Roanoke Colony

Roanoke Colony was an English settlement established on Roanoke Island in the 1580s. When a relief expedition returned in 1590, the colonists were gone, and their fate remained unknown.

Walter Raleigh: An English courtier and explorer who sponsored early English colonization efforts in North America. Raleigh received a royal charter and organized the Roanoke ventures.
1587 Roanoke expedition: The expedition that established a new English settlement on Roanoke Island in 1587. Its settlers, including John White’s family, became the Lost Colony.
Lost Colony: The popular name for the 1587 Roanoke settlement whose colonists were absent when English ships returned in 1590. The phrase centers the colony’s most enduring historical mystery.
Lost Colony theories: Competing explanations for the disappearance of the 1587 Roanoke colonists. The colony’s missing population has prompted theories of migration, conflict, starvation, and capture.
Jamestown Colony: The English settlement founded in Virginia in 1607, which became England’s first permanent colony in North America. Jamestown succeeded where Roanoke failed to maintain a lasting English settlement.
Elizabethan colonization of the Americas: England’s attempts under Elizabeth I to establish settlements and claims in the Americas. Roanoke was England’s first sustained attempt at an American colony in this period.
Croatoan: The name used by English colonists for an island and Indigenous community south of Roanoke Island. The word carved at the settlement was the clearest clue to the colonists’ intended destination.
1585 Roanoke expedition: The English expedition that founded the first Roanoke settlement in 1585 under Ralph Lane. Its return to England shows that the island had already hosted a failed settlement.
Secotan: An Indigenous people and polity encountered by English colonists in the coastal region of present-day North Carolina. Relations with nearby communities shaped the settlers’ prospects and possible destinations.
Virginia Company: An English joint-stock company chartered in 1606 to establish colonies along the North American coast. Its later colonization effort adopted a more organized corporate structure than Raleigh’s Roanoke venture.

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