The modern books are in copyright, and most of them could be read here only through search-inside snippets, the authors' own articles, and reviews; section 9 says how much of each was read. The positions are nevertheless clear. There are three, and the verdict above belongs to one of them.
David Beers Quinn, the Liverpool historian who edited the colony's documents for the Hakluyt Society in 1955 (England and the Discovery of America, 1974, ch. 17; The Lost Colonists, 1984; Set Fair for Roanoke, 1985, pp. 341 to 376) argued that the main body went north to the Chesepian towns on Lynnhaven Bay and the Elizabeth River, that a small party stayed for White and moved to Croatoan by 1588, that Powhatan killed the Chesepians and the English among them in the last days of April 1607, that seven escaped up the Chowan to Ritanoe in the Virgilina copper district on the Virginia and North Carolina border, and that Smith suppressed what Powhatan told him until he spoke to Purchas. Quinn called this "the most speculative section" of his book and warned of "the danger ... of stating a hypothesis and then going on to treat it as" more than one; he allowed that the killing "could, more probably, have happened earlier" than April 1607 (Set Fair, p. 368). He read Strachey's "at Roanoak" as the colony rather than the island, which is the reading used here, and he noticed that Strachey never names a place for the killing. The historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony, 1984; 2nd ed. 2007, pp. 133 to 134, 173 to 178) followed Quinn with hedges, and by 2007 set the "propaganda" alternative beside the massacre and noted the reports of colonists "broken up" among interior groups. The historian Michael Leroy Oberg in 2008 and James Horn in 2005 held the same line. Helen Rountree, the ethnohistorian of the Powhatans, accepted the destruction of the Chesepians but dated it to about 1597 or 1598, before Jamestown (Pocahontas's People, 1990, pp. 20 to 23), and thought most colonists "probably headed to the North Carolina mainland, for that is where most of the inquiries were made for them in 1608-9" (Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough, 2005, p. 49). She also observed that the Company's charge against Powhatan did not need to be true to be useful: "It did not matter whether or not all of them had died violently (the Carolina tribes never said that) or whether he had ever even been in contact with them (the earlier records give no hint of it)" (2005, p. 148). The two points that weigh most against Quinn here are Horn's and Rountree's: Strachey's victims were "seated far from him" and "out of his territory", and the Chesepians were not.
Thomas Parramore, a North Carolina historian, in his "Weapemeoc theory" (North Carolina Historical Review 78, 2001, pp. 67 to 83) had the colonists ready, when White left, to cross the sound to the country of the Weapemeoc people on the north shore of Albemarle Sound. The article sits behind a paywall and was not obtained. Its argument is known here from Fullam's account and from the journal's own annual index for volume 78, which digests it page by page: Quinn's Chesapeake solution reviewed and rejected (pp. 67 to 70), the "probable destination of colonists upon leaving Roanoke Island" (pp. 70 to 71, 75), "Powhatan and followers probably not responsible for disappearance of" the colony (pp. 71 to 73), and "hostilities between Iroquois and Algonquian Leagues probably fatal for colonists" (pp. 73 to 83). Parramore therefore shares the Foundation's destination and rejects its agent of destruction: on his reading the colonists died in Tuscarora and Algonquian warfare on the western shore of the sound, and neither Powhatan's boast nor Strachey's slaughter describes their end. James Horn's A Kingdom Strange (2010, ch. 6, "Into the Main", pp. 193 to 234) is the fullest statement of the reading this report ranks first: a move west by pinnace in the autumn of 1587 to the head of Albemarle Sound near Metackwem (Mettaquem) on Salmon Creek, a small party at Croatoan, dispersal after a few years to the Chowanocs and the Tuscarora towns of Panawicke, Ocanahonan and Pakerakanick, a Powhatan raid along the trading paths in the spring of 1607, and seven survivors at Ritanoe. Section 3 uses Horn's argument that Strachey's own geography excludes the Chesapeake ("nothing in Strachey's writings ... connects the lost colonists to the Chesapeake"; American Heritage, Spring 2010, and p. 272 n.). The Foundation's Sites X and Y (2012 to 2020) and the map patch (2012) are the archaeological expression of the same reading; Luccketti said in 2020 that Site Y "is not a major relocation site, but again, a satellite site", and in June 2026 its website announced the colony "found". Oberg in 2020 called the Foundation's evidence "suggestive" of a move inland and insisted that the colonists' fate was decided by Algonquian peoples. Where this report differs from Horn is in confidence. His narrative fixes a route, a season, a headcount at Croatoan and a raid of 400 warriors; the sources support the direction and the dispersal, and the ledger gives the mainland about two chances in three, with Croatoan running close whenever the plan and the Jamestown hearsay are discounted. Horn's own later statement narrows the gap. In the Foundation's 2023 volume (Klingelhofer, ed., ch. 10) he keeps the place, writing that the references to the killing "are vague but nevertheless clearly refer to locations in the Roanoke region" and that Strachey "was explicit that the colonists were killed beyond Wahunsonacock's dominions" (Wahunsonacock was Powhatan's own name), but he no longer insists on Powhatan's order: the settlers and their Native kin "could have been victims of fighting along an unstable border zone between three major peoples vying for regional dominance—the Powhatans, Tuscaroras, and" the Carolina Algonquians. He also reads Eyanoco at Ritanoe as "protecting these few people from outside threats" rather than holding them as slaves. That position is close to the 45 in 100 this report gives finding C.
Scott Dawson, the Hatteras native who founded the Croatoan Archaeological Society (The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island, 2020; American Heritage, November 2020), and Mark Horton, the archaeologist who leads its digs, hold that the whole colony went to Croatoan, that "the colony was never lost, but, rather, abandoned", and that "The Lost Colony is a marketing campaign that started in 1937". Their case is the carving, Lawson, and the Cape Creek excavations, now with the hammerscale. Kathleen DuVal, a historian of Native America at the University of North Carolina, endorsed it in 2025: "They wrote exactly where they were going: to Croatoan." The objections are Oberg's ("It is a small island. The first things Croatoans did when they encountered the English in 1587 was ask them not to take any of their food"), Horn's ("it is unlikely that the Croatoans could have supported the entire colony for very long on their small, narrow island, which in fact was little more than an elongated sandspit", 2023), Ewen's ("The alleged 16th century material is in the same context with definite 17th century material so the rules of stratigraphy say it has to date to the 17th century"), and the absence of any publication. Dawson's answer on subsistence is that the Native population of Hatteras and the other Outer Banks islands "probably numbered well over a thousand in the 1500s, and they could easily have sustained an additional hundred or so English refugees from Roanoke" (American Heritage, November 2020). This report ranks Croatoan first as a station and second as the principal seat, and it treats "all of them, for good" as the weakest form of the claim because it must explain away the announced plan, the Jamestown reports and the Bertie ceramics together.
The reading of "at Roanoak" as the colony is Quinn's. The argument from Strachey's geography against the Chesapeake is Horn's. Parramore in 2001 and Rountree in 1990 had already put the main body on the Carolina mainland, Rountree because that is where the inquiries of 1608 and 1609 were made. The point that the 1609 searchers never crossed the watershed to the Roanoke River is Barbour's (1975, p. 9). The identification of Purchas's marginal note as the sole source of the confession is Quinn's, who drew the opposite conclusion from it. The subsistence objection to Croatoan is Oberg's and the Park Service's. The stratigraphic objection to Cape Creek is Ewen's. The propaganda reading of the slaughter is Miller's and Kupperman's, with Rountree's observation that the Carolina peoples never reported a massacre. The Spaniards-at-Ocanahowan caution is Fullam's. The linguistic and physical case against the first Dare Stone builds on Sparkes (1941), Darby (2019) and Loubser (2011). What this report adds is set out in section 9.