By: Phoebe Y. Elliott
Have you ever heard of Roanoke Island? I’m sure you have at least once or twice, but do you know what happened to them? Well, I’m going to tell you what happened, who found the devastating news, and some theories about where the people disappeared too.
First of all, let me tell you what happened. There was an artist named John White and he was from England. He was the one who found Roanoke Island and told some other people who were willing to cross the sea to modern-day North Carolina. There were two Native American tribes already there when they arrived, the Croatoans and the Rancocas. The Rancocas did not like the colonists on their island and soon became enemies. Side note: the Croatoans had their own island as well. A few months later, John White’s daughter gave birth to her daughter, however, they didn’t have enough supplies to support an extra mouth, so John bravely went back to England to get more. This was in the 1500s and Spain and England were at war with each other and because John went back and England was in peril, it took John three years to get back to Roanoke Island. Now, they didn’t have phones back then so John had no way to communicate with the other colonists all the way across the world. Soon some privateers came to help John and brought him back to Roanoke. But guess what he came home to... absolutely nothing! Yes, everything was gone, the colonists, the supplies, even the buildings! But how could this happen?
No one really knows for sure what happened to all those colonists, but people have made theories! But what is a theory? A theory is a system of ideas meant to explain something. The colonists DID leave a clue to where they were going though, they carved the letters, “CRO” into a tree. One of the theorists has said that maybe the colonists were headed back to England to get the supplies themselves and got shot by a Spanish ship, as they were still at war with each other. But do you remember that island I mentioned earlier, the one that the Croatoans lived on? Well, some people think that they went with friendly Croatoans to their island, but when John came back and “found out” that he couldn’t get over because the waters were too rough. Some people even believe that the colonists’ ship got destroyed and they all drowned. But in the end, the mystery of Roanoke Island stays a mystery. Will anyone ever crack the code? Will we ever find the bodies of the colonists? No one will ever know until they try, or die trying!