Strangest fact
In 1590 John White found the Roanoke settlement empty and CROATOAN carved on a post, with no cross, the agreed sign of danger.
Why it is odd: The colonists left the calm signal they had promised, yet no one ever found them where the message pointed.
In 1587, 117 English men, women and children landed on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina, to start a colony. Their governor was John White, an artist who had visited the area before. A few weeks after they arrived, White's daughter Eleanor gave birth to a girl named Virginia Dare, the first child of English parents born in the Americas.
The colonists soon ran short of supplies and asked White to sail back to England for help. He left in late summer 1587. He could not return quickly: England was at war with Spain, and in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, ships were kept home to defend the country. White did not get back to Roanoke until August 1590, close to his granddaughter's third birthday.
White wrote down what he found, and his account was printed by Richard Hakluyt in 1600. The houses had been taken down and a strong fence of tall posts, called a palisade, stood around the site. On a tree near the shore were carved the letters CRO. On one of the main posts at the entrance, about five feet up, was the word CROATOAN, without any crosse or signe of distresse.
Before he left, White had agreed with the colonists that if they moved they would carve the name of the place they went, and add a cross if they were in danger. No cross was there.
Croatoan was the name of an island to the south of Roanoke, in the area of today's Hatteras Island, and of the Native people who lived there. It was where the village of Manteo, a Croatoan man the colonists knew, stood. White wanted to sail there, but the weather grew fouler and fouler,
food was short and fresh water had been lost, so the ships turned away and he never returned. No one ever recorded seeing the colonists again.
Historians and archaeologists still argue about what happened. Some think the colonists split up, with some going to Croatoan and others moving inland. In 2012 the British Museum and the First Colony Foundation studied a map White drew, called La Virginea Pars. Under a small paper patch, light tests revealed a hidden symbol of a fort where the Chowan and Roanoke rivers meet, about 50 miles inland, which fits an earlier plan the colonists had to move 50 miles into the maine,
meaning the mainland. The symbol is a clue to their plans, not proof of where they went.