The Completely True History of America, Part I: The Lost Colony

In honor of the fact that soon I'll be moving to the location of America's first successful British Settlement, I've decided to transform my blog into a multi-part, in depth history of the United States. All information comes from peer-reviewed articles, Wikipedia, or my ass. How much history we cover depends on how many posts I write before I get bored and ignore this blog for another six months. Today we start with Britain's first very unsuccessful attempt to colonize the New World.

 The Lost Colony

Sir Walter Raleigh Feeling Especially Fancy (Portrait by Nicholas Hilliard)

The year is 1584, it's been 92 years since Christopher Columbus accidentally ran into North America because he was too stubborn to ask for directions on his way to India and decided to massacre every native group he came across so that there wouldn't be any witnesses to claim he wasn't the first one to find this place. Other than the Spanish who had established a profitable diseases for gold exchange program with multiple native tribes, nobody in Europe had quite figured out how to monetize the new continent yet. This had Queen Elizabeth I rather upset because mama needed some new earrings to match her party crown so she granted a charter Sir Walter Raleigh to establish a colony that could exploit North America's raw materials to create goods that could be sold in the motherland. Raleigh wasn't a big fan of long boat rides because he had a crippling fear of pirates stemming from his mother not giving him attention and instead letting him watch Pirates of the Caribbean at age 5 despite it's PG-13 rating so he wouldn't bother her while she drank wine at 2 pm on a Tuesday and watched General Hospital in the other room. Because of this, Raleigh would never actually visit North Carolina himself, but instead sent other men to establish his colony.

The first expedition landed on Roanoke Island, North Carolina on July 4, 1584. The date is still celebrated to this day as the birthday of America. The men of this expedition quickly encountered two local tribes known as the Secotans and Croatoans. That natives, who did not have access to Barney VHS tapes, had never learned to share and didn't want to share their land with the new men. Despite this, the natives decided to allow the men to live and opted instead to play the long game and send two tribe members covered in North American microbes to England with the explorers under the premise of ambassadorship so that they could spread disease among the European population. The British, themselves great fans of the long game, would respond 180 years later by distributing smallpox blankets to the native population of Pittsburgh.

Armed with information obtained from the native ambassadors, Raleigh sent a second, much larger, expedition to Roanoke Island in 1595. Despite several problems along the way and losing much of their food supplies, all five ships from the expedition eventually arrived at the island. Soon after arriving, one dude couldn't find his silver cup and decided to blame the local population, prompting the group to raid and burn a local village. This is widely considered to be the most diplomatic possible move and established the great relations between Europeans and natives that would endure for centuries. Despite being out of food and having just pissed off anybody who could possibly help them, 107 men decided to stay and establish a fort while the ships went back to Britain for more supplies.

The first several months of 1586 came and went without any sign of the resupply ships. The colonists attempted to contact the ships by building a robust telephone network out of tin cans and string made from the colonists own hair. As the first call was being placed, one of the cans cut the face of the phone operator and he immediately died of tetanus. Soon after, Sir Francis Drake decided to stop by for a visit and the colonists, now lacking any way to contact their relief fleet, decided to go back to Britain with him instead of dying of starvation or being killed by the natives. Shortly after this, the relief fleet finally arrived to find the colony abandoned. A few men from this fleet stayed to maintain the claim on the fort while the rest returned to Britain.

In 1587 another group of Englishmen were sent to the New World, this time to establish a colony farther north on the Chesapeake Bay, but they were to stop at Roanoke to check on the group of men that stayed behind the previous year. When they arrived, they found nothing at the fort except a single skeleton. This is the point where a smart commander would say, "Huh, everybody that stays here seems to disappear. Better GTFO while we can." This was not the reaction of Commander Simon Fernandez, who instead said, "I have a great idea. Forget Virginia. North Carolina is where it's at. We're gonna stay here because it takes three times for an Englishman to learn his lesson." After one colonist was killed by natives, the colonists sent Governor John White back to England to ask for help.

White's return to the New World was delayed by several factors. First he wasn't allowed to sail back during the winter. Then this little gang of ships that called themselves The Spanish Armada decided to attack and basically every single boat in England was engaged in a fight with them. Finally White was able to hire two private ships for his expedition, but the captains tried to capture some Spanish ships to steal their gold and instead got themselves captured. Finally in 1590, after the colonists had been expected to survive with almost no food for 3 years, White finally made it back to Roanoke. There he found no sign of the colonists as the fort had been deserted and all of the structures had been taken down. The only clues of their whereabouts were the word "Croatoan" carved in a gatepost and "Cro" carved in a tree. Because their agreed upon safe word wasn't carved in the tree, White believed the colonists moved to nearby Croatoan island and tried to live among the natives. He initially wanted to conduct a search, but a storm was forming and White was famously afraid of thunder, needing to hide in a bathtub anytime he heard it. Because of this he instead sailed all the way back to England and never made another attempt to find the lost colonists. To this day, their fate is unknown. North Carolina was eventually successfully settled in 1663.