John white: this year i lost my dear colony The colony: actually we just moved in with these native Americans John white: sometimes I still hear their voices
I honestly think they just moved to Croatoan. They probably got tired of waiting for John (since he was gone for 3 years) or they thought he died and wouldn't return so they just left. They had no food and proper water supply so they weren't just gonna keep waiting. They must've made peace with the natives and lived among them
Legit that's very likely what happened if I remember right the local people say they moved there and lived with them Like they left a note what more do you want
@@kibz2005 but there probably would have been signs of the colony fighting back bc i doubt they’d just come along to be eaten willingly, there were a decent number of them after all
Anybody remember the episode of Spongebob where the whole town left for "No Spongebob Day" well this is like that but instead its "No John White Day" except it's an entire lifetime.
By missing colony, what the history books really mean is the colony said exactly where they went and the one dude who could follow up on it just never checked because it was too hard and he gave up.
If by too hard you mean queen elezebeth forbid any vessel from leaving the mainland due to their ongoing war with Spain then yes, becoming a traitor to the crown would be too hard.
left brain: they just went with the tribe, the tribe just started “mysteriously” having blonde hair & blue eyes children, it’s not rocket science right brain: zömbiî apökâlypsš
Full brain: they hid and later snuck onto a slaver ship, leading to the existence of the song “cotton eye joe” by causing one of the slaves to have blue eyes
Everyone: Wow, this is such a mystery! What happened? This is so unbelievable. The pale, blue-eyed blond people + mixed kids witnessed living with the Croatoan tribe: Yeah, that sure is weird.
@@seanydeasthis 😂 we have DNA testing for a reason, why isn’t anyone using it? if they had children they’ll have descendants. if they weren’t abducted and killed someone literally would’ve left and came forward
@@elrose171 Well by now, enough of the people would have married and had childeren, that all the way down the family tree the original DNA of the colonizers would have dwindled (Take this with a grain of salt, I'm no expert)
Lmao John went away for 3 years while they were struggling and he expected them to be in the same place with replenished food? He really said "Well... YOLO"
Okay hear me out: The colony decided to go to the Croatoan Island for some reason, like lack of food supplies, and so they took a boat. But as you said, when John White tried to do the same, both times he had to face storms. Maybe... the colony faced a storm and just drowned, which would explain why there was no body on any of the islands and no trace of a fight either
@@irlneilcircirega9344 No because at the time there was no underwater expedition like the ones we can do now, their bodies are probably gone by now (plus the tide would've pushed them away from the shore), so even if bones are found somewhere there would be no way to tie them to the lost colony I could be wrong but that's what I think
That makes a lot of sense, tbh. They probably had to flee either due to starvation or an attack by the local tribe and died at sea. It also sounds plausible that some of them got killed and the rest assimilated into the tribe, that seems to have the biggest amount of evidence.
Thats the issue with unsolved cases or mysteries. You can have circumstantial evidence but if you have no concrete proof then there will be so many theories, situations, or possible scenarios. I dont think that word is concrete proof, yeah it s circumstantial for sure, but since John white didnt ever reach it we dont know
@@thatloserkyle I think the fact that the local Croatoan tribe at the time started having blonde and blue eyed kids with western surnames born and that the local tribes literally stated the settlers joined their tribe is pretty solid evidence
@@emilybarclay8831yeah but there’s literally zero evidence of this. it’s ONLY stories and old rags which could’ve belonged to a number of settlers. there’s no DNA, there are multiple tribes claiming they’re from the croatoan and have descendants but none of them have been tested, no one’s even tried.
@@emilybarclay8831Nah, it was aliens from outer space. All evidence points to the entire colony having been abducted by flying saucers, never to be seen again by the rest of humankind. It’s the only plausible explanation…that or a grizzly encounter with Bigfoot. /s
There was no decisive or hard proof left on croatoan so we don’t know for sure if they ever made it, not to mention there’s no ancient artifacts or evidence left that they arrived on croatoan, the most plausible theory I have is that they died on the way to croatoan
@@Keith-zr2ct It is explained that the reason John White went back to England was because the colonists are running out of tools and supplies. So it makes sense to me that once they arrive, most of their tools had broken, and they instead used the local tools and wares. Thus eliminating most of the artifact traces.
2020 UPDATE: Following an archeological expedition, it was concluded that the most likely scenario was that the colony moved to Hatteras Island with the Croatoan tribe, where they were integrated with the tribe, and lived out the remainder of their days. Several period-appropriate items were found 4-6 feet beneath the earth on the island, which strongly suggests (if not 'concludes') that the mystery is over.
Everyone: "*OMG ROANOKE IS SO MYSTERIOUS AND TERRIFYING*" croatoan natives: had "mysterious" blonde haired and blue eyed children, and english artifacts
It’s obvious what happened, they joined the natives like many settlers did when things got hard during that time. They became white natives. There was a drought and no food, the only people conditioned to live there were the natives and the settlers had no other choice.
@Ben from smart house that was actually pretty common, a lot of settlers found the native american lifestyle appealing so they left english colonies. they talk about it in Lies My Teacher Told Me
I had just finished loading my grandson's toy gun, the kind with those ends that stick to things when they hit, when I saw the mannequin move. In surprise, I unintentionally pulled the trigger, and hit the screen where it's head was.
Colonists: we were taken in by the croatoan tribe, we even left a note saying where we went, you can even see our descendants in the tribe John White: hmm it’s a mystery I guess we’ll never know
@@maestromazmorra9597 or they probably said that they killed them to be angry at them for no reason lmaoo if there's one thing colonizers are good at, it's being an ass to native tribes for no reason.
@@maestromazmorra9597 white people think they were so superior to Native Americans in the 1500s that there was no way after a few months the people of Roanoke were just like “okay we can starve to death or we can try to show that we’re peaceful to these Native Americans and hopefully gain some food, shelter, and maybe take a bath whatever that is”. Like after 6 months they probably gave up on him coming back and just got down on their knees and begged a tribe to help them out, once they intermingled and found that the tribe was human (wow! Shocker!) they just stayed. White supremacy kind of goes out the window when the only options are death and mixing. Maybe one dude went back to Roanoke and wrote where they went, maybe there were other more temporary notes left like a paper that got lost in the wind or a message written in the sand. Edit: fixed a were->where
If they weren't just simply at Croatoan, then the cannibalism theory makes sense to me. They needed supplies and food and had to wait almost three more years for it. People in history have caved to that plenty of times before.
I feel like its pretty obvious where they went. Thats like me leaving a note on the fridge saying “shops” and my parents being like “oh my god where has she gone? I think she was kidnapped! How will we ever find out where she is!”
not only that, its like if you wrote "Wal-mart" and they were still puzzled lol. especially if there's only one Wal-mart in existence, which was the case for Croatoan, it was the only one lol
Well it’s rather the fact it didn’t say “going croatoan” and just “croatoan” and so it’s more of what did happened. Realistically there’s only two good reasons and it’s where they attacked or did they move. Also not to mention lots of groups would leave there marks to claim their land even though the natives believed it would be nobody’s land they could have been saying leave this Alone.
1) the man never made it to Croatoan 2) English artifacts later found there 3) colonists knew a person in the tribe, who knew White was leaving 4) children in the native tribes suddenly started having blue eyes and blonde hair The World: OMG WHERE DID THEY GO???
The english artifacts couldve easily been brought by the chief who consistently visited the uk. And, they didnt have blue eyes, they were described as grey, which is exceedingly rare in people of european descent
Yeah it's either they just left and fell into some indian tribes throughout the land or were killed by them. I'm betting atleast one is partially true.
I can kinda buy the 1st, 2nd, and possibly the 3rd and 5th, I only think that the 5th theory is a little bent up, the colonists could very well have eaten each other but I only think this was due to survival, there were similar cases of cannibalism in other early American colonies, due to running out of supplies, food, or being locked in their fort area by the natives, and they sent White to gather supplies, they could have ate the least likely to survive and the remaining settlers starved due to no one else on the island, a zombie plauge just seems ridiculous.
I'm curious if the experts bothered to ask oh, idk...the Native Americans whose ancestors were literally on the same island at the same time that the colonists disappeared? I swear to god if this is another Easter Island 'mystery' that's not actually a mystery because the Native people had (at least some of ) the answers - I'm gonna go insane.
Local native tribes told William Stryker (secretary of the Jamestown colony) that most, if not all of the missing colony lived in the Chesapeake area with the native tribe there. Also, the chief of the Powhatan tribe said that the colony moved in with the Chesapeake natives, but they were slain in battle. (He allegedly told John Smith this and it was recorded by Stryker)
Lack of written records and a degree of uncertainty about *whose* ancestors the local tribes actually are serve as the answer to this. It's a question that's been the subject of active research for more than four centuries, if there was an easy answer actually supported by anything of value, someone would have gotten rich writing a book about it. There are native groups that identify as descendants of the local tribes and the missing colonists today, but that's more a matter of them adopting a popular explanation than anything like them having an accurate oral history of anything like it.
@@iusethisnameformygoogleacc1013 Oral traditions are usually pretty good among the tribes. The bigger issue you run into is when tribes intermingle and end up with multiple stories as to where they came from. for example the Cherokee moved from an Island to the southeastern US. they lived among the Iroquois who were originally from the southeastern US until a territorial dispute caused a war that lasted a least 100 years and ultimately forced the Iroquois to move north. Both the Cherokee and the Seneca tell this story and it is backed up with a quite a bit of evidence. As of today the official record still states that the cherokee speak and Iroquoian language (due to shared words) and that they are just a group of Iroquois that split off and traveled south from the great lakes region.
Oh, I know this one! Hatteras Island, then known as Croatoan Island, is now a permanent part of the Outer Banks peninsula due to natural geographical shifts. However, at the time, it was a tidal island. The colonists could have walked there at a certain time of year, but the adjoining land would be underwater at other times. The ocean nearby is infamously treacherous, making the journey over sea very difficult. If John White had simply waited (or had knowledge of the tides, which the local tribes did), he would have been able to reach the island on foot.
Bri J Oh definitely nerdier than that, I’m running a homebrew RPG campaign set in Rodanthe, North Carolina (a few miles south of Roanoke) and went absolutely ham on my research for absolutely no reason. Did you know that Aaron Burr’s daughter Theodosia (yes, the one from the song in Hamilton) went missing at sea just off the coast nearby, and that it’s also the final resting place of Edward Teach aka Blackbeard?
okay but we’ve proved that they did just go to a village called croatoan. they just didn’t actually go there for a long time. there were natives there with blue eyes and who said their ancestors “spoke as if from a book” like it legit just was them
Exactly and the people of the time refused to believe that. White people coexisting with the native population was unheard of. Just shows how close minded and backward thinking they were back then.
Colonizers did a hell of a lot of raping at the time- the mixing could be from that or people other than the Roanoke. Truth is we’ll never know what happened 🤷♂️
When i lived in NC it was actually well known that the colonists left with the Croatoan tribe. for years the tribe had children with blonde hair, light eyes, and english features.
Exactly and they BARELY explain the most watered down basic part of the story. They kinda just skidded over why it took John White so long to return to America. (I also live in NC)
Irish Mud You're right. I saw a Nova on PBS that actually did DNA testing from ancestors back in England. Testing lead to people still living in NC. Descendants.
mcrxliz That’s not that impossible! I mean a storm could’ve blown him off course, he could’ve forgotten which island it was and sailed to another (I think the carving was made by either natives or other settlers), etc. Honestly I believe that this could’ve happened!
@@nonbirenthenon-binarysiren6299 Natives who knew our Roman alphabet, I ll buy that /s (you gotta have the attentionspan of a fruitfly if you didn't even think of that)
Roanoke always interested me. I remember learning about it in school and seeing videos about it that intrigued me. But I never knew Croatoan was an island. I always thought it was a mystery word. I don't remember anything ever saying it was an actual place. That really takes a big chunk of the mystery away.
i’ve always been confused about why everyone is so perplexed by this, guys they were low on food and supplies and he never actually checked the croatoan island. they definitely made peace with the croatans out of necessity and went with them. obviously.
@@lochnessmonster2277 but that doesn’t really matter, people are afraid to say they made peace with the croatoans which would be true whether they made the journey or not, everyone just jumps to the croatoans slaughtering them because everyone jumps to say that natives are uncivilized and to be feared
I've seen it documentary where they found stones thought to be left behind by one of the residents of Roanoke and then they found a map as well that showed a route thought taken by them by boat. I think it's either one of two things they relocated or the Indians got to them. Doesn't seem that mysterious. Seems the most likely other than they were beamed up by aliens
U think these people just went: okay..We're starving, Instead of waiting let's go and move to find food. And then with this they unknowingly started a mystery that would last centuries
ReadaBook we need a t-shirt that says either (quote) “this is a t-shirt” (end quote) or (quote) “This case remains unsolved” (end quote) or what ever Ryan says I can’t remember.
They went to Croatoan Island, like the tree said, and John never made it there to check. English artifacts were later found there. 🤷♀️ I’m failing to see the mystery here.
The "mystery" is because of racism tbh. Despite Croatoan people being born with blonde hair and blue/grey eyes and English artifacts being present there, people still think Roanoke is "unsolved" which is REALLY dumb. Its so obvious and right-in-your-face but people are still like "we'll never know"
I love how Shane's holding a ball and continuously squeezing it just knowing things are gonna get messy in this mystery, just to finally throw it angerly
My guy LITERALLY NEVER ACTUALLY GOT TO CROATOAN ISLAND, THE PLACE/TRIBE WRITTEN ON A TREE IN THE SETTLEMENT. The colony prolly just went w the Croatoans to get away from the Roanoke tribe attacking them
Anthony Hanes yeah! And then they were waiting for him to return and he never made it so they were like “oh well, he’s not coming. Let’s continue with our lives with this Croatoan tribe”
@ididnotwanttojoin dude noone cares that prolly isnt a 'real' word, everyone knows what OP means. Let people speak however they want, back off with your superiority complex ('superiority complex,' by the way, means that you think that you're better than everyone) ;)
@@Ididnotwanttojoin hahahah yknow theres such a thing as implications and speaking down to others, right? Funny that i have to explain that to someone who corrects someone for using slang :')
I love how despite being stupendously easy to figure out what happened here this is treated as a mystery. They left a note, now I grant you it wasn’t a good note but some pretty basic application of critical thinking answers this question in a fairly logical way. Lacking supplies, the desperate remaining colonists ether joined or were forced to serve a nearby tribe of Native Americans. Mystery solved.
"why didn't they leave a note or something with more info" just my personal theory but maybe they had nothing to write on or with since they seemed to be lacking supplies in general
@@vivivalley I saw a documentary where they had found relevant rocks that had carvings on them that had been left behind telling clues of their relocation. You can probably Google this to hear the details
Theory 6: White returns, finds dead bodies all over, doesn't want any future colonists to America to be put off from settling so he covers it all up. Wouldn't have been that hard.
i trusted you guys to not scare me in any unsolved episode ever and you give the already TERRIFYING mannequin in the back THE ABILITY TO MOVE ITS HEAD ARE YOU SERIOUS
There dead i never growed up waching them i grew up like a lot of people waching Dragom ball/Z/GT/Zkai/The final chapters and dragom ball super now im waching Dragon ball heroes thas my child hood cant wait till the new movie also sponge bob/lots of cartoonz Also pokemon AND OOOOO YU-GH-IO but mainly dragon ball
Apparently, a few years after the vanishing of the Roanoke colony, fair-skinned blue-eyed natives started appearing on Croatoan Island. If true, this might mean that the remaining colonists moved to Croatoan Island and interbred with the natives.
We actually had to watch a documentary on that in class I’ll ask my teacher the name and like how these ppl were protected, and I think ben Franklin or some one along those lines are related to them
It was also common for tribes to "adopt" women and children taken during battles. At times even men though they were required to go through different grueling physical trials first to earn a place whereas the other groups were not.
The integration theory is probably most likely. Settlers integrated all the time, especially under circumstances where they were starving or under threat from other tribes.
At times I wonder why he still does this show, it's just him listening to Ryan jump from one superstition to another How rambling on aliens had me staring at the screen thinking "you're kidding right...?"
@@IronLegionnaire1 For entertainment, of course. Some people don't find it funny at all, but I don't believe in these wacky bs and I think it's pretty funny. I'm sure there are many people who would agree that it's funny because of the sheer absurdity. Also I don't think Ryan actually believes in those crazy theories either. As Shane stated, they are actors. Ryan Bergara plays a character called Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej plays a character called Shane Madej. In the end it's just a job, the goal of which is to entertain the masses.
Ever since I watched this episode I have been obsessed with the mysterious disappearance of the Roanoke Colony. Been looking at articles and blogs about it. It's really fascinating.
What you mean to tell me the shaman said “Hippity Hoppity get the F**k off our property” and they just got a glassy look in their eye and just walked off into the trees and were likely Merced by other tribes
12:38 Shane, I too make a map/blueprint of my room when rearranging furniture, I’ve never met another person whose done that! It saves so much time & eliminates most of the “moving stuff & not liking how it looks so now I gotta move it again” nonsense. It’s a great way to get a sense of what the new layout of the room is gonna be without all the repeated heavy lifting.
WILD theory: "Croatoan" was a not at all cryptic note saying exactly where they were going, and then they perished in the same stormy seas that prevented John White from getting from Roanoke to Croatoan later. But no, let's leapfrog over that to zombies and aliens. *Screams into pillow*
It did mean that was where they were going to go, white and the colony decided on a writing that word to signify they were leaving to croatoan in the event he didn't come back
He went to the fort the colony built. He tried to go to the other island that they carved on the wall. They had been to before more than once in the last 3 years. The weather was too bad. Some crew died trying to get to shore and the rest refused to help him anymore.
Recently in class I got extra credit because I remembered this video when I was the only one who could answer a Roanoke question. And my mom said RU-vid rots my brain..
they literally left a note of a nearby island where their best native american friend lived and johnny boy couldn't check that island. how is this a mystery lmao they were low on food and tools when john left, why would he expect them to be in the same place three years later???
They said in the video that John tried to check the island but failed due to bad weather preventing him from reaching the different island where most of his people would be at.
@@british_royal_navy Have you, by chance, heard of Australia, which is an island that is not only considered both a continent and a country, but is also 7.692 million square kilometers in area, or roughly 3.5 times the size of Greenland, which stands at only 2.166 million square kilometers in area.
The comments on this video: 60% - "I learned/am learning this in grade school!" 35% - "OMG DID THE MANNEQUIN HEAD JUST MOVE?" 5% - "Let me hit you with the FACTS. This is my theory"
For everyone commenting about the Roanoke colony has been "proved" to have assimilated the nearby Croatoan tribe. Please keep in mind that this came out in 2017. Archaeologists only found strong (physical) evidence of the Roanoke colony in 2020. While it was already a theory, it didn't have physical or strong evidence until then. Ryan and Shane couldn't have known about it at the time this was made.
Even so, it’s fairly clear they just moved. What happened after they moved wasn’t clear for a long time, but they very clearly just moved along when it was clear White wouldn’t return for a long time, otherwise they would just sit there and starve. I dare to think there was another attack from the Roanoke tribe, which made things more dire and the growing threat of starvation which would also weaken them in another attack, they were forced to move towards Croatoan Island, since they had the allyship with Manteo. A great deal probably died along the way, but no doubt they would eventually have moved in order to survive.
We had an activity based on this case for socials. She gave us several possible theories and the main evidence in this case and made us choose which one seemed the most likely
