I want to take a moment to talk about my favorite book of 2025, which I didn’t have time to discuss when I was reading it: Lee Miller’s Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (2011). Roanoke Island, site of the colony, is adjacent to the Outer Banks, North Carolina, where I vacationed every summer as a child/youth. I talked about this in a comment I posted here: https://forums.online-go.com/t/place-to-share-relaxing-and-thought-provoking-videos/31448/551.
The Lost Colony is a longstanding mystery about the first British attempt to colonize America. The mystery is that the 115/116 colonists vanished during the 3-year wait for the resupply ship. I have read several books about it since I was a child, and I have twice visited the Lost Colony site, once at age 7 and again at 13.
Although I have owned this book for more than 10 years, I was spurred to read it because of an extraordinary discovery made in January 2025: the finding of a Caucasian woman’s remains, dated to the colony’s time (1587) and located on the mainland in accordance with the theory in Miller’s book. There is little doubt that this was one of the colonists.
Miller took a much deeper dive into British historical records than any previous historian, especially into the poisonous politics surrounding Sir Walter Raleigh, the sponsor of the colony. The pilot for the ship appears to have been an agent for Raleigh’s enemies, and he orchestrated the stranding of the colony in a bad location. I knew that Capt. John Smith had encountered one likely, surviving colonist, and I knew about the mysterious Welsh-speaking Indians (one of the colonists was indeed Welsh), but I didn’t know that records show at least five other sightings of probable surviving colonists among the mainland Indians.
In sum, the colonists soon split, with some going to live with the Croatoan tribe at the southern tip of Hatteras Island (confirmed by DNA evidence). The others, possibly the majority, went to live with a friendly mainland tribe. Tragically, evidence indicates that a warlike neighboring tribe apparently conquered the friendly tribe shortly after the colonists arrived, with the prisoners likely sold into slavery. This would account for the distribution of sighting reports along the mainland.