(Mystery) Dr. Mark Horton - "The Lost Colony of Roanoke"

[00:00:02] From the darkest reaches of space to the deepest corners of your mind. Welcome to From The Void. You're listening to From The Void, the podcast that dares to explore the strange, the unexplained, and the forgotten. I'm your host, John Williamson. In this episode, we journey into one of America's oldest and most enduring mysteries,

[00:00:31] the story of the lost colony of Roanoke. In 1587, more than 100 settlers vanished without a trace from the shores of what is now North Carolina. They left behind few clues save for a single word carved into a tree, Croatoan. To help us dig into the facts, theories, and recent discoveries surrounding this colonial enigma,

[00:00:55] I'm joined by Professor Mark Horton, an archaeologist who has spent years investigating this very mystery. Could the settlers have assimilated with local tribes? Were they victims of conflict or disease? Or is the truth something far more complex? Step into the void with us as we uncover what may have happened to the lost colonists of Roanoke. It records local files on both ends. So just when we do the formal goodbyes, just hang out for a second.

[00:01:23] It just needs a moment to upload the file. That's all. So, excellent. We'll go ahead and get started and I'll introduce you and then we'll go from there. Brilliant. That's far ahead. All right. Welcome to the podcast. I'm very excited to have on Dr. Mark Horton. Thank you so much for spending some time of your day with us today. Hi, John. Great to be with you. Absolutely. So this one's a really interesting story. I'm a big history nerd myself. My undergraduate degree is in history. And this is one, a story that stuck out to me as a child.

[00:01:51] We learned it growing up in the United States. But what was interesting about it is that I'm learning as an adult now that we didn't get the full story necessarily. And so there's some bits and pieces that we'll fill in here. Before we jump into it though, tell folks a little bit about yourself and the work that you do. So I'm Mark Horton. I'm over in England. I live in a Tudor house, a 16th century house. So every day I live through Tudorism. I'm an archaeologist. I'm a professor of archaeology at the Royal Agricultural University in Siren Cess,

[00:02:20] South England, which is in the West Country near Bristol. And I'm a professional archaeologist. I've been excavating sites all around the world. I've just come back from Zanzibar and we've got projects in Britain and Mongolia. But possibly one of my most interesting and fascinating projects is in North Carolina on Hatteras Island. Yes. So, and that's what I brought you here to talk about today.

[00:02:43] So one of the things, you know, like I mentioned at the top here, we were taught the story of, they call it the mystery of the lost colony of Roanoke. And so for those of you that aren't familiar out there, if you could give a little backstory on what would become the lost settlement of Roanoke. I'd like to do. I have to realise that Trudor Britain or Elizabethan Britain was very isolated. The Spanish Empire and the Portuguese Empire were all developing.

[00:03:10] In England under Elizabeth I, the connections and ambitions were much more restricted. And a bunch of seamen from Devon, which is in the southwest part of Britain, wanted to change that. People like Sir Francis Drake, Francis Drake as he then was, Humphrey Gilbert, John Oxenham, Martin Frobisher. These are sort of famous names, big sea dogs, if you like, of the Elizabethan era.

[00:03:37] And they wanted to mix, on the one hand, privateering, if you give it a polite name, or pirating, if you want to give it a rude name. It's more like pirating. With ambitions to try and establish bases in foreign lands that could be the basis of an Elizabethan colonial empire. And this was really all developing in the 1570s. Drake had just returned back from his navigation around the world.

[00:04:04] And he had aspirations to even establish a colony somewhere on the northwest coast of America. Because he thought that there would be a seaway along the northern end of Canada, the northwest passage. Of course, there wasn't. There might be nowadays with global warming, but then in the 16th century there wasn't. But he had ideas of a great colony called New Albion. And Humphrey Gilbert had an idea of establishing a colony in Newfoundland.

[00:04:30] Unfortunately, he died on the way back, got drowned, and his patent to create colonies passed to his cousin, Sir Walter Rally, or Water Rally as he then was. And Walter Rally saw the opportunity to establish a permanent English presence on the coast of North America. This was a coast he called Virginia after the Virgin Queen, Queen Elizabeth.

[00:04:55] And so from the 1580s promoted a number of voyages to East Coast America. Initially in 1584 to do a reconnaissance voyage to work out where to settle. And then that was followed in 1586 by a more permanent establishment. It was called a military colony. It was under Sir Richard Grenville, another famous Elizabethan sea dog.

[00:05:23] And they came to the Outer Banks and planned to create a permanent English settlement. They settled, kind of by mistake, on the island of Roanoke, which is one of the islands of the Outer Banks. And this military colony was a disaster, like many colonies were. And actually, they all had to be rescued by Sir Francis Drake, who was returning from raiding the coast of Panama. And they all went back to England.

[00:05:49] But that didn't stop Rally planning a much grander Sackler expedition. I shall draw breath at this point. Yeah, this is good stuff because this is all sort of, you know, I think part of what we were taught as kids here in the United States. That eventually there is this settlement that comes to be on this island off the coast of North America.

[00:06:11] And I think the version, I'll just tell this version very quickly so that way we can kind of get into the details that probably weren't included in the version that we heard. Was that this settlement then comes to be ultimately one of the mayor, one of the leaders has to go back for supplies because, you know, pretty rough going.

[00:06:29] Okay, so the 1587 expedition, which after the soldiers went back slightly in disgrace, was actually led, was actually a settlement expedition of women and children as well as males. Unlike the first expedition, their plan was to create a permanent settlement called the New City of Rally. And they had no real idea where they were going to end up. But they were decamped on Roanoke Island.

[00:06:58] And that's where they then chose to create and found this new city of Rally. And they were led by a man called John White, who had been present in the earlier expedition as the artist. And a remarkable drawing that he compiled of that earlier expedition. John White, his father, John White's daughter was married.

[00:07:22] And while they first arrived, his granddaughter, Virginia Dare, was born. However, and the story goes on, after a couple of months, as a ship prepared to go home, because these settlements, what they did was they basically dumped them there and let them to fend for themselves. And the ship sailed back to England. And according to John White's account, they implored him to go back with the ships to say, we need more food and possessions.

[00:07:49] And so John White then returned back to England in 1587, 1588, and looking for supplies. Now, the problem back in England, those of you who know your history, know that 1588 is the year of the Spanish Armada. And sailing back to America was banned. All the ships had to be marshaled to create a navy to fight the Spanish.

[00:08:14] And so when White returned, he wasn't able to go back easily with a ship full of supplies, but had to kick his heels around waiting to return. He eventually got back in 1590, and he managed to sail to the island of Roanoke, where he'd left his daughter, her husband, and his granddaughter, along with all the other colonists, and went to the new city of Raleigh and found the place abandoned.

[00:08:42] And literally, the doors were swinging on the huts. There was nothing left there. And he was very miserable that he basically lost, you know, where all they were. But there was a clue from the tree that said the word CRO, which probably stood for the island of Krautuan, where they indicated that that's the island that they had gone to to wait rescue.

[00:09:08] Now, I think you pointed out two details that are very interesting, because they're not necessarily a part of the story that we're told. Now, we're told about the mysterious message, which kind of lends itself to the lore and legend behind this story. But what's interesting, interesting points, at least to me, and my remembrance of this story is that's a large gap of time between when he left to go retrieve supplies and when he was finally able to return.

[00:09:32] And it's several years. And, you know, again, this is in the days prior to even like the telegram being invented. And so there's no real way for him to maintain communication with his daughter and the rest of the settlers. So there's this gap of time where there's, I would assume, no communication at all before he's able to. So the last white seas of his daughter and the colonists is when he sets sail in 1587.

[00:10:00] And when he returns back, they've gone. The really sad thing was that on his way to reach Roanoke Island, he went past the island of Krautuan, where they said they had gone, where he subsequently found. So the question is, why didn't he actually go back and find the colonists who were probably sitting on Croaton Island, which is now Hatteras Island, waiting to be rescued?

[00:10:26] Well, the answer is that the prevailing wind direction, of course, the days of sail was in the wrong direction. They had already lost people trying to get into Roanoke Island through the very narrow inlet. And the captain of the boat that brought him over wasn't, he said, there's a big storm coming. I've got to get back to England. What he really wanted to do was some privateering on the way home and didn't trace going back the 50, 60 miles. It was needed to go back to Croaton Island to accompany the mission.

[00:10:56] I mean, true, John White had almost hitched a lift on the boat rather than actually it was a properly funded expedition to do what it was meant to be done. So he returned back to England empty-handed, knowing that his relatives and the colonists were probably living on Hatteras Island. And he wrote a letter to one of the great Elizabethan narrators of this period of Angle Richard Hatlett in 1592.

[00:11:25] So that's why we know what happened. He described his events and how he walked around the island looking for the colonists and how he found this inscription on the tree. But he never returned. He wrote the letter actually from Ireland. And that letter is the last we ever heard of John White. Wow. I mean, it's really a heartbreaking part of the entire story. This man who loses essentially his entire family thinks he has a good idea of where they might have gone and is so close, but yet isn't able to confirm it.

[00:11:54] And so the other piece I want to talk about that you highlighted is the inscription on the tree. Some places it said it was a post, but this is not as mysterious as we were led to believe, at least me growing up as a child. This was actually an agreed upon form of communication, correct? That's absolutely correct. In fact, there were two inscriptions.

[00:12:14] One on the tree was CRO, and one on the palisade of the fort, or the city of New Raleigh, as it were, was the word Croteurne written out in full. So there was absolutely no doubt. And the full communication John White described as if they put a cross under the inscription, then they'd left under duress. If there was no cross, then they'd left voluntarily. And the inscription has no cross. So they made the decision to go to Croteurne Island.

[00:12:41] Now, one of the issues has been that historians have doubted the whole Croteurne thing. They basically said, well, we don't know where Croteurne is. We think it's a tribe. There's a bit of mystery as to where they might have gone. There's no mystery at all. John White, in the earlier exhibition, drew a map, and that map's a vicious library, and that map shows very precisely the island of Croteurne, and even marks where all the Indian villages are on the island.

[00:13:11] So there's no mystery at who the Croteurne are or where they went to. They went to the island of Croteurne, which is now Hatteras Island, and the villages of Buxton, Frisco, and Hatteras. And it's remarkable to me, knowing now that the time frame, the extended period of time in which John White was away and returned, and the fact that they were never truly able to confirm or deny the idea that they went to this island,

[00:13:38] they were never able to go there to say, hey, they're either there or they're not. And then we have all of these various things that crop up, despite the fact that everything is pointing towards the fact that they migrated over to this island, from, you know, killed by the natives, killed by Spanish explorers, you know, all these sorts of things. So your work really comes into play.

[00:13:58] Okay. So I have to explain that one of the problems with all these stories is, I'm afraid, an enduring American racism. Because the implication of them going to Croteurne Island, Hatteras Island, obviously mixing and being assimilated into the local Native American population, suggests that the first English in America are not the Mayflower or the Jamestown set. But actually, these are the Beesons, yes?

[00:14:28] And if you want to look for them and you want to look for their genes, you look for them in the Native Americans of America, but not the white descendants. And this is what has created over the years the fundamental problem. Now, if we look back into 1920s, 1930s, when many of these issues were being debated, this is the time of the Jim Crow laws, the fact that interracial marriage was illegal, it was a crime.

[00:14:57] And so the notion that the first settlers were living and marrying and having sex with Native Americans was something that the historians of that earlier generation could not stomach. And so they did a number of things. They created this myth about the lost colony and so forth. But they also created fraud. And the most egregious example of this fraud is what is known as the Deer Stones.

[00:15:23] Now, the Deer Stones were found, or the original Deer Stones were found in 1937. The height of this racism, American isolationism and so forth, white supremacy, the Kuhtar X'Klan and all that. And it was planted by historians, a couple of historians who've done the work from California, from Berkeley, California, and was planted to create a totally different narrative. And that narrative tells a story about how the lost colonists were all being murdered.

[00:15:53] The stone was planted up the Albemarle in Berkeley County and collected to the story that they'd all took. It was an inscription inscribing how they'd all been killed by the savages. Only really until three years ago, people were doing documentaries around the Deer Stones, suggesting that these were genuine. And it's a palpable play. And interestingly, it was created only basically a month after the play opened in Roanoke called The Lost Colony.

[00:16:20] The story and the play, The Lost Colony play, describes how they go to Crotone Island and get assimilated. So the Deer Stone was planted by historians as a reaction to the play to tell a different story. Yeah, that makes so much sense. And so the more likely theory, the one that even John White himself believed, that they peacefully migrated over and assimilated with this local Native American tribe, is the one that you have done extensive work on.

[00:16:49] So talk a little bit about the expeditions and the archaeological digs around the island. Okay, so the premise of what we believe is we believe that they were assimilated very, very quickly into the Native American community on Haceros Island. There might have been a survivor's camp for a few months, but when we know about survivor's camps, people say, oh God, oh no. And the Native women are far too attractive. Internal discipline collapses and they go and move into the local villages.

[00:17:17] And might have well been encouraged to do so because they had skills and technologies that were highly beneficial to the Native Americans. And so what we think is the way to find them is to actually excavate the Native American villages, not to look for some abandoned fort or something like that, but to go in and find the Native American stuff. And the Native Americans were quite messy and they built rubbish heaps.

[00:17:47] They had rubbish heaps everywhere, called middens in archaeology, where they throw away their shells and their bones and their kitchen refuge, their broken pots. But these preserve beautifully also the stuff that they are trading and have got access to. So these rubbish heaps enable archaeologists to go through there, get dated horizons, and contained within them, we have the material remains of the Elizabethan, to cut a long story short. Not much of it, very little.

[00:18:17] And of course, the graphic sense of the probability of a lighting upon a single object is obviously quite small. But we did find a number of artifacts in these middens that were clearly linked to the lost colony, or the abandoned colonists, we should say, as they moved in in the late 16th, early 17th century into Native Americans. And very quickly, they probably would have become, you know, they'd spoken Algonquian,

[00:18:45] and maybe the original colonists would have died maybe within 20 years. And their descendants, we're talking to the early 1600s, would be very similar to... Yeah, I think it's remarkable that, I mean, the fact that you found anything that can be traced back to Europe in that geographical area kind of screams that obviously they were there. So we found, for example, a token, a Nuremberg token,

[00:19:11] which is identical to one that's excavated in really the only known area where there's sort of traces of the colonists on Roanoke Island. Exactly the same token we found stratified in our deposits. We found trade items. We found remains of a rapier. We found remains of what's called a snap-ons from a musket, cannonball called a seiker shot. We found copper, copper ingots that had probably been bought for trade,

[00:19:40] vessel glass, they find vessel glass, a range of objects. I mean, clearly they were bringing this stuff in small boats, what are known as inices, from Roanoke down to the Sound, and then existing in their settlement. I mean, that's, as it were, one key piece of evidence. And then we then have a second piece of evidence, which is a bit more difficult to explain or to describe, which is that when we look at this community in the mid-17th century, 1640s thereabouts,

[00:20:10] we see that they're displaying all sorts of European tropes. So they're wearing European clothes, we're finding pins, we're finding square where tunics can be fastened. Now, some of these might come from the 16th century horizon, but some of this stuff may be coming from, being traded from Jamestown. They're clearly making gunpowder, they're making shots, they can work copper, they're chopping copper into nightly little figurines.

[00:20:38] They have all sorts of technological know-how that the Native Americans of the Outer Banks don't have. So to me, an almost more convincing case is the fact that this community have these skills, these technological skills and know-how, and the wandering around in European clothes, and they suggest that actually that Englishness, that English culture, has been retained over several generations. That's remarkable. And so surely there must be some lore

[00:21:08] within the Native American community as well that sort of blends to this theory as well, I would assume. Well, not really. I mean, the last we really hear of them is in 1700, when John Lawson, who was a traveller, a geographer, a severe relief on the Attaway. He was subsequently killed a couple of years later by the Native Americans. But he wandered around, he wrote an extraordinary account of his travels. And he describes the community on Hatteras Island as blue-eyed natives

[00:21:37] who could wear, who wore European clothes and could read from the book. So they were still, as it were, literate in 1700s, still wearing European clothes. And then he describes the story about this ghost ship of St. Walter Raleigh that came here 100 years earlier. So he recorded the tradition in 1700, and then that was really the last we heard of them. English sequels moved on to the island in the 1740s.

[00:22:06] And we've seen that they might have created a connection with the survivors of the Lost Country, who this time were basically Native American, and how they connected with these new English pioneer settlers were beginning to sort out. But also, they might have been involved as allies of the English in the Tuscarora Wars, so they might have moved out onto the mainland. Finding the descendants of the Croatoans today is a bit of a challenge. Yeah, that's, it's still, there's so many data points

[00:22:35] that certainly point towards this being the case in terms of what happened to that original settlement. And it certainly rewrites history as we knew it growing up. anyway, or up until this point. Yeah, I mean, I think the story is that, you know, with history is, is always being written by people who have an agenda to take. You know, archaeology is, it's science. We might have a agenda, but basically we have to be driven by the data. And the Lost Colony story is a story driven by prejudice

[00:23:05] and driven by a misunderstanding of the nature of what these communities were, and how valuable the English would have been to the nature of Americans in terms of their dealings with subsequent English and also, of course, Spanish. And the technological know-how was, was, was absolutely critical for them. And so, I think another thing we could say is that many historians have, for example, said the Hacerus Island, Crotown Island, is this barren sand strip on the Outer Banks

[00:23:33] that could not have supported this enlarged community. I mean, the historians who write that have never been there. It's one of the few permanent bits. It's not just a science bit. There's quite a lot of land involved. It's very rich in game, even today, full of deer and so forth. And the sound behind the island is absolutely full of shellfish and fish, absolutely, amazingly rich. So, the notion that they could not survive there

[00:24:02] is utter nonsense. It would have been, and clearly the Nature Americans did permanently all year round. And we can trace that because we can work out the different seasons for the shellfish and in their shell middens we can follow that through. So, there's no doubt at all that they would have lived there perfectly happily living off of, you know, lots and lots of chowder, basically. Hey, nothing wrong with that. That's incredible. So, it's, you know, I was fascinated. I caught you on a program, one of my favorite shows,

[00:24:32] Expedition Unknown with Josh Gates. Talk a little bit about some of the other projects you have going on, some of the other shows that we might catch you on over the next year. So, we did, we went back and did a full exploration this summer on the site and that's actually screening in the middle of February. It's called, the series show is called History Hunters and by all means go and have a look at that and it's quite fun because we looked at the higher nation there, how you could survive

[00:25:02] in this environment and, you know, what the game were, what the resources were around the story. So, tune in to History Hunters I think in late February sometime. Unfortunately, I can't see it because I'm in England. Well, we will definitely check it out here for certain and hopefully they make it accessible worldwide. This is absolutely fascinating. Are there any other points that you'd like to make just in regards to this story and essentially course correcting the historical record?

[00:25:32] Well, I mean, I think that it's really hard to change this. You know, this is set in, you know, people have preconceptions. But what I would say is that my, I've been working with the local community, the Crotone Archaeological Society and they've created an amazing museum, private museum in Buxton as you drive into Buxton and all our material is on public display there. It's not stuck in museum cases or anything like that it's on public display and Scott Dawson, the curator of the museum

[00:26:01] is there to answer questions and to show you around. So, I do urge your listeners if they're fascinated by this, you know, go and take a vacation on Hatteras Island or come on down and you'll be very welcome to visit the Lost Colony Museum and see all the stuff for yourself. You know, it's there. The museum is free. Please go and visit it and see what you think. I love it. Absolutely. Highly encourage folks to go check it out. Thank you so much for coming on and shedding some light

[00:26:31] and again, sort of correcting some of the historical inaccuracies which there are many as I'm finding throughout U.S. history. One that we need to cover at some point is, you know, the story of Paul Revere. I need to cover that one because he didn't quite make it back on Drake's Landing Place. That's the other one. California. Yeah. There's a few things we need to correct in the record, I think, but thank you so much for coming on. I know this is a trick,

[00:27:01] you know, when we're operating with two different time zones, but I truly appreciate you spending some time with me today. Pleasure.

[00:28:39] That was Professor Mark Horton sharing insight into one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in American history. The story of the lost colony of Roanoke continues to captivate not just because of what we don't know, but because of what it says about our desire to make sense of the past. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves a good mystery. I'm John Williamson, and this has been From the Void, where we shine a light into the unknown.

[00:29:09] Until next time, stay curious.