Story Highlights
- Historical event:
- 18 August 1590
- One of the clues that John White discovered on the site of the "Lost Colony" was the word "Croatoan" carved into a tree.
On this day in 1590, English Governor John White returned from England to the American Roanoke Colony and found it empty. It was a great mystery, which has not been fully explained to this day.
Namely, all 90 men, 17 women and 11 children who had settled the colony a few years earlier on the coast of present-day American federal state of North Carolina disappeared. Roanoke Colony, because of this mystery, is today referred to as “The Lost Colony”.
Roanoke Colony was one of the first attempts of the English colonization of North America.
It is interesting that the first English child ever born in North America was born precisely in Roanoke Colony. It was a girl called Virginia Dare, and she was among the missing colonists who the British were never able to find. Said Governor John White, who on this day found Roanoke Colony empty, was the grandfather of Virginia Dare.
One of the clues that John White discovered on the site of the “Lost Colony” was the word “Croatoan” carved into a tree.
There is an assumption that the missing colonists used that word to notify their English compatriots that they moved from Roanoke Colony to Croatoan Island, a few dozen kilometers away. However, they were not found there, so their fate remains a mystery.
