What became of the Roanoke colonists?

Every English document on the colony before 1607 is in Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, the collection of English voyages that Hakluyt, a clergyman and geographer, printed in 1589 and enlarged in 1598 to 1600. The 1600 edition, vol. III, pp. 246 to 295, carries the report of Arthur Barlowe, a captain on the reconnaissance voyage of 1584; the journal of the 1585 voyage; the account of Ralph Lane, governor of the first colony, about a hundred men, in 1585 to 1586; the relief voyage of 1586; the report of Thomas Harriot, the scientist of Lane's colony (1588); White's narratives of the 1587 and 1590 voyages; the list of colonists; and White's letter of 1593. The 1589 edition alone carries White's failed relief voyage of 1588 (pp. 771 to 773). All of them are read here in full and in the original spelling, from Edmund Goldsmid's nineteenth-century transcription checked against the Glasgow (MacLehose) edition of the early 1900s and the scan of the 1600 volume. The Spanish side comes from Irene Wright's translations of documents in the Spanish archives, published in 1951 by the Hakluyt Society, which prints editions of voyages, and from the Relación of Luis Jerónimo de Oré, a Franciscan friar who wrote up the Spanish voyages along this coast, in Maynard Geiger's translation (1936). The searches of 1602 and 1603 are in a tract by John Brereton (1602), Ralegh's letter of 21 August 1602 and the collection of voyages that Samuel Purchas, Hakluyt's successor, printed in 1625.

The plan stated before White left

On 22 August 1587 the colonists pressed White to go home for supplies. He refused at first, and one of his reasons is the only statement of the colony's intentions that survives:

"Also he alleaged, that seeing they intended to remoue 50 miles further vp into the maine presently, he being then absent, his stuffe and goods might be both spoiled, and most of them pilfered away in the cariage".

White, 1587 voyage, Hakluyt 1600, III, p. 285; Hakluyt's margin: "Their meaning to remoue 50 miles into the countrey."

The move was to be "presently", that is at once, and by carriage of goods. Fifty miles from Roanoke Island west across Albemarle Sound reaches the mouth of the Chowan River and the shore of Salmon Creek, which enters the Chowan there (straight-line distances are in section 2). It does not reach Chesapeake Bay, which Lane had put at 130 miles and which had been the seat Ralegh ordered in writing (III, p. 281: "the Bay of Chesepiok where we intended to make our seate and forte, according to the charge giuen us among other directions in writing, vnder the hande of Sir Walter Ralegh"). Simon Fernandes, the pilot of the 1587 voyage, had refused to carry the planters further than Roanoke.

The colonists' own only surviving words are the testimony of 25 August 1587 asking White to go "for the present and speedy supply of certaine our knowen and apparent lackes and needes" (III, p. 286). They were short of supplies from the start. White sailed on 27 August. The pinnace, the colony's own small sailing vessel, and the ships' boats are never recorded as leaving with him, and in 1590 he looked for "their botes or Pinnesse" and found none; the colony had therefore kept its vessels.

What White found on 18 August 1590

"as we entered vp the sandy banke vpon a tree, in the very browe thereof were curiously carued these faire Romane letters C R O: which letters presently we knew to signifie the place, where I should find the planters seated, according to a secret token agreed vpon betweene them and me at my last departure from them, which was, that in any wayes they should not faile to write or carue on the trees or posts of the dores the name of the place where they should be seated; for at my comming alway they were prepared to remoue from Roanoak 50 miles into the maine. Therefore at my departure from them in An. 1587 I willed them, that if they should happen to be distressed in any of those places, that then they should carue ouer the letters or name, a Crosse + in this forme, but we found no such signe of distresse."

White, 1590 voyage, Hakluyt 1600, III, p. 292 (the printed text reads "in the yeere 1586" for 1587 a few lines earlier; the error is in the 1600 original).

"we found the houses taken downe, and the place very strongly enclosed with a high palisado of great trees, with cortynes and flankers very Fortlike, and one of the chiefe trees or postes at the right side of the entrance had the barke taken off, and 5 foote from the ground in fayre Capitall letters was grauen CROATOAN without any crosse or signe of distresse; this done, we entered into the palisado, where we found many barres of iron, two pigges of lead, foure yron fowlers, Iron sacker-shotte, and such like heauie thinges, throwen here and there, almost ouergrowen with grasse and weedes. From thence wee went along by the water side, towards the poynt of the Creeke to see if we could find any of their botes or Pinnesse, but we could perceiue no signe of them, nor any of the last Falkons and small Ordinance which were left with them, at my departure from them."

Hakluyt 1600, III, pp. 292 to 293.

Five chests, three of them White's, had been dug up "long sithence" and their contents spoiled. White wrote that this "could bee no other but the deede of the Sauages our enemies at Dasamongwepeuk, who had watched the departure of our men to Croatoan" (III, p. 293). Dasamonquepeuc was the Indian town on the mainland shore opposite the island, hostile to the English since 1586. That sentence is White's inference; he names no informant.

The site reads as an orderly and unhurried removal by water. Houses were dismantled, a fortification was built after August 1587, everything portable and every boat and light gun was taken, and only the heaviest iron and lead was left behind. The code told White two things: the planters had named Croatoan as the place where they were or meant to be seated, and they were not in distress when they cut the word. White took it as "a certaine token of their safe being at Croatoan" (III, p. 293). He never landed on the island, and no later witness records finding them there. The word did not say whether all of them went, whether they arrived, how long they stayed, or where they went afterwards.

The Croatoan island could not feed them for long

On 30 July 1587 Edward Stafford, one of the colony's captains, and Manteo, the Croatoan man who had twice been to England and served the colony as interpreter, went with twenty men to Croatoan, Manteo's mother's island. The people there "desir[ed] vs not to gather or spill any of their corne, for that they had but little" (III, p. 282). In the famine of spring 1586 Lane had used the same island only as a station for Stafford and twenty men "to feede himselfe and his company, and also to keepe watch if any shipping came vpon the coast" (III, p. 262). A hundred and sixteen extra people could have lived on the island for a season; nothing in the record suggests it could have fed them for years. Croatoan was also the natural place to watch for White's ships, and the Croatoans were the only people on the coast who were friends. The record therefore fits Croatoan as a first station, and the mainland move as the sequel the colonists had announced, better than it fits either alone.

The harbour was silent by July 1588

Spain, which claimed the whole coast from its garrison at St Augustine in Florida, looked for the English settlement three times. Pedro Menéndez Marqués, the governor of Spanish Florida, sailed the coast to 37 degrees in May and June 1587, two months before White's colonists landed, and found no one (Wright 1951, doc. 61). In June 1588 Vicente González, a captain sent north by Menéndez Marqués, explored the Chesapeake to its head, and on the way south, about 30 June or 1 July, ran into a shallow bar at about 35 and a half degrees. Geiger's translation of Oré reads: "In the interior of the region where they were, there was a ship-yard, indicated by the presence of sloops, while on the land there were some remains of English barrels. Besides, there were other signs of debris, indicating that people had been there" (Geiger 1936, p. 48). They saw no people and did not go to the island. Quinn's translation, which could not be checked here against the Spanish, has a slipway and wells made of English casks. In March 1589 Pedro Díaz, a Spanish pilot whom Sir Richard Grenville, the commander of the 1585 fleet, had captured in 1585 and who had sailed on two of the English voyages before escaping, guessed that the settlers "will have died of hunger" (Wright 1951, doc. 65). A Spanish expedition of 300 men to 35 and a half degrees was ordered in 1589 and cancelled in 1590 (Geiger, pp. 50 to 52). No Spanish force ever reached Roanoke or Croatoan.

England presumed survival until 1603

White gave up in Ireland in February 1593, still writing of "my discomfortable company the planters in Virginia" as people to be relieved (III, p. 288). Hakluyt wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, the queen's secretary of state, on 24 October 1599 that of the English colonies in Virginia "one as yet remaineth, for ought we know, alive in the countrey" (epistle to the second volume). Brereton's tract of 1602 records that Ralegh had sent "fiue seuerall times at his owne charges" to find "those people which were left there in the yeere 1587", and that the bark (a small ship) of Samuel Mace, the captain Ralegh sent in 1602, stayed a month forty leagues south-west of Hatteras and never searched the port it was sent to (Brereton 1602, p. 14). Ralegh told Cecil on 21 August 1602 that neither of his barks "spake with the peopell" and that he would "yet live to see it an Inglishe nation". Bartholomew Gilbert's voyage of 1603 aimed at "the Bay of Chesepian ... to seeke out the people for Sir Walter Raleigh left neere those parts in the yeere 1587", and Gilbert was killed on landing (Purchas 1625, IV.viii.12). No Englishman is recorded on Croatoan after 1 August 1587. White anchored off its north-east point on the night of 12 August 1590 without landing, and the lost anchors of 19 August ended the attempt to go there.

Precedents inside the same record

• Barlowe (1584) reports a tradition of the Secotan, the people of the mainland south of Roanoke, that white men wrecked about 1558 built two boats and sailed off, and that their boats were found cast up on another island (III, p. 248). This is the record's only precedent for leaving the Outer Banks by boat, and the men in it were never seen again.
• The fifteen men (Díaz: eighteen) whom Grenville left on Roanoke in the summer of 1586, after finding Lane's colony gone, were attacked by thirty men of Secota, Aquascogoc and Dasamonquepeuc, three mainland towns; two were killed, and the rest rowed to a small island inside Hatorask inlet, the entrance to the colony's harbour, "and afterward departed, whither as yet we know not" (III, p. 283). That party, too, left the coast by boat and was never traced.
• Lane in 1586 dispersed his colony to Croatoan, Hatorask and the mainland to eat, "for so the Sauages themselues doe" (III, p. 262). Dispersal was therefore a response to shortage that the English had already used on this coast.

What the 1584 to 1603 record establishes

1. The colonists announced a move of about fifty miles inland, to be made at once, with the colony's boats and guns.
2. They left a sign in their own code naming Croatoan as the place where they were or meant to be seated, cut without the mark of distress; their arrival there is inferred from the sign, since no witness recorded it.
3. The departure was orderly and was preceded by an interval in which the Roanoke site was fortified; the harbour was empty when the Spaniards saw it in July 1588.
4. Croatoan was friendly but could not feed them; the mainland at the head of the sound was known to the English, who had planned since 1586 to move there.
5. The Spaniards never attacked the colony; no report of its fate exists before 1608; and the English presumed it survived until at least 1603.

Nothing in this record names Powhatan, the Chesepians (the people of the south shore of Chesapeake Bay, among whom a party of Lane's men had wintered in 1585 to 1586), or the inland towns of Ocanahowan and Ritanoe. Those names enter with Jamestown, in section 3.

The only destination the colonists stated is a distance and a direction: "50 miles further vp into the maine". In this record "the maine" is the mainland as against the islands and the sand banks. Lane uses it the same way when he plans to reach "the heart of the maine 200. miles at the least" (Hakluyt 1600, III, pp. 255 to 264). Figure 2 plots straight-line distances from the north end of Roanoke Island to every place the sources or the archaeology bring into play. The values are great-circle distances, the shortest distance over the earth's surface, in statute miles of 1,760 yards. The coordinates, bearings and notes on each place, and the code that computed them, are published with this report.

What an Elizabethan mile was worth

Parliament fixed the statute mile of 1,760 yards in 1593, six years after the colony sailed, and longer customary miles stayed in use. Estimates over water were guesses in any unit. Lane's own figures supply a calibration: he puts the Chesepians "distant from Roanoak about 130. miles" and Chawanook, the chief town of the Chowanoc people on the Chowan River, likewise "about 130. miles" (III, pp. 255 to 256). The straight-line distances are 68 and 63 statute miles. The routes Lane travelled, along Albemarle Sound and up the Chowan, or north through the sounds and overland, are roughly 85 to 100 miles. Lane's mile therefore runs at about two thirds of a statute mile of travel, and about half a statute mile of straight-line distance.

Three readings of the colonists' fifty miles follow, and they should be kept apart.

• Reckoned as Lane reckoned, fifty miles is thirty to thirty-five statute miles of travel, which reaches the middle of Albemarle Sound and the shores of the Alligator and Scuppernong rivers on its south side.
• In statute miles the ring passes through the mouth of the Chowan and the Salmon Creek shore.
• In a customary mile of about 2,000 yards or more it reaches the lower Chowan, the Cashie River and the mouth of the Roanoke River.

All three readings lie inside the Albemarle basin, to the west. None of them reaches the Chesapeake, which Lane had counted at 130 miles and which lay north across the sounds rather than "vp into the maine", and none describes Croatoan, which lies south on the banks.

What the geography settles and what it leaves open

• The announced move was into the Albemarle basin. Its western end, the Chowan mouth, is the part the English knew best: Lane had sailed there in 1586, had noted the Chowanoc town of Ohanoak as "a goodly high land" with "a very goodly corne field", and had found a channel "nauigable for good shipping" (III, p. 256). Sites X and Y stand at that end. Nothing in the phrase itself picks that end over the middle of the sound.
• Croatoan at 47 miles is not "the maine", and White never calls it so. The carved name records a seat there in the colonists' own code. Both places are in the record, and they are compatible only as stages, or as the seats of different groups.
• The Chesapeake is excluded as the announced destination by the wording, by Lane's distance and by the colonists' refusal to go there in 1587, when the pilot would not carry them further. It is not excluded as a later refuge for a party. By Lane's estimate it was four days overland from the head of the Chowan (III, p. 258).
• Ocanahowan, the inland town of the Jamestown reports (section 3), where Barbour places it near the falls of the Roanoke River, is 110 miles from Roanoke Island, twice the announced distance. The Jamestown reports that put clothed men there in 1608 describe a position twenty years on, and up a river the English had entered in 1586, not the move of 1587.

From 1607 every report of the colonists came through Jamestown, the settlement that the Virginia Company, a joint-stock company chartered in London in 1606, planted on the James River in May 1607, and all of it was Indian report, heard through interpreters and recorded by officers of a company that was looking for survivors and raising money on the prospect. The texts are read here in full, in their first editions or the standard transcriptions: the writings of Captain John Smith, the Jamestown leader, in his True Relation (1608), Map of Virginia and Proceedings (1612) and Generall Historie (1624), from the Text Creation Partnership transcriptions of Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP) with Edward Arber's edition as control; the legends of the Zúñiga chart, a manuscript map of Virginia drawn at Jamestown in 1608 and known from the copy that the Spanish ambassador in London sent to Madrid, in the three published readings (Alexander Brown's Genesis of the United States, 1890; Philip Barbour, 1975; Encyclopedia Virginia); the instructions of the Virginia Company's Council in London to Sir Thomas Gates, the governor it sent out in May 1609, in Susan Kingsbury's edition of the Records of the Virginia Company, vol. III; Hakluyt's dedication of 15 April 1609; the Council's True and Sincere Declaration (December 1609) in Brown; the Historie of William Strachey, the colony's secretary in 1610 and 1611, in R. H. Major's 1849 edition of the British Library's Sloane manuscript; Purchas's Pilgrimes (1625) from the EEBO-TCP transcription, which keeps the margins; and the account of Ralph Hamor, another secretary of the colony (1615). The notes published with this report give every passage with its page. What follows is the record in the order it was made.

December 1607 to February 1608: clothed men to the south

Smith, captured in December 1607 and held by Opechancanough, Powhatan's brother and the chief of the Pamunkey, was told "of certaine men cloathed at a place called Ocanahonan, cloathed like me" (True Relation, EEBO-TCP image 12; Arber I, p. 17). An early reader corrected a copy of the printed book in ink to "certaine men at a place 6 dayes jorny beyond Ocanahonan" (Barbour, Complete Works I, note to the passage). Powhatan, a fortnight later, "confirmed" "the people cloathed at Ocamahowan" and placed "Mangoge", "Chawwonock" and "Roonock" to the south, with a country called Anone "where they haue abundance of Brasse, and houses walled as ours" (image 13; Arber I, p. 20). In January or February 1608 the weroance (chief) of Paspahegh, the people on whose land Jamestown stood, agreed "to conduct two of our men to a place called Panawicke beyond Roonok, where he reported many men to be apparelled", took his reward at Warraskoyack, a town down the James, and turned back (image 15; Arber I, p. 23). Three Powhatan informants in two months put clothed men in the interior to the south; none mentioned a killing, and Powhatan had volunteered his account.

June 1608: the Zúñiga chart

The manuscript chart of Virginia that Pedro de Zúñiga, the Spanish ambassador in London, sent to King Philip III on 10 September 1608 went out from Jamestown with Smith's letter in June. Its legends are read differently by each transcriber. Brown (1890, I, p. 185): "Here remayneth 4 men clothed that came from Roonock to Ocanahawan." Barbour (1975, pp. 4 to 5): "Here remayne the 4 men clothed that came from Roonock to Okanahowan", written beside a town he reads as Pakerikanick on the second river south of the James. The chart also marks where "the King of Paspahege reported our men to be" and where "Paspahege and 2 of our own men landed to go to Pananiock" (Brown's readings). The chart is the first text to give a number, four, and a movement, from Roanoke to Ocanahowan. The Company took it seriously: in the autumn of 1608 Christopher Newport, the captain who brought each fleet out from England, carried a private commission "not to returne without a lumpe of gold, a certaintie of the South sea, or one of the lost company sent out by Sir Water Raleigh" (Generall Historie, p. 66). Newport went west to the Monacans, the people above the falls of the James, instead.

Winter 1608 to 1609: one informant in London

Newport reached England in January 1609 with two Powhatan men, Namontack and Machumps. Three London texts of 1609 to 1612 carry what was learned from them, and they are one channel, not three.

"Besides, our owne Indians haue lately reuealed either this or another rich mine of copper or gold in a towne called Ritanoe, neere certaine mountaines lying West of Roanoac."

Hakluyt, epistle dedicatory to Virginia richly valued, dated 15 April 1609.

"besides you are neere to Riche Copper mines of Ritanoc and may passe them by one braunche of this Riuer, and by another Peccarecamicke where you shall finde foure of the englishe aliue, left by S^r Walter Rawely w^ch escaped from the slaughter of Powhaton of Roanocke, vppon the first arrivall of our Colonie, and liue vnder the proteccon of a wiroane called Gepanocon enemy to Powhaton, by whose consent you shall neuer recouer them, one of these were worth much labour, and if you finde them not, yet seach into this Countrey it is more probable then towards the north."

Council of Virginia, instructions to Sir Thomas Gates, May 1609, section 15; Kingsbury, Records III, p. 17, from Bodleian Ashmole MS 1147.

"where, at Peccarecamek and Ochanahoen, by the relation of Machumps, the people have howses built with stone walles, and one story above another, so taught them by those Englishe whoe escaped the slaughter at Roanoak, at what tyme this our colony, under the conduct of Capt. Newport, landed within the Chesapeake Bay, where the people breed up tame turkeis about their howses, and take apes in the mountaines, and where, at Ritanoe, the Weroance Eyanoco preserved seven of the English alive—fower men, two boyes, and one yonge mayde (who escaped and fled up the river of Chanoke), to beat his copper, of which he hath certaine mynes at the said Ritanoe".

Strachey, Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, written 1610 to 1612; ed. Major 1849, p. 26. The Sloane manuscript's side-note reads "Howses of stone, tame Turkyes, and Monkyes, supposed at Peccartcanick."

Strachey names his source, Machumps, and Strachey was in London until June 1609. The Council's section 15 and Strachey's page 26 share the copper mines, the survivors, the escape, a protecting weroance (Gepanocon, Eyanoco) who was Powhatan's enemy, and the dating of the slaughter to "the first arrivall of our Colonie", that is to Newport's landing in the spring of 1607. Hakluyt's Ritanoe of April 1609 shows the same report already current a month before the instructions were drafted. The differences are the count (four men; four men, two boys and a girl) and the town (Peccarecamicke; Ritanoe). The slaughter story is therefore a year older than Strachey, and it and the survivor story are one story from one Powhatan informant, told in London in the winter of 1608 to 1609.

1608 to 1609: the only searches on the ground

At the end of December 1608 Smith, by then president of the colony's council, sent Michael Sicklemore, one of his men, with two guides to Chowanoke, the chief town of the Chowanoc on the Chowan River, "with directions howe to search for the lost company of S^r Walter Rawley, and silke grasse" (Proceedings, p. 57). The result, in Smith's own words:

"M^r Sicklemore well returned from chawonock, but found little hope and lesse certainetie of them were left by Sir Walter Rawley. So that Nathaniell Powell & Anas Todkill, were also, by the Quiyoughquohanocks, conducted to the Mangoages to search thē there. But nothing could we learne but they were all dead".

Smith, Proceedings, 1612, p. 90; repeated in Generall Historie, 1624, p. 87.

In 1624 Smith added what the searchers saw. Sicklemore found the Chowan "not great, the people few, the countrey most over growne with pynes". Powell and Todkill were led "Three dayes iorney ... through the woods, into a high country towards the Southwest: where they saw here and there a little corne field, by some little spring or smal brooke, but no riuer they could see: the people in all respects like the rest, except there language" (p. 88). The Quiyoughquohanocks were a small people on the south bank of the James, and the Mangoags were, in the English usage of the time, the Iroquoian-speaking peoples of the interior. Three days' walk south-west from the Quiyoughquohanock towns, into upland with no river and a different language, is the country of the Nottoway and Meherrin, Iroquoian peoples of what is now southern Virginia. The searchers never reached the Roanoke River, where Barbour and the First Colony Foundation place Ocanahowan, and "they were all dead" is what the Mangoags said, reported at second hand. Strachey confirms in passing that the Mangoag journey happened and brought objects back to the fort (p. 124). Meanwhile the Council in London printed, in December 1609, that "some of our Nation planted by Sir Walter Raleigh" were "yet a live, within fifty mile of our fort", as "testified by two of our colony sent out to seek them, who, (though denied by the savages speech with them) found crosses and Letters the Characters and assured Testimonies of Christians newly cut in the barks of trees" (True and Sincere Declaration; Brown I, p. 349). Smith never repeats the tree carvings. The Declaration was a fund-raising document, issued after the loss of the Sea Venture, the flagship of the Company's 1609 fleet, wrecked on Bermuda.

Strachey's slaughter and where he put it

Strachey states the slaughter five times (pp. 20, 26, 50, 85 to 86, 103). The fullest passage is a policy statement, drafted as instructions to be read to the weroances:

"the men, women, and childrene of the first plantation at Roanoak were by practize and comaundement of Powhatan (he himself perswaded therunto by his priests) miserably slaughtered, without any offence given him either by the first planted (who twenty and od yeares had peaceably lyved intermixt with those salvages, and were out of his territory) or by those who nowe are come to inhabite some parte of his desarte lands".

Strachey, ed. Major, pp. 85 to 86.

"Powhatan hath slaughtered so many of our nation without offence given, and such as were seated far from him, and in the territory of those weroances which did in no sort depend on him or acknowledg him".

Strachey, p. 103.

Four things follow from Strachey's own words. The victims had lived "twenty and od yeares ... intermixt with those salvages": 1587 plus twenty is 1607, the year the Council's instructions name, so the tradition itself presupposes twenty years of assimilation before the killing. The victims were "out of his territory" and "seated far from him". Strachey draws Powhatan's southern frontier at "the Mangoages and Chawonoaks bordering upon Roanoake" (p. 48) and writes, of the country of Ralegh's colonies, "No parte of this sowth country is supposed to be under Powhatan, but under an absolute Weroance, as powerfull and great as Powhatan", with the side-note "Ronoak not under the commaund of Powhatan" (pp. 27 to 28). "Roanoak" in these passages is the colony's name, as in "our other colony at Roanoak" (p. 20), a reading Quinn made in 1974; he nowhere says the killing happened on the island. Read on its own terms, Strachey puts the massacred colonists south of Powhatan's reach, in or beyond the Chowan and Roanoke river country, and has some of them escape up the Chowan to a copper-working weroance who was Powhatan's enemy.

Quinn's Chesapeake reading rests on a different passage: Powhatan's priests foretold "that from the Chesapeack Bay a nation should arise which should dissolve and give end to his empire", and "not many yeares since" he "destroyed and put to sword ... all the inhabitants, the weroance and his subjects of that province, and so remaine all the Chessiopeians at this daye, and for this cause, extinct" (p. 101). The passage does not mention the English. The link between the destroyed Chesepians and the colonists is an inference, and it has to override Strachey's repeated statement that the victims lived outside Powhatan's territory, which the Chesepians, his near neighbours, did not.

Purchas's "confession" of 1625

Every modern statement that Powhatan confessed the killing to Smith and showed him English objects rests on two passages by Samuel Purchas, printed in 1625, seven years after Powhatan's death. The first is a marginal note set beside Smith's Sicklemore sentence: "Powhatan confessed that hee had bin at the murther of that Colonie: and shewed to Cap. Smith a Musket barrell and a brasse Morter, and certaine peeces of Iron which had bin theirs" (Pilgrimes IV, p. 1728, outer margin; the note is absent from every machine-read scan of the book and was recovered from the EEBO-TCP transcription). The second is in Purchas's own essay: "as Powhatan confessed to Cap. Smith, that hee had beene at their slaughter, and had diuers vtensills of theirs to shew" (p. 1813). Smith's texts of 1608, 1612 and 1624 contain no confession, no musket barrel and no mortar, and a search of the whole Generall Historie finds none. Purchas knew Smith and may have had it from him in conversation. He may equally have added the objects himself to the story the Council and Strachey already told. Purchas's own Pilgrimage, a different book from the Pilgrimes, never adopts the story in its editions of 1613, 1617 and 1626. The musket barrel therefore fixes neither the place nor the date of any killing: it appears only in an editorial note of 1625 attached to a story that was already in print.

After 1612

In the summer of 1611 five Jamestown men, Cole, Kitchins and three others, ran south "to a Spanish Plantation, reported to be there", travelled "some fiue daies iorney to Ocanahoen" and were hunted home by Indians the colony had hired (Hamor 1615, p. 27; Smith 1624, p. 110). By 1611 the clothed men of Ocanahowan had become Spaniards in the colonists' rumour. In 1619 the council in Virginia counted the "thre riuers of Ronoake Powsatan and Pamunky" among Opechancanough's subjects (Kingsbury III, p. 228). In July 1621 the Company heard a written relation of a voyage "to the Southward to Roanocke" made the previous summer by one Marmaduke Rayner; the relation is lost and the minute records no finding (Kingsbury I, p. 504). In February 1622 John Pory, who had been the colony's secretary, walked sixty miles to the Chowan and reported silk grass (a plant fibre the Company hoped to sell) and two harvests a year, and nothing of the colonists (Smith 1624, p. 143). After 1612 no Jamestown text uses "Roanoke" for the colony at all.

The reports at a glance

What the Jamestown record establishes

1. Every informant placed clothed men to the south and south-west of Jamestown, inland, in the Chowan, Roanoke and Tar river country. None placed them at Croatoan and none in the Chesapeake.
2. The numbers reported were small: four men, or four men with three children. No report describes a community of a hundred.
3. The slaughter story and the survivor story entered the record together, from one Powhatan informant in London, and were dated by that informant to the spring of 1607, after twenty years of the colonists living among Indians outside Powhatan's territory.
4. The only searches on the ground, in 1609, came back with hearsay of death from people who had not been asked to produce a survivor, and never reached the river where the survivors were placed.
5. Powhatan's "confession" and the English objects are a 1625 marginal note. No English writer of the period records seeing either a survivor or a body.

Four later texts are still cited as evidence of survivors. They are of unequal weight and only one of them is independent of everything above.

Bland, 1650. Edward Bland, a Virginia merchant, led a party in 1650 towards the Tuscarora, the Iroquoian-speaking people of the interior of what is now North Carolina, carrying orders from the governor of Virginia to speak with "an Englishman amongst them" and "to enquire for an English woman cast away long since, and was amongst those Nations" (The Discovery of New Brittaine, 1651, p. 3). They wrote to the Englishman in five languages, were told he was "a great way off at the further Tuskarood Towne", and never met him (pp. 5 to 6, 13). A woman "cast away" among the Tuscarora sixty-three years after 1587 is as likely a shipwreck survivor as a colonist. The passage shows only that Virginia still expected to find English among the southern nations in 1650.

Yeardley, 1654. In September 1653 four traders reached Roanoke Island, where "the great commander of those parts" received them "and shewed them the ruins of Sir Walter Ralegh's fort" (Francis Yeardley, a Virginia planter and councillor, to John Ferrar in England, formerly of the Virginia Company, 8 May 1654; Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, pp. 25 to 26). The chief asked for his son to be taught "to speak out of the book". The letter records no tradition of the colonists; so far as it tells, the island's people in 1653 knew the fort only as a ruin.

Lawson, 1709. John Lawson, an English surveyor who became surveyor-general of North Carolina, wrote from his travels and residence in Carolina from 1700:

"A farther Confirmation of this we have from the Hatteras Indians, who either then lived on Ronoak-Island, or much frequented it. These tell us, that several of their Ancestors were white People, and could talk in a Book, as we do; the Truth of which is confirm'd 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; and that in process of Time, they conform'd themselves to the Manners of their Indian Relations."

Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, 1709, p. 62. His census on p. 234 gives "Hatteras. Town 1, Sand Banks, Fighting Men 16."

This is the one later testimony that comes from the Indians' side, from the people of the island the colonists named, and it is independent of the Jamestown tradition, which was in manuscript or in Purchas's margins where Lawson never saw it. It is also 120 years after the event, about a community of sixteen men, on a coast that had seen wrecks, traders and Lane's own men. Lawson's explanation, supplies failed and the English "were forced to cohabit with them", is the first printed statement of assimilation, and it is his inference. Robert Beverley, a Virginia planter, in his history of that colony four years earlier, gave the Virginian view: the colonists "were remov'd to Croatan" and the Indians "cut them off: For to this Day they were never more heard of" (History and Present State of Virginia, 1705, pp. 10 to 11). Lawson's Carolina tradition and Beverley's Virginian one both put the colonists at Croatoan; they differ on whether the colonists were absorbed or killed.

McMillan, 1888. Hamilton McMillan, a North Carolina state legislator who had the Indians of Robeson County, in the south of the state, recognised as "Croatan Indians" in 1885 (they have been the Lumbee since 1953), published their traditions three years later: a tribe that "once lived in Roanoke in Virginia", "took the English to live with us", moved inland, and bore colonists' surnames (Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony, 1888, pp. 16 to 24). His evidence is a speech of 1864 reported "in substance" twenty-four years later; traditions gathered from 1875 in a community he had already named Croatan; surnames that are common English names; and a pronunciation "Darr, Durr and Dorr" elicited after he had told the story of Virginia Dare (p. 18). The Lumbee historian Malinda Maynor Lowery (2019) and the anthropologist Robert K. Thomas, in a report of 1976 for the Lumbee themselves, reject the surname argument. McMillan builds openly on Lawson and adds nothing that can be checked. Alexander Brown's endorsement in 1890 put the Lumbee link into the scholarly literature, in the same volume as his transcription of the Zúñiga chart, and it has been cited from there since.

What the later record establishes

• The Hatteras Indians in 1709 held an independent, near-primary tradition of white ancestors, which is consistent with the CROATOAN carving and with the absorption of some English people at some date.
• No tradition of the colonists was recorded on Roanoke Island in 1653, and by 1705 Virginians held that the colonists had gone to Croatoan and died there.
• In 1650 Virginia still expected to find English among the Tuscarora; the expectation was never tested.
• Nothing in the Lumbee tradition can be separated from Lawson and from McMillan's own prompting.

Three places have been dug for the colonists: Roanoke Island since 1895, the Chowan shore of Bertie County (the mainland at the head of Albemarle Sound) since 2012, and Cape Creek on Hatteras (the site of the Croatoan town) since 1993. A fourth, the Chesapeake, has been dug for other reasons. The published site reports and technical studies (the 1962 report of J. C. Harrington, the National Park Service archaeologist who dug on Roanoke Island; the British Museum's 2012 bulletin; the 2019 article by Charles Ewen, an archaeologist at East Carolina University, and Farrell; Mary Ellen Hodges's 1998 report on the Chesapeake site; the First Colony Foundation's own PDFs and web statements; the National Park Service's dig summaries) and every press report of the unpublished work through 14 September 2026 are read here, and each claim is checked against the site's own words. Where a claim rests on an interview, the text says so.

Roanoke Island: no 1587 settlement has ever been found

Seventy-nine years of excavation at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, the Park Service's ground at the north end of Roanoke Island (Harrington 1947 to 1953 and 1965; the Park Service in the 1980s; Ivor Noël Hume, the Colonial Williamsburg archaeologist, 1991 to 1995; the First Colony Foundation, a nonprofit group formed in 2004 to search for the Roanoke colonies, 2006 to 2021) have produced a small earthwork, a metallurgical workshop beside it with the debris of the ore assays (tests of ore for metal) made by Lane's colony, and Native cache pits with 1580s trade copper. Harrington's conclusion of 1962 stands: "the settlement site has not been located". No house, palisade line, burial or midden (refuse heap) of the 1587 colony has been identified anywhere on the island. The First Colony Foundation's reinterpretation of the earthwork (2022, revised 2024) assigns it to Lane's colony on the strength of assay debris under its rampart; the palisade "very Fortlike" that White found in 1590 has not been seen in the ground. The only feature ever proposed as later than 1586 is a group of three fire pits in a watchtower footprint, which the Park Service reported in 2021 with "no way to know" whether they are 1585 or 1587. The north end of the island "has eroded extensively since the sixteenth century", in the words of the marine archaeologist Gordon Watts (2008, in the Foundation's 2007 report), and the settlement may lie under the sound. The absence of the settlement site therefore bears neither for nor against any reading of the colonists' fate.

The patch on White's map

In 2012 the British Museum examined two paper patches on White's manuscript map of the sounds, drawn in 1585 to 1586 and now in the museum (1906,0509.1.3), at the request of a First Colony Foundation board member. The technical study (Ambers, Russell, Saunders and Sloan, British Museum Technical Research Bulletin 6, pp. 47 to 54) found that the second patch, at the head of Albemarle Sound where the Chowan and Roanoke meet, conceals "a boldly coloured symbol apparently indicating a fort or signifying the intended location of one", and that a fainter symbol was redrawn on top of the patch. The authors decline to interpret it: "the detailed interpretation of this symbol is beyond the scope of this study", and "it is not clear if this shape is intended as a symbolic representation or as an actual depiction of the ground plan of a fort or of an intended, but unbuilt, fort". The map is a document of 1585 to 1586. It records that someone in Lane's colony marked, and then hid, a fort position at the Chowan mouth. That is consistent with Lane's plan to move by way of "the Riuer of Choannak" (section 1) and with the colonists' "50 miles into the maine". It is not evidence that the 1587 colonists went there. Horn's "conclusive proof" (2012) is an inference from the map to the colony.

Sites X and Y, Salmon Creek

The Foundation dug Site X, beside the Native town of Mettaquem that White's map marks at the mouth of Salmon Creek, from 2012 to 2017: 53 two-metre units, in a plough zone (topsoil that centuries of ploughing have turned over, mixing whatever it holds) mixed with some 275 pounds of Native pottery, produced "40 sherds representing perhaps 6 or 7 vessels of 16th century Surrey-Hampshire Border ware; 8 sherds representing a North Devon plain baluster jar" (a sherd is a fragment of a pot; Border ware is an English kitchen pottery made on the border of Surrey and Hampshire), two tenter hooks (for stretching cloth), an aiglet (the metal tip of a lace), priming pans from gun locks, a buckle and, announced in 2026, a lead seal of the kind fixed to bolts of cloth at Augsburg, of the late sixteenth century. Site Y (the state's site number 31BR49), a short distance away, was tested from December 2019 in 72 five-foot squares and produced a more varied English assemblage (Border ware, North Devon baluster jar, London and Essex redwares, Spanish olive jar, German (Frechen) and French (Martincamp) stoneware) with no Native material; no sherd count has been published. Neither site has produced a structure, a feature, a burial or a sealed sixteenth-century deposit. The dating rests on typology, the dating of pottery by its style: Border ware "declined precipitously after about 1630", and the glass beads and clay tobacco pipes that mark later trade are absent. In its 2023 volume the Foundation put the argument in numbers. Site X, with 2,282 square feet excavated against 10,000 to 30,000 at a sample of Virginia sites, "has five to ten times as much Border ware as the early Virginia sites, excepting the first years of settlement at Jamestown"; Eden House, the governor's seat built on the Chowan no earlier than about 1663, yielded "just four sherds from a single vessel of a late type of Border ware"; and the absence at Site Y of "colonial tobacco pipe stems with large bore holes" is offered against any later seventeenth-century occupation. An answer to the Foundation now has to meet that comparison rather than the bare presence of the ware. The same chapter states the limit of the claim in the words of Nicholas Luccketti, the Foundation's archaeological director: "no artifacts undeniably of sixteenth-century European origin. No features from English buildings, no burials. We did not find a fort. Nor did we claim that we had found the site of the main group's relocation". It canvasses the colony's pinnace "moored nearby" as one explanation of the site, and its sonar survey of Salmon Creek recorded several small submerged craft and one larger target near the creek's mouth, none of them examined. Critics (Ewen, Henry Wright of the University of Michigan, Horton, Noël Hume) answer that a mixed plough-zone assemblage cannot be dated to within a generation, that a Jamestown-era origin between 1607 and 1650 is not excluded, and that Lane's 1586 voyage up the Chowan is not excluded either. No peer-reviewed site report exists for either site; the fullest account is a popular volume edited by Eric Klingelhofer, one of the Foundation's archaeologists (Excavating the Lost Colony Mystery, 2023), and the Foundation's own dig-reports page lists nothing for Bertie County.

The Foundation's statements have grown more confident between 2017 and 2026 without any new data being published. "We do not have the smoking gun" (2017, repeated 2023); "Site Y does not solve the Lost Colony mystery" (December 2020); "we are 100 percent sure that we have two sites that are related to the Roanoke Colonists" (Luccketti, December 2020); the colonists are "still lost" and "more work is needed to confirm it" (June 2024); and on 4 June 2026 a web statement headed "The Lost Colony is Found! How We Did It." which opens "This is not another hoax or false claim" and concludes that Site X and Site Y "were part of a larger, dispersed settlement of farms along the Chowan River, where 117 immigrants established their New World home". The statement reports no new fieldwork, no new dates and no new counts; the Foundation's news index carries nothing between 17 October 2024 and 4 June 2026. What the two sites show is a small, typologically coherent group of late sixteenth or early seventeenth-century English kitchen and storage ceramics with a few dress and gun fittings, at two spots on the Chowan shore beside a Native town, consistent with a small English presence there for a season or more, of a date between 1586 and about 1650. That is a finding in its own right, but it is not evidence of a colony of 117 people.

Cape Creek, Hatteras (31DR1)

David Phelps, an archaeologist at East Carolina University, excavated the Croatoan town site at Cape Creek, near the village of Buxton, from 1993 to 1998, dated it 1650 to 1720, found a signet ring he took for gold and a snaphaunce lock (an early form of flintlock), and never published. The ring, re-examined in 2017 by X-ray fluorescence, a test of a metal's composition, is brass, and it lay in a context of 1670 to 1720 (Ewen and Farrell, North Carolina Historical Review 96 (4), 2019, pp. 408 to 425). Mark Horton, a British archaeologist, with the Croatoan Archaeological Society, a local group on Hatteras founded by Scott Dawson, dug from 2009 and found a rapier hilt, a slate writing tablet, a Nuremberg counter (a brass token used in reckoning accounts), gun parts, aiglets and coin weights dated 1644 and 1648, most of it in seventeenth-century contexts; Horton himself said in 2020 that the objects could have arrived by trade, and Ewen reads the stratigraphy (the order of the layers) as seventeenth-century.

The claim that has most altered the public account since 2024 is the hammerscale. In an excavation of summer 2024 Horton's team found the flakes that fall from iron being forged, and in January 2025 the first report spoke of "buckets" of it. The sequence since then is: a Daily Mail article of 11 May 2025 ("SOLVED", Horton: "Once and for all, this smoking gun evidence"); Live Science of 10 June 2025, where Horton describes "hammer scale in a pit underneath a thick shell midden that contains virtually no European material in it at all" and the writer notes that the finding "has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal"; a talk at the Coastal Studies Institute on Roanoke Island on 26 March 2026 titled "The Smoking Gun?", after which Horton told the Outer Banks Voice that "archaeologists have difficulty dating material to differentiate 50 years on either side" and that the objects "could be 17th-century trades from Jamestown"; and a WAVY report of 1 June 2026 in which Scott Dawson of the Croatoan society says that four radiocarbon results have come back, "All of them were from the 1580s", among them a date on the teeth of a deer whose jaw held a musket ball, which Dawson himself allows may have come from Lane's men of 1585. The argument is sound in principle: hammerscale is waste that was not traded, so iron was forged on Croatoan, and forging was a European craft. Whether the layer is of the 1580s, the 1600s or the 1650s is the whole question, and it turns on stratigraphy and dates that have not been published in any form a reader can check. As of 14 September 2026 no journal article, monograph or technical report by Horton or the society on the hammerscale, the radiocarbon dates or the 2009 to 2024 excavations exists. Ewen has said he wants to see a hearth; Whitney Leeson, an archaeologist at Roanoke College, wants slag and charcoal. Until the section drawings and the dates are in print, the hammerscale cannot be counted as a dated result.

The Chesapeake

Quinn's thesis that the main body went to the Chesepian towns on the Lynnhaven and Elizabeth rivers has never been tested by excavation, and the one large Chesepian site that has been fully reported, Great Neck (site 44VB7, in what is now Virginia Beach), yielded no European artefact earlier than the nineteenth century and a late Native occupation that the excavator did not date after sustained European contact (Hodges 1998). Strachey says the district was re-peopled by Powhatan's own people by 1611 (p. 105). No excavation supports the thesis, and none has been designed to test it.

Roanoac village, the Lumbee, and DNA

In 2023 to 2024 the Foundation found the village of Roanoac, an Algonquian-speaking community like the other peoples of the sounds, in the Elizabethan Gardens, a garden beside Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island, with a drawn-copper ring of European metal; it is a contact site of 1584 to 1586, abandoned when Lane left. The Lumbee descent claim has no archaeological component. The Lost Colony DNA Project, founded in 2007 to find colonists' descendants by surname lineages, is listed as inactive and reported no match.

What an archaeologist would need to see

Any of the following would move the question decisively; none has been found since excavation began in 1895:

• A European structure, post-hole pattern or hearth with 1580s material in a sealed context, at any site.
• A burial of European type or European ancestry with sixteenth-century associations, on Croatoan or the Chowan.
• A published stratigraphic sequence with radiocarbon dates for the Cape Creek hammerscale.
• A sherd count and context description for Site Y, and a feature at either Bertie site.
• Any sixteenth-century European material at a Chesepian site.
• A findspot, a mineralogical provenance, or a residue analysis for the first Dare Stone (section 7).

The archaeology as it stands gives two places with a small English footprint of the right period, one on the banks and one on the mainland at the west end of the announced fifty miles, and nothing at all for the Chesapeake or for a massacre site. That is also the distribution the documents in sections 1 to 3 describe.

The question the ledger models is narrow on purpose: where was the principal seat of the main body of the colonists in the years after they left Roanoke, roughly 1588 to 1607? Five outcomes cover it. Croatoan; the Albemarle mainland, meaning the head of the sound, the Chowan mouth and the Roanoke River country, with a Croatoan stage allowed; the Chesapeake; the sea; and anything else. Parties elsewhere, a division of the colony, a killing and later descendants are judged separately below, because the record supports combinations of outcomes that one question cannot represent.

How each scenario meets the evidence

The ledger

Each row is a cluster of evidence that shares a source or a channel, and each carries one judgement of how likely that cluster is under each outcome. The numbers are judgements, and their purpose is to make the weighing explicit and to show how far the result moves when any one of them is changed. The prior, the starting weight given to each outcome before any evidence is counted, gives the mainland 28, Croatoan 20, the Chesapeake 20, the sea 10 and other 22, on grounds stated in the notes to the published code.

The raw product gives the mainland 77, Croatoan 16, the Chesapeake 2, the sea 0 and other 5. Blending in 15 parts in 100 of an even split across the five outcomes, to allow for evidence not in the ledger, gives the reported values: mainland 68, Croatoan 17, other 7, Chesapeake 4, sea 3.

What happens when the weights change

The table runs the ledger again nineteen ways: with each cluster left out in turn, with no starting preference, with the two Jamestown clusters counted as one, with the evidence against each rival halved, with every weight halved, and with a larger allowance for the unknown. The mainland leads in every case. Its lead over Croatoan is narrow when the plan (cluster C1, the first row of the ledger) is left out and when the strength of four clusters (C1, C4, C5 and C9) is halved, the case labelled Croatoan-friendly in the table; those two cases give the lowest values for the mainland.

The separate findings

These are judgements on their own evidence, not products of the ledger, and they are what makes the leading scenario a combination rather than a single place.

Reading the numbers

• The probabilities in the ledger are judgements about hearsay, not measurements. Each depends on the five outcomes chosen and on the weight given to each cluster, and the range across the alternative weightings is the more informative figure. The table above shows the size of that dependence for nineteen alternatives; more alternatives would not test the judgement against evidence outside the ledger.
• The clusters are not fully independent even after grouping. The three Jamestown informants of 1607 to 1608 and the London informant of 1609 drew on the same body of report; the case that counts them as one is in the table.
• The two archaeological clusters would each move the result by ten to fifteen points if their dates were published and held, and by as much the other way if they failed.
• "Other" is not a hypothesis anyone has argued for in detail. It stands for the interior of the Pamlico, Tar and Neuse, where the Zúñiga chart's Pakerikanick and Strachey's Peccarecamek are placed, and for an early annihilation that left no report.

Forty-eight inscribed stones, each claiming to carry a message from the colonists, reached Haywood J. Pearce Jr., a history professor at Emory University in Atlanta and vice-president of Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia, of which his father was president, between November 1937 and January 1941. Forty-seven came from William Eberhardt, a Georgia stonecutter, and his associates in Georgia and South Carolina and were exposed as forgeries in 1941. The first stone stands apart: different rock (vein quartz, 21 lb 4 oz, 13 5/8 by 9 5/8 by 2 1/4 inches), a different region (said to be found near the Chowan River, a few miles from Edenton), a different and better hand, and none of the words that exposed the other forty-seven as forgeries. It is at Brenau University, Gainesville, Georgia. This section judges it on its own. The notes published with this report mark each quotation as read in the source or as taken from a reprint.

The text

Pearce's reading of 1938 is the primary published text (Journal of Southern History 4, May 1938, pp. 148 to 163). He notes that every o and a on the back is "an irregular, roughly circular depression" and so conjectural, and that the long s (the old form of s, shaped like an f) is used throughout. The face, below a Latin cross:

The back, in Pearce's seventeen numbered lines (his bars mark his conjectural sentence divisions):

The 1941 reprint of Pearce's manuscript by the journalist Boyden Sparkes, whose investigation is described below, differs at line 6 only ("mesage of shipp vnto vs"). Popular texts since 2015 silently modernise: they print "Suddaine" for the stone's "suddiane", "Spirits" for "spirts", and "You" for "yov". The Brenau photographs show a face cut in capitals with some minuscule forms (VNTO with a V, Arabic numerals, I for J in "Iohn") and a back cut in small crowded letters. No transcription made letter by letter from the stone itself, as a specialist in inscriptions would make one, has ever been published.

The finder

Pearce's article withheld the finder's name. Sparkes (Saturday Evening Post, 26 April 1941) supplied it from Pearce's own manuscript: L. E. Hammond, described as a produce dealer of Alameda, California, touring for hickory nuts, who said he found the stone in a swamp about three miles from Edenton on the east bank of the Chowan, washed it, cleaned the grooves with a steel brush and darkened the letters with an indelible pencil, and brought it to Emory University in November 1937. The Emory party that went to the site could not find the spot; Hammond produced "a crude map scrawled on a piece of paper bag". Emory's president called the stone a fraud. Nobody who dealt with him ever saw his car or his wife. Detectives of the Pinkerton agency "were unable to find anyone who had ever known him". His only reference was an Oakland jeweller who knew him as married, about forty, with "some kind of a pension". He proposed exhibiting the stone at twenty-five cents a head, sold it to the Pearces for $1,000 paid to a post-office box, and later reappeared in Georgia under the name "L. E. Martin", offering a later finder $30,000 for a stone with "Yahoo" on it and telling Pearce he could procure "a stone bearing any word Pearce asked for". In the eighty-nine years since, no researcher has produced a documented life for him. Brandon Fullam, an independent researcher (2021), claims to, in a book that could not be obtained for this report.

The season

The Lost Colony, an outdoor play by the North Carolina playwright Paul Green, opened at Manteo, the town on Roanoke Island, on 4 July 1937. President Roosevelt attended on 18 August 1937, the 350th birthday of Virginia Dare, the day a commemorative stamp was issued. Hammond dated his find to mid-September (Pearce's manuscript) or August (according to David La Vere, a historian at the University of North Carolina Wilmington whose book on the stones appeared in 2010). Sparkes also recorded two things from that summer at Manteo: a stranger who tried to sell "a stone relic of Virginia Dare" from a suitcase, and a highway promoter who years earlier had proposed "a scheme for creating a bogus stone relic of the Lost Colony to get newspaper headlines" and who was in the audience on opening night. Whether the suitcase stone was Hammond's stone is unproven. Pearce never investigated it.

The later stones and the collapse of 1941

Seventeen months after Hammond, Eberhardt began delivering stones that continued the story into Georgia. The first stone had said "murther al save seaven" of twenty-four and "names writ al ther onrocke"; Eberhardt's fourth stone carried seventeen names and the date 1591. A committee of thirty-four scholars led by the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison met at Brenau on 19 and 20 October 1940 and reported that "the preponderance of evidence points to the authenticity of the stones". Sparkes then showed that Eberhardt's stones were freshly cut soft rock, that they used "primeval", "reconnoitre" and "trale" (a century or more too early), that their spelling was too consistent for any Elizabethan, and that one carried the letters F A K E. In May 1941 Eberhardt produced a stone reading "Pearce and Dare Historical Hoaxes. We Dare Anything." Every one of those findings concerns the later stones. What Sparkes established about the first stone was narrower: the finder could not be traced, the grooves had been scrubbed and pencilled, the Manteo suitcase episode, and the falsity of Pearce's claim that the inscription could not be duplicated (stone workmen at Marietta, Georgia, said they could cut it with hand tools; the Emory geologist had sandblasted an inscription into quartz himself).

What has been done since

An examination in 1983 by Robert Stephenson, South Carolina's state archaeologist, was inconclusive. La Vere (2009, 2010) reopened the case for authenticity. In 2016 Brenau's president Ed Schrader, a geologist, had a slice cut from the stone at UNC Asheville: the interior is bright white, the exterior and the groove surfaces dark. Lawler (2018) collected opinions: Heather Wolfe, curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, saw nothing that "jumps out as a forgery" but doubted the three-initial signature; Jean Wilson of Cambridge, a historian of inscriptions, found nothing that could not be of the date; Matthew Champion, a historian of English church graffiti, found the lettering consistent with English church graffiti but could find no other instance of Virginia abbreviated "Via"; Diarmaid MacCulloch, the Oxford historian of the Reformation, called it a forgery with "all the plausibility of Dick Van Dyke's cockney accent". No laboratory report on the 2016 slice has been published, no weathering measurement exists, and the language panel Brenau announced for autumn 2018 has no published outcome. No test, report or excavation on the stone between 2019 and September 2026 could be found.

A corpus check of the spellings

About 3.7 MB of period text (Hakluyt vol. VIII in the MacLehose edition, Strachey in Major's 1849 edition, Smith's works in Arber's 1884 edition with u and v preserved, and the 1608 True Relation) was searched for every unusual form on the stone. Absence from these texts is weak evidence, because the full Early English Books Online corpus could not be searched; presence in them is strong evidence.

Nothing on the first stone is a proven anachronism of the "reconnoitre" kind. The linguistic case against it is a case from register and convention. The content is also entirely inside the printed record: the fifty-mile move, a ship that came and went, Indian fear of revenge, priests inciting a massacre, seven survivors. All of it is in Hakluyt, Strachey, Smith and the 1609 instructions, the books Pearce used to check it, and nothing on the stone is checkable outside them. The burial hill, the rock with names and the grave have never been found; test pits at the most plausible site in 2015 turned up English pottery of a later century and nothing of the sixteenth.

Finding

The first Dare Stone is more likely than not a fabrication of 1937: about 80 in 100 (range 75 to 85). The weight lies, in order, on the finder's conduct and untraceability; on the anniversary season and the documented intent that summer to manufacture such a relic; on a text every statement of which can be found in the printed sources, and whose archaic spellings are of the kinds an imitator would choose; and on physical evidence that cannot be used either way, because the grooves were scrubbed, pencilled, floured and pressure-washed before anyone could test them. Against this stand the absence of any demonstrated anachronism, which is a real difference from the forty-seven fakes, and the unmeasured colour contrast of the 2016 slice. The Foundation's 2023 volume (Klingelhofer, ed., ch. 1) adds an argument from chronology: White reached Croatoan on 18 August 1590 "and not a year later", which "was unknown in 1937", and the carver, "Not knowing that the long-held 1591 date was wrong", dated the stone to the year he believed White had returned. This report has not been able to confirm that 1591 was the received date for White's return in the 1930s, so the argument is recorded here and given no weight. The stone does not bear on the colonists' fate. If genuine, it places seven survivors of a massacre near the Chowan in 1591; if a forgery, its writer had read the same sources used here.

What would settle it: scanning-electron imaging and residue analysis of the few incisions that escaped cleaning (identified in 2011 by Johannes Loubser, a rock-art specialist who examined the stones), where a modern alloy or an abrasive signature would be decisive; a quantified weathering comparison of an uncleaned groove floor, the natural exterior and the 2016 saw cut against local vein-quartz controls, the only test that could positively support authenticity; a search for the suspect forms in Early English Books Online; and the Emory "Dare stones collection, 1937 to 1987", which should hold Hammond's letters and the Pinkerton report.

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.

The Chesapeake: Quinn, Kupperman, Oberg (2008), Horn (2005)

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.

The Albemarle mainland: Parramore, Horn (2010), the First Colony Foundation, Oberg (2020)

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.

Croatoan: Dawson and Horton, DuVal

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.

Other readings

• Lee Miller, a writer (Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony, 2000), has the colony marooned by a plot of Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen's secretary of state, moved to the Chowan, attacked with its Chowanoc hosts and dispersed as slaves among a Siouan-speaking "Mandoag". Reviewers found the conspiracy "not persuasive" (Matson) and the reasoning "tendentious"; Oberg: "a larger interpretive leap than the evidence will allow". Her point that the Powhatan slaughter may be Company propaganda, "Did Strachey invent it? Was it propaganda to create an enemy?" (p. 223), is a fair question and is weighed in finding C.
• Brandon Fullam, an independent researcher (The Lost Colony of Roanoke: New Perspectives, 2017), sends the main body across Pamlico Sound to the Pamlico and Neuse country, reads Strachey's "slaughter at Roanoak" as Roanoke Island in 1586, and derives the stone houses from the Spaniards of Juan Pardo's expeditions into the Carolina interior in 1566 to 1568. His observation that Jamestown expected Spaniards at Ocanahowan by 1611 (p. 142) is right and is used in section 3; no sixteenth-century English site south of Pamlico Sound has been found.
• David La Vere (North Carolina Historical Review 86, 2009, pp. 250 to 281; The Lost Rocks, 2010) keeps the first Dare Stone open and reads "the slaughter of Powhaton of Roanocke" as a killing by the Roanoke Indians' own weroance, perhaps Wanchese, the Roanoke Indian who had been to England in 1584 and turned against the English. Section 7 answers the first point; the second is a possible reading of the 1609 sentence that Quinn had already canvassed in 1974.
• Andrew Lawler, a journalist (The Secret Token, 2018), concludes for division and absorption and treats the mystery itself as a cultural artefact bound up with Virginia Dare. He is sceptical of both digs: "Everything that Horton found could have made its way to Croatoan without the involvement of a Roanoke colonist", and the Site X finds "could conceivably be goods traded south from Jamestown decades later". He notes that the slaughter story rests "heavily on the testimony of Machumps". On the fate his conclusion and this one coincide.
• Ewen and Shields, Charles Ewen and the literary scholar E. Thomson Shields of East Carolina University (Becoming the Lost Colony, 2024), hold that none of the hypotheses "have been shown to be more probable than any of the others" and that only sixteenth-century Christian burials would settle it. This report agrees that nothing is settled and disagrees on ranking: the documents and the two footprints do favour one reading over the others, by a margin that the table in section 6 shows.
• Barbour (1969; 1975; 1986) established the forms of the place names that later scholarship uses, and placed Ocanahowan near the falls of the Roanoke; David Stick, the historian of the Outer Banks (1983), surveyed the theories without choosing; the National Park Service (2025) lists six theories and takes no position.

Credits

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.

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, 80 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.