Maxwell S.
Now even though many years have passed I can still remember the day I learned about Roanoke in the fourth grade. It was an idea that fascinated me, a booming colony that vanished in less than a year, the loan skull left to rot in the dirt, and the carved tree only bearing the words “Croatoan� when it had once been a tree in the center of a new town. I remember coming up with theories and ideas about how they vanished with my friends. But was this truly the biggest vanishing act ever or was it just a lost answer?
What was Roanoke? Roanoke was one of the first European settlements in North America. When it first came to be, it was a colony lead by a man named Ralph Lane and Richard Grenville. It was Chartered by Queen Elizabeth I and she gave them seven years to establish a colony or else she would take back the rights to the area. When they arrived in the area they lived in the boats and started to look for a place to build the town. During this time they were met by the local Indian tribes the Croatoan. They were not the happiest about the settlers coming to where they lived. This was caused by another settlement. The settlement had accused the Croatoans of
stealing a silver cup which caused the death of two of the Croatoans in the process. This caused the Croatoans to dislike the new settlers. The new settlers explored the land and decided to build their settlement on the northernmost area of the land, and while the people in the settlement set up the town a group of eighty to ninety-five people on the Tiger to England to get materials and tell the Queen that they had established a colony. About a year passed until they came back to the area they had founded. Eventually the people sent to get supplies came back only to find no town in sight, a tree trunk with the word Croatoan carved into it, and only one human skull half way buried in the soil.