For nearly a century, American school children have been taught the same haunting mystery. In 1587, a group of English colonists landed on Roanoke Island. Then, they vanished, leaving behind only one cryptic clue carved into a wooden gatepost: the word "Croatoan."
In this edition of Weird Science, Public Radio East spoke with a Buxton native who is using science to dispel what he said is the myth behind the truth.
We are told it is one of history’s greatest unsolved cold cases. But what if the answer wasn't lost at all? What if it was simply erased?
“There's nothing from actual history to indicate this colony missing or being lost at all. That all comes from a play that started in the 30s,” said Scott Dawson, a historian, author, and a ninth-generation native of Hatteras Island.
He grew up in the small town of Buxton, North Carolina—less than a mile from the historic Croatoan village site. For more than a decade, Dawson and the Croatoan Archaeological Society have partnered with British archaeologists to prove that the "Lost Colony" was never lost. They just moved.
To understand how history became a mystery, Dawson said you have to look at the primary sources. Before the colonists ever arrived at Roanoke, the English Navy had been using Hatteras Island as a base for three years. The local Croatoan people were close allies. In fact, he said Croatoan men had traveled to England and back twice.
When the 1587 colony arrived, tensions with other mainland tribes were deadly. A colonist named George Howe was murdered. Terrified, Dawson said the governor turned to his indigenous allies.
“The English immediately returned to Croatoan with Manteo, who is Croatoan, and they beg for help,” he said, “And those guys throw them a feast and agree to help them, travel to the mainland, crush the other tribes, steal all their corn, and give it to the English. Then the governor's informed by the ships, which are off Nagshead, that they refuse to take them anywhere else because they want to pirate the Spanish and they're wasting time. So, the governor tells the colony, unfortunately, I have to leave. Write down where you relocate to, and they did. Croatoan.”
When the governor finally returned years later and found the word carved into the tree, he wrote in his own journal that he "greatly joyed," knowing they were safe with friends. Decades later, Dawson said early explorers found a mixed-race community on the island with blue-eyed natives who spoke of their English ancestors.
So how did this clear historical record turn into a ghost story? Dawson said the shift happened in 1937, with the launch of a highly successful outdoor drama on Roanoke Island.
“In 1937, when the play came out, we were still segregated in North Carolina. They were painting white kids brown to play the natives in the play until like two years ago. They make a lot of money off of it. Roanoke Island doesn't have a beach... but they're right next to Nags Head where you've got hundreds of thousands of tourists. And if it's cloudy, they can pull them over to Roanoke for a day with this fake history,” Dawson said. “Mystery sells."
By framing the Europeans as victims of a spooky disappearance, the narrative shifted entirely. The focus turned exclusively to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas.
Dawson said, “They had a sign as you pulled into the town up there that said ‘home of the first white child born in this savage land.’ They named the county Dare. They have a statue of her as an adult. Is she wearing deer skins and tattoos? Of course not. She's as white as ever. All of the focus is on Europeans. The Croatoan who fed the English 6 freshly killed deer every morning, fought another tribe on their behalf, and ultimately adopted them? They're not in the narrative at all."
The byproduct of commercializing this mystery was the total erasure of the Croatoan people. But Dawson decided it was time for science to intervene. His team began digging in Buxton, right at the heart of the old Croatoan village. What they uncovered was an absolute goldmine of Elizabethan history.
“Everything you could possibly imagine. We found their entire blacksmith shop. There's a Tudor rose from a horse bridle. There's Nuremberg token... a rapier sword. They're making arrowheads out of their wine bottles. They're making axes out of their door hinges,” Dawson said, “Everything you could possibly find, we found. But it’s hard to kill a myth."
To prove these items belonged to the lost colonists, Dawson turned to carbon dating. Metal tools and lead musket balls don't contain carbon, but the animal remains buried right alongside them do.
He said, “We had one really lucky find recently. A deer had been shot in the head with a musket ball that went through the skull and the upper jaw bone and got lodged in the bottom jaw. And the musket ball is still in the deer. And we found hundreds of musket balls, but you cannot carbon date lead. You can, however, carbon date the deer.”
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The carbon dates from the teeth matched the 1580s perfectly. Today, Dawson displays these artifacts at his Lost Colony Museum and Gifts in Buxton, hoping to bypass the commercial tourism machine and educate the public directly.
He said, “It's hard to kill a myth, especially if that myth makes money. And that's what we're dealing with. But the kind of recent science that we've done is if you believe in science, at least it proves what happened. Because you can date all this stuff stratigraphically by the layer that it's in, which we've been doing.”
Dawson said the evidence is in the dirt, and it is written on the trees. The colony wasn't lost; they were saved by neighbors.
