What would overturn the ranking

• A sealed sixteenth-century deposit at Cape Creek with a hearth, slag and English domestic debris, published with its section and dates, would raise Croatoan to first place as the principal seat.
• A sixteenth-century English burial or house floor on the Lynnhaven or Elizabeth River would restore Quinn's Chesapeake.
• A demonstration that the Salmon Creek ceramics are of 1607 to 1650 or later, by seriation or by association with the Bertie settlers of the 1660s, would remove the mainland's only physical support and bring the mainland and Croatoan to parity.
• Marmaduke Rayner's lost relation of 1621, or the second part (which Strachey called a decade) of Strachey's Historie, if either survives, would settle more than any excavation could.
• A laboratory result on the first Dare Stone, in either direction, would settle finding F.

What is new here, and what only confirms

None of it is new evidence. Every document used here was in print by 1888 and every excavation is someone else's. Quinn, Barbour and Horn read the same texts closely first, and the credits in section 8 say whose argument each step is. What this report adds is analysis of old evidence: the weights in the ledger are this report's own, the mile calibration is arithmetic on Lane's figures, the archaeology check is a reading of what is in print, and nobody else has run the spelling test.

1. The ledger, published with its code, shows how far the mainland reading depends on the announced plan and the Jamestown hearsay, and how close Croatoan runs when those are discounted. The result is Horn's reading at lower confidence, with the alternatives published beside it.
2. The calibration of the colonists' "50 miles" against Lane's own estimates of 130 miles to the Chesepians and to Chawanook shows that the phrase keeps the destination inside the Albemarle basin in any reckoning of the mile and does not by itself pick the Chowan mouth over the middle of the sound.
3. The check of every archaeological claim of 2024 to 2026 against the published record found nothing published: no report for Site X or Site Y, no sherd count for Site Y, no section or radiocarbon table for the hammerscale, and a June 2026 announcement that the colony is "found" with no new data behind it.
4. The corpus test of the first Dare Stone's language against the printed narratives it could have been composed from finds that its archaic spellings are of the kinds an imitator would choose, and finds La Vere's claim that "salvage" was used "during only a few years" to be wrong: the word is common in Hakluyt, Smith and Strachey.
5. Two small observations: the objects in Purchas's 1625 note, if real, could have been picked up on the abandoned Roanoke site, where White saw iron and ordnance lying in the grass; and the Virginia government's order to Bland in 1650 to enquire for "an English woman cast away long since" among the Tuscarora is a living tradition of English among the southern nations that is not discussed in any of the works read here.

The remaining findings confirm earlier work: the order of the reports, the single London channel behind the slaughter story, the late and editorial character of the confession, the negative result of the 1609 searches, the independence of Lawson, and the weakness of the Lumbee link are all in Quinn, Barbour, Horn, Lowery and Lawler.

Cautions on common claims

• "The colonists went to Croatoan" is White's reading of a sign in the colonists' own code. The sign names Croatoan as the place where they were or meant to be seated; White never landed there, and no witness records finding them on the island. This report treats their arrival as an inference (finding A, {{FA_P}} in 100).
• "Powhatan confessed to John Smith" is not in Smith. It is Purchas, 1625, in a margin and an essay.
• "Strachey says the colonists were killed on the Chesapeake" is not what Strachey says. He says they were far from Powhatan and outside his territory, and he never names the place.
• "Site X is the Lost Colony" was not the Foundation's own claim until June 2026; in 2020 its director called the sites satellites of a relocation site that has not been found.
• "The hammerscale is dated to the 1580s" rests on interviews. No date, context or section has been published as of 14 September 2026.
• "Nothing has been found since" claims were checked: the last new Foundation fieldwork reported is the Elizabethan Gardens village of 2023 to 2024; the last Hatteras fieldwork reported is the 2024 season with the deer-jaw musket ball of 2026; Site Y has had no fieldwork reported since January 2020.
• The Zúñiga chart's legends are quoted here from Brown (1890), Barbour (1975) and Encyclopedia Virginia, which disagree in wording; Barbour's letter-for-letter (diplomatic) transcription of 1969 could not be obtained.
• The Spanish record of 1588 is read in Geiger's translation of Oré; Quinn's translation differs ("slipway"; wells of English casks) and the Spanish text was not obtained.

What could not be read

• Quinn's Roanoke Voyages and Set Fair for Roanoke, Horn, Lawler, Kupperman, Oberg, Miller, Rountree, Fullam and Dawson were read in search-inside snippets (with page numbers where Google Books supplied them), the authors' own articles and full reviews, not cover to cover. Parramore (2001) and Oberg's review of Lawler were not obtained. Parramore's argument is known from the journal's own page-level annual index for volume 78 and from Fullam's account. Klingelhofer's 2023 volume was read in unpaginated Google Books snippets (59 search terms), its contents and its reviews. Ewen and Shields (2024) were read as publisher descriptions, contents and the authors' interviews.
• The 1609 instructions were read in Kingsbury's edition, not the manuscript in the Bodleian Library's Ashmole collection; Strachey in the Sloane text (Major 1849), with the readings of the Princeton manuscript (a second manuscript of the Historie) only as Barbour quotes them.
• This report includes no fieldwork, no laboratory result and no new document; the verdict is a reading of the existing record.

How this report was made

The sources were gathered as about 300 raw texts, each saved with its address and the date it was fetched, and worked into five sets of notes: the voyages of 1584 to 1603 from Hakluyt's 1600 volume and the Spanish documents; the Jamestown and later texts of 1607 to 1888; the archaeology; the Dare Stones; the modern scholarship. Each quotation in the notes is marked as read in the named edition or as taken at second hand. The report, the ledger and the figures were written from those notes, with the load-bearing quotations checked again against the saved texts. The notes, the raw texts, the data files and the code for the distances, the ledger and the figures are published with the report.

Sources

Primary, in the editions read. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 1600, vol. III (Goldsmid and MacLehose transcriptions checked against the scan); Hakluyt 1589 for the 1588 voyage; Wright, Further English Voyages to Spanish America (Hakluyt Society 1951), docs. 61 to 65; Oré, Relación, tr. Geiger 1936; Brereton 1602; Ralegh to Cecil, 21 August 1602; Smith, True Relation 1608, Map of Virginia and Proceedings 1612, Generall Historie 1624 (EEBO-TCP A12470, A12466, A12461; Arber 1910); Brown, Genesis of the United States 1890 (Zúñiga letter and chart, Maguel, Molina, the True and Sincere Declaration); Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company I and III; Hakluyt, dedication to Virginia richly valued, 1609; Strachey, Historie, ed. Major 1849; Purchas, Pilgrimes 1625 (EEBO-TCP A71306) and Pilgrimage 1613, 1617, 1626; Hamor 1615 (TCP A02606); Bland 1651 (TCP A28352); Yeardley 1654 in Salley 1911; Beverley 1705; Lawson 1709; Byrd, ed. Boyd 1929; McMillan 1888; Pearce, Journal of Southern History 4 (1938), pp. 148 to 163; Sparkes, Saturday Evening Post, 26 April 1941.

Archaeology. Harrington 1962; Ambers, Russell, Saunders and Sloan, British Museum Technical Research Bulletin 6 (2012), pp. 47 to 54; Hodges 1998 (Great Neck 44VB7); Ewen and Farrell, North Carolina Historical Review 96 (2019), pp. 408 to 425; First Colony Foundation reports, PDFs and news pages 2007 to 2026; National Park Service dig summaries 2021 and "Major Theories" 2025; press reports on Cape Creek 2015 to 2026 (NYT, Coastal Review, Island Free Press, Outer Banks Voice, WHRO, Daily Mail, Live Science, History.com, WAVY, WHQR, WTKR), each saved with its date.

Scholarship. Quinn 1974, 1984, 1985; Barbour 1969, 1975, 1986; Stick 1983; Kupperman 1984 and 2007; Rountree 1990 and 2005; Noël Hume 1994; Miller 2000 and Matson's review; Parramore 2001 (through the journal's index and Fullam); Shields and Ewen 2003; Sloan 2007; Oberg 2008 and 2020; La Vere 2009 and 2010; Horn 2005 and 2010; Fullam 2017; Lawler 2018 and Towns's review; Lowery 2018; Dawson 2020; Klingelhofer ed. 2023 and Oakley's review; Ewen and Shields 2024; Darby 2019 and 2025; Loubser 2011.