In 1587, a group of colonists arrived at an island across the Atlantic Ocean to establish the first English settlement, but vanished without trace just three years afterwards.
Over 400 years later, very little has ever been uncovered about the secrets of this lost colony – until now.
Clues hiding in the details of a 400-year-old map could now solve the mystery of the lost colony of Roanoke – an island between North Carolina and the Outer Banks.
The map, titled ‘La Virginea Pars’ was drawn by John White, a cartographer who was part of the Roanoke colony.
A closer inspection of the map – which depicts part of the North Carolina shoreline – revealed a blank spot where it appears that someone had covered up a small section but never drew a correction. The site is less than 100 miles from where English witnesses last saw the Roanoke colonists.
The blank spot corresponds to a location near current-day Bertie County, on the western end of Albemarle Sound.
This site also matches the location of an archaeological site – 31BR246 – where Nicholas Luccketti of the James River Institute for Archaeology found English ceramic artefacts in 2007.
In the 1580s, Queen Elizabeth I and famed explorer Sir Walter Raleigh hoped an expedition to America would see the creation of a new capital for England and the ship – with 115 onboard – was the first to bring women and children to the American continent.
The group included English artist and Governor John White’s pregnant daughter, Eleanor White Dare, who gave birth a few weeks later. This baby, named Virginia Dare, was the first baby born in the New World.
Governor White then returned to England to gather more supplies, but was held up for three years while England warred with Spain.
When he finally returned in 1590, the colony was deserted, and almost all evidence of his daughter and new granddaughter vanished.
The only trace of the settlers he found was the word “Croatoan” carved into a wooden post – the name of another island just south of Roanoke the home of a Native American tribe.
Over the years there have been many theories about what happened to the 115 settlers. Some have suggested they succumbed to disease, while others say they were either massacred by Native Americans or Spanish settlers, or if they assimilated into a nearby tribe as friends or even slaves.
In 2012, British Museum curator Kim Sloan and her colleague, paper conservator Alice Rugheimer, placed White’s map on a lightbox, which revealed the symbol of a fort behind the cover-up.
“I said to Alice, ‘I think we just discovered the intended site for the ‘Cittie of Raleigh,’ the colony that John White was sent to Virginia to found,” Sloan told Popular Mechanics. “And then I think I swore.”
The ceramic fragments found at the 31BR246 site were Border ware, a specific type of English pottery that had been “limited to the earliest settlement sites in Virginia, possibly dating back to the sixteenth century,” Luccketti explained. The discoveries suggested that archaeologists had found a previously unknown English settlement.
After the site was found on White’s map, experts began to think the Roanoke settlers left the island and travelled the 100 miles to 31BR246, now known as “Site X”.
However, when North Carolina’s First Colony Foundation (FCF) conducted an investigation, no trace of a settlement like those at Jamestown or Plymouth was ever found. The FCF plans to continue investigating Site X in search of more evidence of the English presence and any clues which could lead to more information about what happened to the Lost Colony.
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