A SECRET was hiding in plain sight | The lost colony of Roanoke

I don't know about you but I am far more interested in mysteries that have occurred in the relatively recent past I think it's easier to relate to the people involved because they've probably lived their lives kind of similar to how you're living now different but similar right you know and also like the information if you're looking at a case that happened 50 years ago or less it's easier to fact-check that information and there's probably more information about that case whereas if you're looking at something that's happened let's say hundreds and hundreds of years ago while certainly there are people involved and being a human being I can relate to them in that sense but the way they live is a lot different than we live now and so it's very difficult to to kind of put myself in their perspective because my experience living on the earth is so much different and of course information even if it was diligently transcribed at the time it's taken hundreds of years to arrive in front of me now and so the the opportunity for information to change or to be passed down and accurately or to just be a straight-up embellishment is much higher so the accuracy of information in older cases it's a little bit up for grabs so I tend to be interested in more recent mysteries but there is one case in fact it is the oldest unsolved mystery in American history that I have been fascinated with ever since I heard about it in grade school and the reason I'm talking about it now in this video is not only have I found it fascinating but there has been some recent discoveries as recent as 2011 that totally changed the theories about what could have happened in this particular case and the case of referencing is the Lost Colony of Roanoke the too long didn't read version of the story is when England first tried to colonize America they set up a colony on Roanoke Island which is right off the coast of North Carolina and when it wasn't going very well in the the early colonists they needed more supplies they sent their leader back to England to get more supplies but when he came back the colony was gone all 115 people gone without a trace and all that was left were two strange messages one was on a tree and one was on a fence post right in where the colony used to be and for centuries historians and amateur sleuths alike have debated what those messages mean but a recent discovery in 2011 completely changes people's interpretation of what happened at Roanoke before we get started if you are a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format well you've come to the right channel because that is literally all I'm going to be doing and I post three to four times a week so if that appeals to you if you would please gently assassinate the like button and then turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of these cool stories all right let's dive in by the late 1500s England wanted to colonize America and in the early 1580s an Englishman by the name of Sir Walter Raleigh was basically given a permit to go colonize America basically it said okay it's you know 1580 and you have until 1591 to colonize somewhere in America if you can't do it by then you're gonna lose your permit he starts getting funding together he starts you know looking on a map to figure out where is a good spot to land and by 1584 he's ready to launch his first reconnaissance mission to America so in 1584 two ships make their way to north america and they land somewhere in the Outer Banks in North Carolina they land and they actually quickly befriend the local Native Americans that are there and in fact they invite the these English people to come to their village which was on Roanoke Island also in North Carolina not too far from the Outer Banks and so these early English settlers are brought to this village and they're able to coexist with the Native Americans really beautifully they're sharing trade secrets they're learning how to hunt they're learning how to do all the things that you would need if you were going to live in this new land and and they're being embraced by by the local population which was huge so after one month of this reconnaissance mission that group of early settlers is really excited about the possibilities of settling in America so they make their way back to England and they share their findings with Sir Walter Raleigh and preparations are immediately began to launch an actual colonization effort into Roanoke so one year after this initial reconnaissance mission Sir Walter Raleigh is ready to launch this full-fledged effort to colonize America and so he sends seven ships with 600 men and supplies that were designed to last that group of people for a full year so they're everything's going beautifully they're sailing their way over to America and when they reach the Outer Banks their flagship the the biggest and best ship they had that was carrying the bulk of their supplies their food their fresh water it ran aground and a lot of their supplies fell into the ocean and were spoiled and so this is a devastating blow and they know immediately that well not everybody on this this fleet can actually land here so they sent 500 men back to England and only landed a hundred of the original 600 in Roanoke now as soon as this the second round of settlers these 100 men landed in Roanoke they went and spoke with the local Native Americans there was already good relationships built from that first reconnaissance mission and these settlers were given permission by the local natives to build their colony in Roanoke so they begin constructing their colony and everything is going off without a hitch in fact the Native Americans were incredibly generous they worked closely with the settlers and you know did their best to support them however they could now the settlers they still needed more supplies they didn't have this robust supply that they planned on having because much of it was destroyed in that shipwreck as they initially made their way in so they had been promised by the 500 returning crewmembers they were gonna send supplies by the following winter so they're anticipating this this shipment of new supplies and as they get closer to the winter time the hundred settlers that are there they're running incredibly low on supplies to the point where they actually basically run out and so they had to rely on the local Native Americans generosity just to stay alive when the shipment that was supposed to be there in the winter did not show up and in fact had actually been cancelled they didn't know this that had been cancelled by Queen Elizabeth who basically said that wasn't important we're going to focus on things that are happening in England when that doesn't show up the tensions between these hundred settlers and the local natives the tension was growing because now there's a huge over dependency that tension grew to the point where the leader of the settlers and the leader of the local Native Americans began to not trust each other and in fact the local natives instead of being violent decided that they would just abandon Roanoke Ann go to the mainland and would just kind of give Roanoke Island to the settlers and that that would kind of solve all the problems but the English settlers took their retreat as a sign that they were actually going to the mainland of North Carolina these Native Americans and we're going to be forming alliances with other tribes and then they were going to come back out and wipe out the hundred settlers we don't know if that's true because what happens next is the English settlers in kind of a fit of paranoia they preemptively cross the the water and they make it to the mainland and they attack the Native Americans that had previously been helping them and keeping them alive and they actually wiped them out these English settlers come back to Roanoke Island and now the paranoia has even higher because now they don't have supplies they don't know how to live there they've just basically started a war and it just so happens that an English bound fleet was passing by the area on their way back to England and when they stopped at the colony the settlers were basically in a panic I mean at this point they just recently you know wiped out the state of American tribe they're the free get out what's gonna happen to them and they were in such a rush to abandon the colony and evacuate that only 97 of them got on the ships and left they literally left three people there they said well they're not here for the evacuation so we're out of here and so sure enough that fleet took the 97 settlers and they left leaving those 3 settlers to fend for themselves as irony would have it just days after this evacuation Sir Walter Raleigh he had sent additional ships with resupplies and and reinforcements to Roanoke and they literally arrived like a couple days after this mass evacuation but when they arrived the colony was abandoned and they didn't find those three men that were left there so Sir Walter Raleigh's reinforcements just left and then a couple weeks later another English bound fleet passed by Roanoke and stopped to check in on the colony and they found it abandoned and because they had so many people on this this fleet that was passing by they decided to leave 15 crew members at the colony because they felt like this is an English colony it's not in total disrepair at this point and perhaps you know this is gonna be useful to the crown or or we can use it in some way so they leave 15 crew members to basically guard the outpost while they go back to England and figure out what's gonna happen next so it would be months before anybody went back to Roanoke so those 15 crew members were kind of hung out to dry a little bit but a man by the name of John White who had been a part of that initial failed colony in Roanoke who had evacuated back to England he was still eager to colonize America and so he actually convinced Sir Walter Raleigh to launch a new expedition back to America to try to recolonize not in Roanoke but slightly north in the Chesapeake Bay which was just viewed as a more fertile and just more advantageous position and then in 1587 they send out three ships back to America to try this colonization effort all over again it is important to know that unlike the first effort which was much more kind of militaristic it was literally 600 men that got sent to America this time it was going to be a more kind of civilian approach where was men women and children being sent over to America to colonize so with John white as the captain of these three ships they're they're making their way towards America and again their plan was to go north to the Chesapeake Bay area but they intended to pass by Roanoke on purpose because they knew about those 15 crew members that have been left there you know almost a year prior and so they intended to stop at Roanoke and and basically have a meeting with those crew members give them supplies that they needed it and then make their way up to the Chesapeake Bay however something strange happens where the chief navigator a man by the name of Simon Fernandez who had navigated during the initial reconnaissance mission the very first trip to America also navigated for the the second trip to America when they brought the 600 men now navigating for this third trip with with John White he had the charisma of a real leader and was frankly just very well-respected he's an incredible sailor and even though John White was technically the captain really it was Fernandez that really had the respect of all of the people on this trip to America and so for some reason Fernandez decided that he just didn't want them to go up to Chesapeake Bay and instead when they got to Roanoke to have this meeting with the 15 crew members he just basically told everybody to get off like we're not gonna go north everybody that's here to colonize go ahead and get off because we're out of here and John White didn't put up a fight I think he recognized that the pole this guy had was gonna be too much and the crew and everybody who was there just kind of accepted it and so even though it was a total deviation they just begin to colonize Roanoke even though again that was never there planned so as they're literally descending upon Roanoke they're getting ready to meet with these 15 crew members who they're really hoping are still alive but there's no sign of them there's no sign of the crew that were left behind and all they find is like a little pile of bones and John White speculated that you know perhaps this is a sign that the crew members were you know attacked by you know the Native Americans that were seeking revenge because they had been wiped out from that that initial group that had been here the initial English settlers John White's suspicions would actually be proven true when just a few days after the the hundred-plus group of colonists it kind of began setting up camp and Roanoke a man by the name of George Howe was you know away from the the colony a little bit and a group of Native Americans surrounded him and shot him with 16 arrows so it was kind of like a message to the settlers that like you're not welcome here you know your predecessors that wiped out an entire tribe yeah we haven't forgotten about that so you're not allowed to be here it was not a good start for John White and is his new colony feeling like the colony was kind of doomed from the start the colonists actually told John White hey if this is the way it's starting we need more people here we need more supplies like this is not a good start we were not set up for success here you need to go back to England and get more supplies and bring them back here because without that we're doomed and it just so happened that Fernandez the guy that had kind of ditched them he hadn't left the Outer Banks yet he had anchored at the Outer Banks and he was basically still available to take people back and so John John White initially was against the idea because he didn't want to be viewed as someone that was kind of abandoning the colony when he got back to England and John White's daughter who was pregnant was there she was one of the early colonists she was there in Roanoke and he didn't want to Bandhan her but ultimately he says okay I'll go and he goes and gets on Fernandez ship and they go back to now unfortunately when he got back to England England was in the middle of a war with Spain and so the Queen had ordered any ship any English ship was basically not allowed to leave England because they needed to be able to defend themselves against the Spanish Armada and so he wasn't able to leave England to go back to Roanoke whether he had supplies or not for three years and so three years go by and he finally with the help of Sir Walter Raleigh is able to to be put on a convoy of ships that is going back to America with the necessary supplies and so he heads off so it's 1590 three years since John White has left Roanoke left his daughter and to go back for supplies now he's back and he's got the supplies and they get to the Outer Banks and they get in their small boats to make their little journey up around to the north side of Roanoke so they can actually get on the island and go check out what's happening in Roanoke and when they land on the north side of Roanoke they start yelling to try to get anybody's attention there's no answer as they walk up into the woods they notice that there are some fresh footprints right on the beach and then in the woods itself but again no one's coming to greet them which is a bit of a bad omen because if there are fresh tracks either it's an English settler and with chase they would be eager to come see them they'd be running out to meet them or it's a Native American which could mean they're you know they don't trust the English settlers right they don't want to show themselves or they don't want to be seen which is also kind of ominous they start moving in to where the Roanoke colony was and they see a they see three letters on a tree it just says see our Oh on a tree as they're making their way into the colony and again they're yelling the whole time trying to get anybody's attention and no one's calling out there's no sign of life anywhere so they see CRO on the tree and then they keep moving closer and now they break out the the colony and the colony when they left had not been heavily fortified now it was very heavily fortified with big Pike's you know basically like wooden pikes lining the outside of this this this basically looked at Fort and on one of the wooden posts that was kind of fortifying the outside of Roanoke where it was the word Croatoan there is not only nobody inside of this heavily fortified colony that's kind of fort if you will it looked like no one had been there in years the the grass was overgrown you know basically anything of value had been looted effectively there was the only things that were left were like really heavy objects that would have been difficult to move but there was also no sign of a struggle it didn't it did there was not a human remains anywhere there wasn't a clear sign of struggle I mean obviously it's this well fortified area which leads you to believe that they were at least anticipating some sort of attack but there was no sign of a struggle they're just gone John White he would write about this experience when he arrived and just discovered the colonies vanished a hundred and fifteen people just gone right he wasn't actually concerned because the writing that he saw on the tree and on the wooden post to him meant something really specific before he left to go back to England to get the supplies he had spoken with the people that would be staying there and said look if you need to abandon Roanoke for any reason we need to have a system worked out to where if I come back and you're gone I need to know what happened and so you need to leave me a clue you need to write a clue somewhere of where your destination is if you're going by choice just write the destination if you're being forced write the destination with a cross and that will to me signify that you've left in distress and so when he sees Croatoan and crow on the tree to him that just means oh well yeah they must have relocated to the island of Croatoan which was fifty miles to the south he would detail in his notes that before he left Roanoke in 1587 to go get those supplies he said that the settlers have been talking about leaving Roanoke abandon oh no and moving fifty miles north to the mainland not fifty miles south to an island the concern was the island was isolated and not a good place to have a colony and so they were talking about leaving it and so he just kind of casually mentions in his notes oh well you know they were thinking about leaving to go 50 miles to the mainland so that that might be why they're at Croatoan island but that doesn't really make any sense because you're just kind of abandoning one problem set for another like you want to leave an island cousin island has unique problems why would you go to another island you would go to the mainland so that was kind of problematic so john white believes they've just up and relocated to the Croatoan island and so he quickly takes his men and he goes back to the ship and they begin to turn and set their course to go south 250 miles to the Croatoan island but as fate would have it the anchor line snapped as they're trying to make their way south to the Croatoan island and the weather was getting progressively worse and worse and they start drifting north and north until finally the captain of the crew just said look we cannot go to the Croatoan island it's not really possible and so they had to return to England John white never would return to America so he actually would end up dying with absolutely no idea what happened to the colony and in fact no one really knew what happened to the colony it was just this huge cliffhanger the assumption is they've gone to the Croatoan island but no one could prove that they really had literally for centuries people just speculated as to what could have happened to this colony I mean there's the assumption that perhaps they did just go to Croatoan and eventually kind of assimilated with the Native Americans there and you know they just became a part of the culture there there was other theories that they were you know wiped out at some point by angry Native Americans but it was all just assumptions until the 1930s when a small stone was found by a man just out walking around and he turned it into a museum and they look and it was written by Eleanor dare who was the the daughter of John White the the pregnant daughter that he had that he had abandoned and didn't get to see again and she detailed what had happened and half of the colony got wiped out by Native Americans that were angry at them and then another percentage were taken captive and then there's a couple survivors that are you know barely able to survive that don't really expect to live very long at the time the stone was found I mean everybody knew that the last we had heard from the Roanoke colony was that they more than likely had made their way to the Croatoan Island because that was the the word written on the post the CRO on the tree I mean that's what made the most sense and so why would there be this stone by the daughter of John White fifty miles to the north of Rouen wouldn't it make more sense to have been found on either Roanoke itself or at Croatoan like it didn't really add up and so a lot of people speculated that that stone had to have just been a fake a hoax but in 2011 a major discovery is made in the Roanoke case that actually lends a lot of credibility to the stone that Eleanor Dare had apparently written on John White was a painter by trade and he had created all these maps of the colony of Virginia of North Carolina everywhere he went you know he basically painted him out it was customary when you were at the time when you were making a map if you had small mistakes on your map you would actually cut a new piece of canvas and you would put the corrections on that piece and then you would slap it over wherever your mistakes were made and so it wasn't uncommon if you were looking at a map to see little patches kind of all over the map and so for for literally centuries there were these maps that John White had created that had a number of these little patches on on the map and in 2011 somebody who is researching said well why don't we look under the patches and just confirm that they really were just that little mistakes that were covered up and in corrected with a patch and it turned out that on one of the maps there was a patch over a section of land 50 miles to the north of Roanoke around the area where that stone had been found and underneath the patch was a star and the star was set to resemble a fort so basically there is an English fort built basically where that stone had been found but it had been covered over with a patch as if the fort was a mistake right shouldn't been a fort there and they put a patch over it but upon closer inspection the patch that had been put over that X on the map that signified a fort right where that stone had been found well on the patch there was literally hidden ink where someone had drawn a similar X to denote a fort and they put that over the the obvious fort symbol that they were covering up one could maybe make the case that they wanted to signify to someone that was maybe looking for invisible ink they wanted to signify that that was where the fort was but they didn't want someone who intercepted the map for example the Spanish because they'd just been at war with the Spanish they did not want you know them to know where a location of a fort was researchers began calling that site where there was that patch site X now site X is 50 miles to the north of Roanoke and if you recall from what John White had put in his description when he was describing finding the the writing in the tree and the posts when he returned to Roanoke in 1590 he had referenced that the colony was planning to move 50 miles north to the mainland because that was a more suitable place to live but of course with the writing on the trees everyone thought oh well they end up going to Croatoan well now a site X that is a location that lines up with what they had originally said they were going to do and you have that stone written by Eleanor Dare at the same location and so archaeologists descended upon the area that was site X and while they haven't confirmed that there's a fort or they haven't found a fort in the area they have found metal and pottery that is potentially indicative of an English settlement and in fact right now they're still doing all sorts of archaeological digs and research to try to determine if that is where the Roanoke colony went but even if that is the answer to the mystery that in fact you know it was just this hidden map and the stone that said yeah they went 50 miles north it doesn't really answer the question which is what everybody thinks of when they think of the Roanoke colony of why was Croatoan written on the fence post why was crow written on the tree why were they there and how is it that with all these eyes and all this interest in this case dating back to literally the 1500s how has no one ever found even one of the remains of the 115 colonists that apparently just vanished into thin air so it's a fascinating case with recent developments which makes it even more fascinating and I would love to hear if you have any theories about what could have happened to the colonists to leave it in the comments so we can discuss it so that's gonna do it if you want to be in touch with me even hit me up on instagram my handle is john ballin for 1/6 also i post quite a bit on tik-tok my handle is mr. ball in there and that's gonna do it guys until next time I'll talk to you guys soon

Channel: MrBallen

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Length: 27min 16sec (1636 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020