I am creating this topic because I recently visited Roanoke Island, off the coast of South eastern Virginia. As many of you know how the story goes, a group of settlers from England landed there in the early 1600's. They dissapeared without a trace. I am interested in hearing what you think might have happened to the colonists livign there!! And use your imagination!!

My guess is they got bored with their little island home and moved inland and assimilated into the native tribes.

Or they got eaten. By what (or whom) is yet to be determined. :lol:

This is fortuitous. One of the many projects I'm fidlding with involves incorporating the Roanoke colony mystery into a Cussler-esque political thriller, but there is precious little information available to me (out here on the West Coast) about the state of the site right now.

I may want to pick your brain for details at some point in the future.

Don't forget the mysterious carving in the fence post "Croatoan."

My guess is a combination of assimiliation, killed by indians, moved on and killed by diseases. Maybe the word croatoan is spelled croton today. Many old words are spelled differently today.

This story has fascinated me for years, and all the moreso because the most common assumptions (as some of you have made in the above posts) don't bear up.

There were other colonies that were wiped out by natives, disease and starvation, but in every case, there is archaeological proof of the events. Starvation or an epidemic doesn't kill everyon all at once, and those who live the longest bury the others, and usually leave some kind of marker to tell the tale. At Roanoke, the bodies aren't there, so you can discount those theories. Similarly, a massacre would leave some physical evidence; bodies at the very least, signs of a struggle, burned structures--again, there's nothing forensic to deifinitively state that as a cause. Did they simply move on to greener pastures, or perhaps to Croatoan Island as suggsted? A plausible alternative is that they intended to move to Croatoan, but either went the wrong way, or perished en route.
The problem with the "moved on" theory is summed up in this line from the above source:

That suggests a sudden evacuation, so hasty that there wasn't even time to pack. What could have prompted that decision? Some kind of impending natural disaster, or hostile natives? We may never know with a reasonable degree of certainty, but the more I read about this story, the more interesting it becomes.

Natural disaster would have left traces or destroyed everything manmade on the island. Any poisons introduced into the food supply would leave bodies- as in the argot theory for the Salem witch trials. An attack either by the local natives or by sea would leave evidence. Building a ship large enough to transport that many people would be beyond the capabilities of the settlers without specialized tools and skills. If they were picked up by a passing ship which later sank it would seem that some note would be left and the settlers would have packed their possessions. This leaves two possibilities that I can see- one should be discussed in the X-Files forum and the other an internal revolt.

Well, assuming than an X-files explanation is out of the question, we have to look at all the other possiblilities. An internal revolt might account for a few deaths, but there would be bodies and probably survivors to tell the tale.

Maybe so maybe no, but they would packed their stuff and taken it along.

A natural disaster wouldn't have to be on the order of a tsunami or earthquake--it could have been a period of heavy rain or snow. But the threat of a disaster or attack might have prompted the settlers to flee, perhaps to a secondary settlement (of which the departed colonists might have been unaware) or to some other perceived place of refuge. It may be that somewhere on the island, there is an undiscovered communal house, or perhaps a collapsed or flooded cave, in which the bodies of the colonists have lain these past centuries.
I did find one resource that suggested a linguistic commonality in a native tribe further down the coast which has led some to believe that the colonists might have integrated into a native community some distance from the settlement and lived out their natural lives. I have been studying anthropology this term, specifically Native Americans of Oregon, and one fact that has emerged is the existence of slaves in native culture. In fact, slave raids were the chief source of intertribal war prior to arrival of Europeans. If the natives of the area had chosen to attack the colonists, it would not have simply been for the purpose of killing them. The big flaw in this theory of course is that a raiding party would also have taken physical items, especially metal tools, and from what I gather, these items were found in the abandoned settlement.
And so, the mystery endures...

I am led to wonder exactly how thorough the search was and how accurate the documentation. A thorough search would involve several days at the very least and the longer the settlers had been gone the tougher to find clues. I find it hard to believe that every living soul in a settlement of that size could have simply vanished. Yet no good explanation exists. I would like to see the reports from the initial search party to satisfy my own curiosity.

Since "Croatoan" was also a tribe as well as an island, maybe the inscription left at the Roanoke site meant that they integrated with that tribe.

That decision may well have been decided for them by the natives as an ultimatum. If one was faced with annihilation or integration, one would seriously be tempted to down tools and leave peacefuly.