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” John Smith spoke to two Indian chiefs who described men clothed like Smith who lived in English-style houses. There was also a report the colonists were slain by Powhatan, but a few survived. Powhatan, the chief of an alliance of tribes in the Chesapeake region, also claimed that he killed them. The explorations by Smith’s men turned up no one, and they concluded by 1612 that all of Ralegh’s colonists were dead. There was no proof either way. In 1660 a Welshman reported preaching to light-colored Indians along the Neuse River. In 1709 John Lawson surveyed the Carolinas and encountered Hatteras Indians who told him that “several of their Ancestors were white People, and could talk in a Book, as we do; the Truth of which is confirm’d by gray Eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians.” After this point legends take over, including an elaborate hoax involving stones with Eleanor Dare’s initials, reflecting an intense desire to know the fate of America’s first-born English child, Virginia Dare. Today the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, the descendants of the Hatteras Indians who migrated from Croatoan Island, also claim to be descendants of the “lost” colonists. This is likely, but impossible to prove. There were other lost Englishmen—the three left behind by Lane and Drake in 1586 and the fifteen left by Grenville—who may have survived and intermingled with the natives also.

John White, by the way, gave up his search for the colonists after the voyage of 1590, declaring himself contented. From Ireland he wrote to his friend Richard Hakluyt that he was “committing the relief of my discomfortable company the planters in Virginia to the merciful help of the Almighty, whom I most humbly beseech to help and comfort them, according to his most holy will and their good desire.” He certainly sounds as if he believed the colonists were still alive.

In the 1605 comedy Eastward Ho, which predates the sightings by the Jamestown settlers, Captain Seagull says of Virginia: “A whole country of English is there, man, bred of those that were left there in ’87; they have married with the Indians, and make ’em bring forth as beautiful faces as any we have in England.”

Seagull is joking with another character, but he has hit upon a truth that lies at the heart of the Roanoke mystery. No one can migrate to a new land without being changed by it and leaving a mark on it. Sometimes this happens by violence, and sometimes it happens quietly and no one writes about it. Probably there were colonists still alive in 1590, and in 1605, and even forty years after that. They had children with beautiful faces who gave birth to more children with beautiful faces, and on and on. In that way, they are still among us.

For Further Reading and Research

Algonquians of the East Coast. By the editors of Time-Life Books. Alexandria, Virginia, 1995.

Harriot, Thomas. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Originally published in 1588. New York: Dover Publications, 1972.

Lacey, Robert. Sir Walter Ralegh. New York: Atheneum, 1974.

Leland, Charles G. Algonquin Legends. New York: Dover Books, 1992. Rpt. Of Algonquin Legends of New England. Boston, 1884.

Miller, Lee. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000.

Milton, Giles. Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2000.

Oberg, Michael Leroy. The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Quinn, David Beers. Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1606. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Ralegh, Sir Walter. The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh. Agnes M. C. Latham, ed. London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1929.

Searching for the Roanoke Colonists: An Interdisciplinary Collection. E. Thomson Shields and Charles R. Ewen, eds. Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2003.

Smith, John, Capt. Writings, with Other Narratives of Roanoke,