island ranger station shows an image on the ground next to the Currituck Sound that looks just like an old drawing of Fort Raleigh. "I looked at that map and I...

Robert Anthony, curator of the North Carolina collection at the Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill... was one of the 24 scholars who holed up last month in the Tower of London, the dank quarters where Raleigh spent most of the last 15 years of his life working on Volume I of the "History of the World." When the academics emerged from the Tower after two days, it was agreed that a critical analysis of the writings and works of the man largely responsible for persuading the queen to launch the 1584-87 Roanoke...

“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.” --...

Search for Lost Colony goes high-tech By CATHERINE KOZAK, The Virginian-Pilot MANTEO, N.C. - An innocuous-looking golf course tractor pushing a platform on wheels could help illustrate the nation's oldest mystery. In the quest for the Lost Colony, the vanished 1587 English settlement on Roanoke Island, archaeologists have conducted numerous explorations in Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, digging and surveying and scanning and scoping. But they've never used high-tech radar tomography that can produce 3-D images out of data collected from 6 feet, more or less, under ground. The refined technology, which can also use sound and light waves, gained...

At 12:35 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 11, a Villa Dunes resident spotted a fire across the sound on Roanoke Island and called 911. Part of The Lost Colony’s Waterside Theatre was in flames. All fire departments north of Oregon Inlet responded. Fire crews worked swiftly and efficiently to control the blaze and take necessary precautions to save the nearby men’s dressing room structure. Despite of the efforts, the maintenance shed, thought to be at or near the source of the fire, was completely destroyed. Charred pieces of framing in a flimsy skeleton, pointing irregularly toward the star-lighted sky, appear to...

<p>ROANOKE ISLAND, N.C. - Researchers believe they may be able to use DNA to uncover the fate of the Lost Colony, which vanished shortly after more than 100 people settled on Roanoke Island in 1587.</p> <p>Using genealogy, deeds and historical narratives, researchers have compiled 168 surnames that could be connected to settlers in what is considered the first attempt by the English to colonize the New World. The team will try to trace the roots of individuals related to the colonists, to the area's 16th century American Indians or to both.</p>

MANTEO - At an archaeological dig at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, Phil Evans stepped into a meticulously measured pit and started shoveling dirt. The Durham lawyer is no scientist. But he couldn't miss this. After 30 years of searching, he still wants to pinpoint where the English failed to establish their first permanent colony in North America. Nearly every North Carolinian knows that a band of English settlers vanished from Roanoke Island about 1589, creating the legendary Lost Colony. No one knows where they went. An outdoor production replays the mystery year after year. But the full story is...

America's Lost Colony: Can New Dig Solve Mystery? Willie Drye for National Geographic News March 2, 2004 More than four centuries ago, English colonists hoped to carve out a new life—and substantial profits—in the wild and strange land of North America. One group of colonists gave up and returned to England. A second colony, in what is now North Carolina, vanished in the 1580s and became immortalized in history as the "Lost Colony." Today the prosperous little town of Manteo, North Carolina, surrounds the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, a national park protecting the place where the English tried to...