White comes home to Roanoke and finds it empty; the houses are taken down
For three years, John White had been trying to get back to the colony he governed on Roanoke Island, delayed first by shortages, then by the Spanish Armada, then by ships that failed him. On August 18, 1590, the anniversary of granddaughter Virginia Dare's birth, he finally landed and found the settlement gone, the houses dismantled, his belongings ruined, rain and rust having done the rest. The only clues were letters carved into a tree and the word CROATOAN cut into a post. Bad weather and the loss of three anchors then forced him to abandon the search.
Roanoke was the first English attempt at a permanent colony in what became the United States, and its disappearance became the country's founding mystery. The unanswered question of what happened to the settlers made Roanoke, not Jamestown or Plymouth, the first story Americans told about colonization's fragility.
QWho was the navigator that stranded the Roanoke colonists on the island in the first place?
Simon Fernandes, a Portuguese navigator hired to guide the 1587 expedition, made the call that put the colonists on Roanoke instead of their intended destination. The colony's charter and plans actually pointed toward the Chesapeake Bay, a location the settlers believed offered better land and safer harbor. Fernandes, reportedly eager to get his ships free for a privateering run against Spanish shipping, refused to carry the colonists any farther and forced them ashore at Roanoke instead. That single decision by a hired ship's pilot put John White's daughter, granddaughter, and roughly ninety other settlers on the exact spot where they would later vanish.
QWhat was Virginia Dare's place in Roanoke's short colonial record?
Virginia Dare, born August 18, 1587, holds the distinction of being the first English child born on American soil, arriving just weeks after her parents landed as part of the roughly 115 colonists John White brought to Roanoke that year. Her birth was recorded precisely in the colony's documents, giving historians one of the only firm dates tied to the settlement's brief existence. She was White's granddaughter, meaning White returned in 1590 hoping to find not just a colony but his own family intact. No baptismal, burial, or any other record of her after infancy has ever surfaced in English archives.
QHow large was the 1587 Roanoke expedition that White was trying to get back to?
White's 1587 voyage carried White's 1587 voyage carried a total of roughly ninety colonists, including seventeen women and eleven children among the households, a mixed group intended to form a self-sustaining settlement rather than a military outpost, which is why the food shortage that sent White back to England grew urgent so quickly. Feeding families, not just soldiers, strained supplies faster than Raleigh's backers had planned for. That population, entire households rather than garrisons, is what makes the 1590 discovery of an empty site with no bodies, no wreckage, and no graves so unusual, since a settlement of that size leaving behind no bodies, no wreckage, and no graves has no other clear parallel in the colonial record.
