The morning of 18 August 1590, a group of sailors from two English privateering ships, the Moonlight and the Hopewell, scrambled up from a sandy beach to enter open woodland. They followed the lead of an elderly man who would have grown increasingly desperate in his shouts: “Eleanor! Ananias! Anybody! Is anyone there?” The sailors had landed on Roanoke Island in modern North Carolina, and their leader was John White, governor of Queen Elizabeth’s North American dominion, Virginia.
White was trying to find his daughter Eleanor and her husband, Ananias Dare, and indeed any other English settler on the island. Eleanor and Ananias, with his young granddaughter Virginia, were members of the colony he had left there three years earlier.
In 1587 White had returned to England to get badly needed supplies from Ralegh for the colonists who had wintered on Roanoke. His voyage back to America was soon beset by problems. On his first attempt, his vessel was captured by French pirates and he was seriously wounded in the fight. His efforts were also frustrated by a royal order to stop all shipping because of the Armada threat.
Even when White did manage to return, in 1590, another disaster took place the day before his search on Roanoke. A captain and several crewmen drowned in rough seas trying to reach Roanoke Island through the dangerous sand bars of the Outer Banks. Nevertheless, the sailors pressed on, rowing around Roanoke to anchor off its north end where the settlers had lived. But no one answered White’s calls. No one was there. White found that a new strong fort had been erected but was now abandoned, containing only discarded, heavy items. All the houses of the settlement had been dismantled and removed. None of the 117 members of this Lost Colony were ever located. It remains the greatest unsolved mystery in the shared histories of England and America.
