The Lost Colony, Roanoke Island, NC

ROANOKE ISLAND : A VIEW AT THE LOST COLONY

Of the countless words written about the beginnings of English America perhaps carries more of a story as these three letters : CRO . Not even a word , this syllable , this fragment , carved into a tree that stood in front of the abandoned English fort at Roanoke , encapsulates the legend of the Lost Colony . When John White returned to Roanoke in 1590 in the hopes of relieving , rescuing , or rejoining the colony he had left there three years earlier , he found all one hundred and ten people

gone and the cryptic message left behind . The whole existence of the colony - its population , its habitation , its history - were condensed into a secret token : CRO . And yet John White believed this was a history he could read . In his narrative of these events , published by Richard Hakluyt in his Principal Navigation of 1600 , he describes why .upon a tree , in the very browe thereof were curiously carved there faire Romane letters CRO . A secret token agreed upon between them and me at my last departure from then . [to] write or carve on the trees or posts of the dores the name of the place where they should be seated .If they should happen to be distressed in any of those places that then they should carve over the letters of the name a Crosse in this forme , but we found no such sign of distress (Hakluyt , 1600 ADDIN EN .CITE HakluytRichard HakluytThe Principal Navigations , Voiages , Traffiques , and Discoveries of the English Nation1600Lon donGeorge Bishop , Ralph Newberie , and Robert Baker

The story of the Lost Colony has the earmarks of a myth : recurrence plasticity , and indeterminacy . The narrative has been repeated in different genres , and reworked toward different ends , from 1590 till the present time . The story can shrink and grow , from the dense encoding of a three-letter engraving to the endless dispersal of speculation upon what might have come before or after the making of that mark . This narrative elasticity is linked to the story 's failure to conclude . As an unsolved mystery , it both invites elaboration and forbids closure and thus remains available as a cultural medium . This research offers a genealogy of the Lost Colony . This entails reconstructing events from White 's success in finding the island of Roanoke in 1587 to his failed rescue mission in 1590

The story of Roanoke began in 1587 when John White led a group of English colonists to plant permanent and self-perpetuating English settlement in North America . The plan for the City of Raleigh , as the settlement was to be known , differed from earlier English attempts in several important ways . The first difference was demographic . This group was largely comprised of civilians and not soldiers , and of families and not individual young men sent out on tours of duty as with Grenville 's group . It was to be a community rather than a military outpost . The second difference was its destination . The colony was headed...