If you do not obey the Lord your God . . . the Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies.

Deuteronomy 28:15, 25

Sir Walter Raleigh was an English explorer and adventurer who for many years dreamed of planting a colony in the New World. Finally, in 1584 his close friend, Queen Elizabeth, granted him permission to make the attempt. So Raleigh put Arthur Barlowe and Philip Amadas in command of two ships and sent them on their way. As Columbus had done, they avoided the prevailing Westerly winds off the coast of Europe by sailing down to the Equator. There they picked up the trade winds, which blew them across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean. Then they made their way up America’s East Coast until they arrived at the Outer Banks of what is today North Carolina.

After they gave thanks to God for their safe arrival, they rowed ashore through the sparkling waves, pulled the boats up on the gleaming white sand, and went exploring. They found deer and fowl, sweet red grapes, tall red cedars, and fragrant flowers. It seemed like a paradise to them.

The Native Americans watched the English for a few days and finally came to meet them. The Indians and the English found that even though they didn’t know each other’s languages they could communicate through sign language and gestures. The next day the Indians returned and brought with them Granganimeo, the brother of their chief, Wingina.

The sailors soon struck up a brisk trade with the Indians, exchanging beads and trinkets for animal skins which they could sell back in England. When the English indicated that they needed vegetables, the Indians loaded them up with melons, onions, walnuts, cucumbers, and peas. Barlowe said, “We found the people most gentle, loving and faithful.”

When it came time to go back home, Barlowe and Amadas forced two natives to come with them—Wanchese from Roanoke Island and Manteo from Croatoan Island. This was the first time in America that the English had taken prisoners from another race. It was the beginning of slavery.

The next English expedition to the New World was under the command of Sir Richard Grenville. When they reached Cape Fear off the Carolina coast, the pilot of the fleet’s flagship, Tiger, carelessly allowed his ship to run aground on a sandbar at the southern end of the Outer Banks. Unfortunately, all their provisions were stored in that ship, and the pounding waves soon pushed seawater through the hull and ruined the seed corn that was going to provide food for the colony. Now they were at the mercy of the natives. If they didn’t get food from the Indians, they might starve to death.

Grenville immediately led a party of sixty men ashore to find the Indians. To make sure that the English treated the Indians right, Grenville made strict rules that the English could not beat the natives, or force them to work, or enter their homes without permission.

The men were on their best behavior when they met the Pomeoic Indians, who received them gladly. Everything went smoothly until the English got back to their boats and Grenville noticed that his personal silver drinking cup was missing. Assuming that the Indians had stolen it, though he had no proof of this, he flew into a towering rage. And then he decided to do something that wiped out all the good feelings between the natives and the English. He ordered Amadas to go back to the Indians’ settlement, burn down their houses, and destroy their corn crops. This made the Indians very angry. As the word spread through the area about what the English had done, all the Indians began avoiding them.

Back at the beach, the English found that the Tiger had been repaired and was once again able to sail, so Sir Richard Grenville made plans to depart for England. Before he left, he got Granganimeo’s agreement for the English to build a small settlement on Roanoke Island. So they quickly constructed a fort, a few houses for the leaders, a church, a storehouse, and shacks for the rest of the settlers.

Sir Richard sailed away on August 25, leaving behind 107 settlers under the command of Ralph Lane, the acting governor. There was a problem, though, because almost half of the settlers were soldiers who knew nothing about building houses in the wilderness. Many of the others were from upper English society and they thought that digging and chopping down trees and planting was beneath their dignity, so they refused to do any work. The colony was not off to a good start.

Several weeks later Granganimeo’s brother, King Wingina, came to talk. He was suspicious of the English, not just because of what they had done to the Pomeoic, but because everywhere they went, after a few days the natives began to die. Though neither the Indians nor the colonists understood what was happening, the English were spreading measles and smallpox among the natives, and the Indians had no immunity to these diseases.

Lane and Harriot invited the Indians to come and join them in prayers for God’s help, which they did. Wingina invited the English to sing psalms in his village, and to pray for him when he thought (mistakenly) that he was dying. Thomas Harriot, who had learned to speak the Algonquin Indian language and could interpret for the English, brought a Bible into the Indians’ village. He told the Indians about Jesus in their own tongue. The Indians were confused, however, because they thought that the Bible itself was a source of power. So they grabbed it and rubbed it all over their bodies!

When winter came, the Indians shared their food with the colonists, but in the spring, the English demanded that the natives hand over their seed corn. This made Wingina mad, because without the seed corn there could be no harvest in the fall. He started talking with other chiefs about joining together to kill all the colonists. But later he changed his mind and decided to help them. He taught them how to trap fish in weir nets, and gave them several fields that he had planted with his own seed corn. Without Wingina’s help the little English colony wouldn’t have made it through the next winter.

But strangely, Wingina changed his mind once again. He tore up the colonists’ fishing weirs and began making plans to kill them. Before he could attack them, Sir Francis Drake arrived at Roanoke with a powerful fleet of 23 English warships that had just come from the Caribbean, where they had attacked Spanish settlements. Seeing the colonists’ need for help, Drake ordered his ships to give them supplies, but just as they started rowing things ashore a ferocious three-day storm blew in. Many of the ships were sunk, and with them much of the provisions.

This was the bitter end for Governor Lane—he decided that they should give up the colony and go home with Drake. But a few weeks after they sailed away Sir Richard Grenville arrived with six ships and 400 hundred soldiers. When he heard that Governor Lane had abandoned the colony he changed his plans and took everybody away except for fifteen men and enough provisions to last two years. But fifteen men weren’t enough to defend the little colony against an Indian attack. The future didn’t look good.

When Thomas Harriot reached England, he brought back a smelly weed the Indians smoked. They called it uppowac, which the Spaniards translated as tobacco. It became a big hit in London society. How soon could more ships go back to find more of it?

The following spring, as it turned out. But Sir Walter Raleigh had difficulty finding someone to lead the expedition. Finally he settled on the artist John White. And Manteo, who was made Governor of Roanoke, would go back to rule over all the local Indians. He would report directly to Queen Elizabeth.

The expedition sailed in May of 1587, and for the first time women came with the men. There were fourteen couples, including White’s daughter Eleanora and her husband, Ananias Dare. Eleanora was pregnant, and would have her baby after they got to America.

But getting there took a long time. When they finally arrived at Roanoke, White’s navigator-pilot, Simon Fernandez, insisted that all 112 colonists get off his ship there, instead of further north at Chesapeake Bay, which is where they had been headed. When they approached the fort, they were upset to find that it was in ruins. The houses were abandoned and overgrown with weeds, and there was no sign of the men Grenville had left behind the summer before.

They searched everywhere but found only the bones of one English settler. Had the Indians killed everyone? Finally, one of Manteo’s relatives told them that the Englishmen had indeed been ambushed by the natives. In a fierce fight, the English had lost two men, but the rest escaped to the Outer Banks. There they had disappeared. None of the Indians seemed to know what had happened to them.

It was still very dangerous for the settlers, however, because a few days later one of the men was murdered while hunting for crabs on the beach. White tried to conclude a peace treaty with local Indian chiefs, but they didn’t show up when they were supposed to. So John White got angry and decided to attack the Indians, which was a dreadful mistake. The Indians he chose to assault were perfectly innocent—they were Manteo’s kinsmen and probably the last friends the English had in the entire region. When the English realized their mistake, they called off the attack, asked the Indians’ forgiveness, and helped to bind up their wounds. But great harm had been done.

Soon, however, two happy events occurred which made everyone feel better. Manteo was baptized into the Christian faith and installed as Governor of Roanoke in a special ceremony. Five days after that Eleanora Dare gave birth to the first English child born in the New World, a baby girl they appropriately named Virginia.

Pilot Hernandez was still hanging around with his ship, the Lion, to see how things would turn out. When John White took a careful look at their provisions he found that they did not have enough food to last them until the next harvest. The colonists were worried and asked him to go back to England and tell Sir Walter Raleigh to send them more supplies.

Before White left he made the settlers promise that if they were to leave Roanoke for any reason, they would carve the name of the place where they were going on a tree trunk. If they were being forced to leave they were to carve a cross over the letters.

His daughter and baby granddaughter came down to the beach to see him off, and with a heavy heart White kissed them goodbye and got into the rowboat that would take him to the Lion and home to England. From the rowboat’s stern he waved to them all the way out to the ship.

When White got to England, he found Queen Elizabeth preparing for an expected invasion by King Phillip II of Spain, who was assembling a mighty fleet for this purpose. The Queen had decreed that all English ships were needed to fight the Spanish, so Raleigh couldn’t send a relief expedition to Roanoke.

England fought off Spain’s attempted invasion, but it wasn’t until March of 1590 that John White was able to sail for Roanoke—this time with two ships under the command of Captain Cocke. It had been two and a half years since he had left.

As they neared Roanoke Island White saw plumes of smoke. That meant there were people there! But when they finally came ashore, although White found Indian footprints in the sand, he saw no one.

“Sir, look at this!” one of the sailors cried out. The governor and the others rushed over to find three Roman letters carved into the trunk of a tree: C R O. But there was no cross. Perhaps they had been forced to leave in a hurry and never had the chance to finish carving the name of Croatoan Island, the place of Manteo’s village.

When the search party reached Roanoke Village, they found the buildings in ruins. “Nobody’s been around here in a long time,” muttered Captain Cocke. Near the entrance there was a tree whose bark had been stripped off. Someone had taken the time to carefully carve “CROATOAN” five feet above the ground, but there was no cross over it. The settlers must have gone there of their own will.

White also found trunks of his and other colonists that had been buried to hide them from the Indians. But they had been dug up and trashed. “Many of my things [were] spoiled and broken, and my books torn from the covers, the frames of some of my pictures and maps rotten and spoiled with rain,” White wrote later.

It was starting to rain. Captain Cocke was anxious to leave. If White wanted to do any further exploring, he would have to come back another time. As he stood on the shore waiting his turn to get into the rowboat that would take them back to the ship, he remembered that this was the same spot where he had said goodbye to his daughter and granddaughter two and a half years ago. Tears filled his eyes as he realized he would probably never see them again.

Sadly, he looked up at the darkening sky and prayed for them and the other settlers of the lost colony, asking for “the merciful help of the Almighty, whom I humbly beseech to help and comfort them.”

———

John White never came back to America, and the fate of the Roanoke settlers became a great mystery. George Percy, who came on the first English voyage to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, said that he had seen an Indian boy with yellow hair and rather white skin, so perhaps the lost colonists had intermarried with the Indians.

Captain John Smith claimed that Powhatan told him that the colonists had moved in with the Chesapeake Indians to the north. But if that is true, why was CROATOAN carved in the tree?

Powhatan supposedly also told Smith that shortly before the English arrived in 1607 his priests had prophesied that from the Chesapeake Bay area a nation would rise up and destroy his kingdom. If what Powhatan said was true, then perhaps out of fear he had ordered his warriors to kill all the Chesapeake and the English colonists before more English settlers could arrive and make the prophecy come true. English colonial secretary William Strachey believed it was true, and said that after his arrival at Jamestown in 1609 he had discovered that the Roanoke settlers had been slaughtered by Powhatan.

Some of the Roanoke settlers must have escaped, however, because rumors of survivors kept circulating in England, and a 1610 search party from Jamestown was told that “four men clothed” had originally come from Roanoke. Also, Strachey was told by an Indian named Machumps that Indians southwest of Chesapeake Bay had been taught by the English to build houses out of timber and stones. But no solid evidence to back up any of the rumors was ever found.

In 1701, a naturalist named John Lawson was told by Indians on the Outer Banks that “several of their ancestors were white people and could talk in a book [read] as we do; the truth of which is confirmed by gray eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians, and no others.” In the latter part of the nineteenth century, North Carolinians noticed that many Indians in the Outer Banks area of the state were light-skinned with pale eyes and bore last names matching some of the Roanoke colonists.

No definite information has come to light since then. The fate of the Lost Colony remains a mystery.