England was at war with Spain. White could not find any ships to take to Roanoke because of the fighting. After three years, White found a group of privateers who said they would take him to Roanoke. He landed on Roanoke Island on 15 August 1590. The colony was empty. All 90 men, 17 women, and 11 children were gone. There were no signs of fighting. The people had just disappeared.
The only thing White found was the word "CROATOAN" carved on a tree. The word "CRO" was carved on another tree. All of the houses and buildings had been taken apart. This means that the colonists did not leave in a hurry.
White had told the colonists what to do if something bad happened to them. He told them to carve a Maltese Cross on a tree if someone made them leave the colony. The colonists didn't carve the cross on any of the trees. White thought that the colonists had gone to an island called Croatoan Island. (Today, Croatoan Island is called Hatteras Island.)
The men who brought White to Roanoke did not let him search Croatoan Island. They wanted to leave because there was a big storm coming. They left on 16 August 1590 and went back to England.
In 1602, Raleigh decided to find out what happened to his colony. He sent several ships to the colony. A man named Samuel Mace was in charge. Raleigh bought all of the ships and promised that the sailors would be paid. He did this so they would not go privateering on the way to Roanoke.
The ships stopped at the Outer Banks to pick up some sassafras and other aromatic woods. These plants were used to make perfume in Europe. They could be sold in England for a lot of money. By the time they finished getting the sassafras, the weather had gotten bad. The ships turned around and went back to England. They never got to Roanoke Island. Raleigh could not send any more ships to Roanoke because King James I arrested him for treason.
The Spanish also tried to go to Roanoke. They knew that Raleigh wanted to use the colony for privateering. They wanted to destroy the colony so he could not do that. The Spanish thought that the colony was a lot more successful than it really was. In 1590, the Spanish found the remains of Roanoke by accident. They didn't think it was the Roanoke Colony. They thought it was a small settlement outside of the main colony. They thought that Roanoke Colony was by the Chesapeake Bay. (That was where John White was supposed to set up the colony.) The Spanish could not get enough ships and people to look for the Roanoke colony because of the Anglo-Spanish War.
The colony was called the "Lost Colony" because no one knows what happened after 1587. There are many ideas about what might have happened. There is no proof that any of these ideas are right. It is still a mystery today.
One idea is that the colonists went to live with the Native American tribes. They may have joined the Chowanoke tribe. The Choanoke were attacked by another tribe. The Jamestown Colony's records say that a tribe called "Mandoag" attacked the Choanoke. (Jamestown was a colony in Virginia started 20 years after Roanoke.) The word "Mandoag" is from the Algonquian language. It means 'enemy nation.' The "Mandoag" might have been the Tuscarora people or the Eno people. The historian Lee Miller wrote about this idea in the book "Roanoke: solving the mystery of the lost colony" (2000).
There is some proof for this idea. A 1607 map from Jamestown called the "Zuniga Map" had some writing on it.) The writing said "four men clothed that came from roonock" were living in an Iroquois village on the Neuse River. (The Tuscarora tribe spoke the Iroquois language.) Also, a secretary from Jamestown wrote about strange Native American villages. William Strachey wrote that there were two-story houses with stone walls in the villages of Peccarecanick and Ochanahoen. He thought that the Roanoke colonists taught the Native Americans build these kinds of buildings.
In the late 1880s, there were Native Americans in Robeson County, North Carolina who said they were related to the Roanoke settlers. A politician from North Carolina named Hamilton McMillan learned about this claim. He found that a lot of the words in this Native American tribe's language were a lot like some old English words that are no longer used. Also a lot of the people in the tribe had family names that were the same as the names of the colonists'. McMillan thought that these Native Americans were the descendents of the Roanoke settlers. Because of this, he helped pass a bill called the "Croatan Bill" on February 10, 1885. This bill said that the Native American people in Robeson county were officially called "Croatan."
Two days after the bill, there was an article written about the tribe. It was printed in the "Fayetteville Observer" on 12 February 1885. It said that "Croatoa" was just a village and the tribe called themselves the Tuscaroras. The article also said that the tribe was always friendly to the white people of Roanoke. When they saw that there was no help coming from England, the tribe let the colonists live in their villages. Over time, the tribe left their old villages and moved to live in the center of Robeson County.
Historians are not sure that this is really what happened. There are many different Native American tribes that have legends and stories about the Roanoke Colony. There is a legend that is a lot like the Robeson County tribe about the Saponi people of Person County, North Carolina. The Saponi are now extinct (today there are no living Saponi people). The legend says that the Saponi were descended from the English colonists. When settlers met the Saponi, they were surprised to find that they already spoke English and knew about Christianity. The Saponi also had European features. (Their faces were shaped like Europeans' faces.)
Some of the other tribes that say they are descended from the Roanoke colonists are:
The Lost Colony DNA Project was set up to test if this is true.
A historian named David Beers Quinn thinks that the Roanoke colony moved to a new place and then was destroyed. In 1607, Captain John Smith started the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. One of his jobs was to find out what happened to the Roanoke Colony. Chief Powhatan told Smith that he had killed all of the Roanoke colonists. He said that they were living with the Chesepian tribe. The Chesepians would not join Chief Powhatan's Powhatan Confederacy. Also there was a prophecy that said the Chespians would destroy Powhatan's empire.
Because of this, the Powhatan Confederacy killed all the Chesepians. Chief Powhatan showed Captain Smith proof of this. He showed Smith some iron tools made in England. The bodies of the colonists were never found. Archaeologists do not have any evidence either.
In 1998, there was a team of scientists studying the climate (weather) of the Roanoke area. The team took cores of some 800-year-old trees on Roanoke Island. They wanted to look at the tree rings to see the history of rain and temperature over the years.
They found that the colonists had started Roanoke Colony in the middle of the worst drought in 800 years. (A "drought" is a period of time when there is very little rain.) "This drought persisted for 3 years, from 1587 to 1589, and is the driest 3-year episode in the entire 800-year reconstruction," the team wrote in the journal "Science". The drought happened in all of the southeastern United States. It was worst in the area near Roanoke Island.
The people in charge of the team were David W. Stahle and Dennis B. Blaton. Stahle was a climatologist from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Blaton was an archaeologist from The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Governor White left some ships at the colony when he left in 1587. They had a full-rigged pinnace and some small ships. One idea is that the colonists tried to sail back to England in these ships. It could be that the ships sank and the colonists died.