Before reading this post, it would be a good idea to read or even skim my previous posts on the Lost Colony.
After further research, I began to suspect the answer was because most of them were dead. I put together some facts:
At the start of the second voyage in 1585, Lord Grenville sent a ship to retrieve thirty men left on Croatoan by the captain of the Lion. They found “two men and no explanation of the fate of the others.” Twenty eight people are dead.
A year later, upon returning to Roanoke and learning Ralph Lane and his men had abandoned their post, Lord Grenville left fifteen men on Roanoke Island and went back to England. A year later, John White “found the bones of one of (those) men and no indication where the others might be.” Forty-three are dead.
In both cases, the groups of soldiers were attacked or killed shortly after the ships (which would have looked formidable to the natives, and represented power, strength and shelter for the English when they weren’t wrecking along the shore) and the groups’ leaders disappeared across the sea.
Fast forward a year later to the arrival of John White’s colonists in 1587. Not long after they disembarked, one colonist “was ambushed and killed while crabbing alone without armor or weapons. He was struck by sixteen arrows and then clubbed to death with wooden swords.”
Forty-four are now dead.
If forty-three soldiers in two groups had been killed after being left on Outer Banks islands and one colonist brutally murdered when caught alone, what reason do we have to believe that a group of civilians could have stood up against the Secotans and possibly their allies after White, the ships, and any protection the colonists had at their disposal had left?
Like other nations, the Secotan killed their enemies, and thanks to Ralph Lane’s heavy handed rule on Roanoke Island the previous year, the English were now the enemy.
And then there’s John White’s return in 1590. He saw the palisade the colonists had to build, indicating an imminent threat had existed. The distress token wasn’t carved in the tree above the location, but some items had been left behind. Those items had been scattered around long before that and damaged. Why? Because some or most of the colonists had been ambushed before they could retrieve them? Some of the Croatan too, including Manteo?
The night of, and the following day after, his return to Roanoke three years later, John White saw several large fires and fresh footprints in the area he expected to find his people. That caught my attention. Over the years I’ve learned some natives had a habit of tossing enemies they killed into piles. Perhaps the Secotans did as well in this case, or they just scattered the bodies of dead colonists around as they did the items they found inside the palisade. When years passed and no additional colonists arrived, perhaps they assumed they had achieved their goal of ridding the area of the English. Then, when they spotted more ships approaching from the horizon, perhaps they set the bodies or other evidence on fire to dispose of it for fear of retribution. Perhaps John White saw something to that effect in the ashes and knew his people had been attacked.
Why wouldn’t he just say it? Perhaps he did. Perhaps it was suppressed. The land was still Sir Walter Raleigh’s patent granted by Queen Elizabeth, and Raleigh still had financial and military interest there. There was no such thing as free speech. White didn’t even write about the last voyage until 1593. Raleigh had fallen out of favor with the queen by then. The year before White wrote about the voyage, Elizabeth had Raleigh imprisoned in the Tower of London.
That’s a lot of maybes and perhaps, I know. Questions remain and we can only continue to guess as to what happened. I do believe some of the colonists survived. That’s clear from the accounts of John Lawson and other explorers who attempted to find them. If the majority of the group, especially the men, had been killed, the few remaining colonists would have had to assimilate with surviving Croatoan, later known as the Hatteras Indians. It explains, as John Lawson wrote in 1701:
“These tell us that several of their Ancestors were white People, and could talk in a Book [read], as we do. The Truth of which is confirmed by gray Eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians, and no others. They value themselves extremely for their Affinity to the English, and are ready to do them all friendly offices. It is probable, that this Settlement miscarry’d for want of timely Supplies from England; or thro’ the Treachery of the Natives, for we may reasonably suppose that the English were forced to cohabit with them, for Relief and Conversation...”
Before all this started, I believed the colonists, now abandoned, joined with the Croatoan and eventually assimilated with them. After taking all these facts into consideration, I think there’s far more to that theory. Given the pattern of natives killing any newcomer they found (it’s important to note that this pattern extended to the Jamestown settlers in 1607) I no longer believe the vast majority of the 118 people who traveled to ‘Raleigh’s Virginia’ in 1587 survived for long after the departure of those formidable ships and the colonists’ leader, John White. Likely only a few survived and they would have been at risk for the rest of their lives. Since no one found them during early 1600s expeditions, they may have all been gone by that time with the exception of the children, who were more native than English.
And since the Croatoan didn’t come out to meet the ships—not even Manteo—I suspect the Secotan attacked them as well for helping the English. Even if that didn’t happen, they weren’t on Croatoan as they usually were. Were they staying with whatever group the Croatoan later merged with to form the Hatteras tribe to protect themselves? Seems reasonable. Years later, Hatteras Indians, presumably ancestors of the Croatoan and the surviving colonists (whichever colonists had gray eyes) were back on the island, so they didn’t go elsewhere for long. They returned to their homeland at some point in time.
Why wouldn’t he just say it? Perhaps he did. Perhaps it was suppressed. The land was still Sir Walter Raleigh’s patent granted by Queen Elizabeth, and Raleigh still had financial and military interest there. There was no such thing as free speech. White didn’t even write about the last voyage until 1593. Raleigh had fallen out of favor with the queen by then. The year before White wrote about the voyage, Elizabeth had Raleigh imprisoned in the Tower of London.
That’s a lot of maybes and perhaps, I know. Questions remain and we can only continue to guess as to what happened. I do believe some of the colonists survived. That’s clear from the accounts of John Lawson and other explorers who attempted to find them. If the majority of the group, especially the men, had been killed, the few remaining colonists would have had to assimilate with surviving Croatoan, later known as the Hatteras Indians. It explains, as John Lawson wrote in 1701:
“These tell us that several of their Ancestors were white People, and could talk in a Book [read], as we do. The Truth of which is confirmed by gray Eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians, and no others. They value themselves extremely for their Affinity to the English, and are ready to do them all friendly offices. It is probable, that this Settlement miscarry’d for want of timely Supplies from England; or thro’ the Treachery of the Natives, for we may reasonably suppose that the English were forced to cohabit with them, for Relief and Conversation...”
Before all this started, I believed the colonists, now abandoned, joined with the Croatoan and eventually assimilated with them. After taking all these facts into consideration, I think there’s far more to that theory. Given the pattern of natives killing any newcomer they found (it’s important to note that this pattern extended to the Jamestown settlers in 1607) I no longer believe the vast majority of the 118 people who traveled to ‘Raleigh’s Virginia’ in 1587 survived for long after the departure of those formidable ships and the colonists’ leader, John White. Likely only a few survived and they would have been at risk for the rest of their lives. Since no one found them during early 1600s expeditions, they may have all been gone by that time with the exception of the children, who were more native than English.
And since the Croatoan didn’t come out to meet the ships—not even Manteo—I suspect the Secotan attacked them as well for helping the English. Even if that didn’t happen, they weren’t on Croatoan as they usually were. Were they staying with whatever group the Croatoan later merged with to form the Hatteras tribe to protect themselves? Seems reasonable. Years later, Hatteras Indians, presumably ancestors of the Croatoan and the surviving colonists (whichever colonists had gray eyes) were back on the island, so they didn’t go elsewhere for long. They returned to their homeland at some point in time.
As I said, that’s a lot of maybe’s, but it’s the most reasonable—and sadly, logical—explanation as to the fate of the Lost Colonists. Hopefully, new evidence will come along to prove that theory wrong.