Roanoke Colony

**Roanoke Colony** was a British colony in North America that disappeared mysteriously. It is called the "**Lost Colony**." It was on Roanoke Island in what is today Dare County, North Carolina, in the United States. It was started in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh. It disappeared sometime between 1587 and 1590. Today, nobody knows what happened to the people who were living there.

## The Charter 
On 25 March 1584, Queen Elizabeth gave Sir Walter Raleigh a charter to start a colony in North America. A *charter* is a document which gives permission from a monarch to the holder. Raleigh's charter said he could start a colony in a part of North America called *Virginia*. It also said that if he did not start the colony, Raleigh would not be able to start any other colonies ever again. 

Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth hoped that the colony would be rich. They wanted it to be a base for privateering. *Privateers* are pirates who work for the government to attack ships from other countries. The English privateers from the colony would attack the Spanish ships that were carrying treasure across the Atlantic Ocean to Spain.

## First trips to Roanoke Island 
### First expedition 
Raleigh sent some ships to explore North America in 1584. On 27 April 1584, Phillip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe sailed to the Eastern coast of North America. They landed on Roanoke Island on 4 July 1584. (Guayanilla Bay) on 11 May 1585.

#### In Puerto Rico 
Grenville and the *Tiger* waited in Puerto Rico for the other ships. While they were waiting, Grenville built a fort called Fort Elizabeth. He also did some privateering from there against the Spanish. Grenville soon got tired of waiting for the other ships. On 7 June 1585 he left Puerto Rico and abandoned the fort. Nobody knows what happened to the fort, or where exactly it was.

#### Arrival 
The *Tiger* arrived at the Outer Banks on 26 June 1585. (The Outer Banks are islands on the coast of the Carolinas in North America. Roanoke Island is part of the Outer Banks.) The *Tiger* hit a shoal in Ocracoke Inlet. This damaged the ship and most of their food was ruined. Aquascogoc was a village of the Croatan tribe.

### First colony 
Genville decided to leave some men to start a colony at the north end of Roanoke Island. He did this even though they did not have a lot of food and the Croatans were angry about Aquascogoc. Ralph Lane and 107 men were left on Roanoke Island. Grenville promised to return in April 1586 with more men and supplies. Lane and his men left for Roanoke on 17 August 1585. Lane built a small fort on Roanoke Island and explored some of the area. There are no pictures of the Roanoke fort. It was probably a lot like Fort Elizabeth on Guayanilla Bay, Puerto Rico.

Grenville did not return in April 1586. The Croatans were angry because the English had destroyed Aquascogoc, so they attacked the fort. The colonists were able to repel the attackers. (This means that the Croatan warriors didn't win the fight.) 

### Back to England 
Soon after this attack, Sir Francis Drake stopped by the fort on his way back to England. The colonists agreed to go back to England with Drake. They brought with them tobacco, maize, and potatoes to Europe for the first time.

The colonists were scared. They asked Governor White to go back to England and get help.

### Return trip cancelled 
Governor White left the colony in late 1587. The ship barely made it back to England. It was very dangerous to cross the Atlantic Ocean in the winter. There were bad storms and lots of heavy wind. White wanted to return to Roanoke fast with help. The captain said he would not go back during the winter because it was too dangerous. At the same time, the Spanish Armada was sailing to attack England. All English ships were sent to fight the Spanish, so there were no ships for White to sail back to Roanoke. or the Eno people.) 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 how to 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."

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 Catawba people (including the Shakaori people and Eno people)
* the Coree tribe
* the Lumbee tribe
The Lost Colony DNA Project was set up to test if this is true.

### The Chesepians 
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. 

### Drought 
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.

### Other ideas 
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.

Another idea is that the Spanish destroyed the colony. Earlier in the 1500s, the Spanish destroyed a French colony in South Carolina called Fort Charles. They also killed all of the people in a French colony in Florida. This is probably not what happened in Roanoke, because the Spanish were still looking for the colony in 1600.

## Sources 
## Other websites 
* The Lost Colony Center for Science and Research 
* The finding of Raleigh's lost colony (1907)
* Finding the lost colony of Roanoke by Brian Dunning