That first discovery must have been disheartening, but there was plenty of bad news to come. Six days after they arrived, one of the colonists, George Howe, was killed by Indians while he was out alone looking for crabs. He left behind his young son, now an orphan. When the colonists decided to retaliate for Howe’s murder and attack a nearby Indian village, they discovered partway into the attack that they’d made a huge mistake: The village was occupied by Native Americans who were friendly toward the English, not the enemies they expected to find.
Amazingly, those Indians seem to have been willing to look past that error. But the Roanoke colonists still had plenty of other problems. For a variety of reasons, they’d failed to load up on necessary supplies—including food—on their way to America. And because the captains of the ships bringing them to America had wanted to spend as much of the sailing season as they could privateering (a common theme in the history of the English on Roanoke Island), the colonists didn’t arrive until late summer, when it was too late to plant any crops. Finally, one of the things the English had learned from their previous trial runs was that Roanoke Island was actually a lousy place for the English to try to settle. This time around, the colonists intended to settle farther north, in the Chesapeake Bay area. But Simon Fernandez, the pilot leading their fleet of ships, reportedly refused to take them anywhere else. Much of the speculation about the Roanoke Colony’s fate has been directed at Simon Fernandez. Was he intentionally sabotaging the colony? If so, who told him to do that? And why? Was he secretly working for Spain? Or was he taking bribes from some enemy of Raleigh’s within the English court?
Or have Fernandez’s intentions simply been misinterpreted because his side of the story is lost to history?
Regardless, Simon Fernandez did agree to let one person go back to England to plead for more supplies: John White. According to his own account, White was very reluctant to leave Roanoke, but the other colonists persuaded him that his word would carry the most clout—he would be the one most likely to be able to get help.
Once he got back to England, White faced obstacle after obstacle. The English were worried about a naval attack from Spain, so Queen Elizabeth ordered English ships to stay in port, to be ready to defend their country. At one point, White had permission to sail, but then the permission was revoked before he could actually leave. Another time, White managed to leave in a small ship with supplies and fifteen new colonists, but they never made it to America. Instead, the ship did a lot of privateering and then came under attack by French privateers. White himself was injured twice during the ensuing fight, and the ship was so badly damaged that it had to return to England. A few months later, the Spanish Armada attacked. But even after England defeated Spain in that epic battle, the Roanoke Colony investors were apparently too distracted to put together another rescue attempt right away.
White finally set sail for America on March 20, 1590, nearly three years after he’d left his colony behind. And he was able to sail then only because he agreed not to take any new colonists. He complained in his writings that he wasn’t even allowed to take a boy to act as his servant during the trip. The ship’s captain wanted as much room as possible to store the treasures he expected to gain through privateering. And he took a very leisurely path toward Roanoke, detouring to help capture a Spanish ship. As White himself described the situation, “both Governors, Masters, and sailers, regard(ed) very smally the good of their countreymen” in the Roanoke Colony.
The ship White was on, the Hopewell, finally neared Roanoke Island in mid-August 1590. The first evening, White was encouraged when he saw smoke rising from the area where he’d left the colony. The next morning, seeing smoke rising from another island nearby, White and others from the Hopewell decided to search there first. But this turned out to be a wild goose chase: No humans were in sight, and the fire evidently had natural causes. The second morning, two boats rowed toward Roanoke, but one capsized in the dangerous waters, and seven men drowned. By the time the survivors had dealt with this disaster, they decided it was too late and getting too dark to go to Roanoke. Anchored nearby, in sight of a fire on Roanoke Island, White and the others called out and played the trumpet and sang familiar English songs, in an effort to get the colonists’ attention. White heard no reply, and in the morning when he and the sailors were able to land on Roanoke, they discovered that the fire was only from dry grass and dead trees. On their way to the colony site, they saw footprints in the sand that White concluded belonged to Indians, but they met no one.
The rest of the story is as Andrea and Katherine told it: White and the men with him found the colony site deserted and mostly destroyed, but with CRO carved on an nearby tree and CROATOAN carved on a post of the wooden fort (which the kids in this book refer to as a fence, though White would have called it a palisade). White was upset to find that some of his own possessions—including a suit of armor—had been dug up from their hiding places in trunks and left to rot and rust and spoil. He blamed enemy natives for this. But he was overjoyed by the carved CROATOAN, especially since there was no cross carved along with the word. A cross was the sign he and the other colonists had agreed upon to mean that they had left the island in distress. White concluded that his colonists were safe with the friendly Croatoan tribe on nearby Croatoan Island (probably the island now known as Hatteras).
White intended to go to Croatoan Island the very next day. But a storm blew up in the night, and a series of disasters caused the Hopewell to lose three of its four anchors. At first, the plan was to go to Trinidad to make repairs and get supplies before coming back to search for the colonists on Croatoan. But continued violent weather blew the Hopewell far off course, and it ended up in the Azores, in the mid-Atlantic. From there, the ship’s captain decided to return to England.