The Daily Tar Heel
Printing news. Raising hell. Since 1893.
Thursday, March 28, 2024 Newsletters Latest print issue

We keep you informed.

Help us keep going. Donate Today.
The Daily Tar Heel

Search goes on in Roanoke’s lost colony

“I think we have gone from a ‘Lost Colony’ to a ‘misplaced colony’ with our recent research findings,” said Brent Lane, a member of First Colony Foundation’s board of directors and director of the Carolina Center for Competitive Economies.

The clue has to do with one of two small correction patches on La Virginea Pars, a late-16th century British map of the North Carolina and Virginia coastal region currently in the British Museum in London.

Researchers at the museum closely examined the surface of the patch in Bertie County, N.C. and used modern scanning technology to look beneath the patch in 2012.

Researchers found a bright red and blue symbol of a fort underneath the patch, and on the surface, they found a separate fort symbol in scratch marks, which are thought to be from the quill of a pen writing in invisible ink.

“It is just really one of those most extraordinary occurrences that happens in historical research,” said Eric Klingelhofer, vice president for research at the First Colony Foundation.

In the late 16th century, Sir Walter Raleigh, a wealthy English courtier, sponsored expeditions to settle the Outer Banks and Chesapeake regions. Captains of an early scouting trip identified Roanoke Island — off North Carolina’s coast — as a suitable place for the first English colony, and in 1587 there were more than 100 settlers on the island.

But three years later when a British ship returned to the island to drop off supplies, the settlers were nowhere to be found. All that was left of the settlers on the island was a carving on a tree reading “CROATOAN,” which likely referred to the Croatoan Island 50 miles south.

“They had talked about going 50 miles into the main,” Klingelhofer said. “But a lot of people thought they meant going up to Virginia ... The colonists had really wanted to go up to the better harbors of the Chesapeake Bay. They thought that was a better place for their ships than the Outer Banks.”

The hidden fort symbol lies on the Albemarle Sound in modern-day Bertie County, which is west of Roanoke Island. Sources made available after the colonists disappeared from Roanoke reference plans to resettle the mainland, and the fort in Bertie County is now suspected to be the realization of those plans.

The reason the Bertie County fort was covered with a patch remains a mystery. Klingelhofer said both patches were applied while John White was making the map in London, and it was possibly meant to keep the settlement secret from the Spanish, whom the British were at war with and had been known to eradicate competing settlements in the New World. There also could have been other motives.

“It could be that they just decided, ‘Well we’re not going to send anybody there. It’s a stupid place to build a fort, and let’s just pretend we never thought about it,’” Klingelhofer said.

Lane said the “Lost Colony” could have played a significant role in shaping early American culture.

“If they indeed survived the way they were reported to have done, what you saw was the emergence of a culture of combination of Native Americans and the particular culture, even political leanings of the Roanoke colonists,” he said. “I like to think of it as perhaps the first stirrings of the American melting pot in Albemarle.”

The archaeological findings aren’t yet convincing enough for experts to accept the hidden fort as the resettlement of Roanoke Colony. Steve Claggett, state archaeologist at the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, said the First Colony Foundation is finding traces of 16th-century European occupation in Bertie County, but no big smoking gun.

“I think we’re making good progress,” Klingelhofer said. “I think in the near future we should be able to turn the corner on it and say, ‘It is either this spot or it won’t be.’”

To get the day's news and headlines in your inbox each morning, sign up for our email newsletters.

state@dailytarheel.com

Special Print Edition
The Daily Tar Heel's Collaborative Mental Health Edition