The CROATOAN Carving: What John White Found When He Returned to Roanoke
The ships arrived at the Outer Banks on August 15, 1590, three years late. John White, the colony's governor, had left his daughter, his son-in-law, and his infant granddaughter on this island in 1587, promising to return within months. War with Spain, seized ships, and bureaucratic indifference kept him on the wrong side of the Atlantic for 1,096 days.
White's party rowed ashore on August 18 — his granddaughter Virginia Dare's third birthday, though he could not have known if she was still alive to mark it. The palisade around the settlement was intact but overgrown. The houses inside had been taken apart. Not burned, not smashed — dismantled, deliberately, the way people dismantle structures they intend to move. White found his own chests, buried by the colonists, dug up and broken open. His maps were ruined by rain. His armor was rusted through. His books had been pulled apart, their pages rotting in the sand.
Carved into a wooden post at the entrance to the palisade was a single word: CROATOAN. On a nearby tree, the letters CRO had been cut into the bark. Before White had left in 1587, he and the colonists had agreed on a distress signal — if they were forced to leave, they would carve their destination. If they left under duress, they would carve a Maltese cross above it. There was no cross.
White knew what the word meant. The meaning of CROATOAN was no mystery — it was the name of an island fifty miles to the south, modern-day Hatteras Island, and the name of the Algonquian-speaking people who lived there. Manteo, a Croatoan man who had twice traveled to England and served as the colony's primary intermediary with Indigenous nations, had ties there. The message, by every rational reading, was a forwarding address.
White never followed it. A storm rolled in. His captain refused to risk the shoals. The ships turned south toward the Caribbean for the winter, intending to return in spring. They never did. White spent the remaining two decades of his life in Ireland, writing letters about his failed attempts to reach the colony, and died around 1593 without ever learning what happened to his family.
The Roanoke colony's disappearance is not, at its core, a mystery about what happened to 117 people. The carved word is a clue so direct it barely qualifies as a clue at all. The real mystery is why England never bothered to look. The lost colony is the founding ghost story of American colonization — not because the colonists vanished, but because the empire that sent them across the ocean treated their survival as optional. The people who disappeared were not victims of some dark force. They were victims of a country that gambled human lives on geopolitical ambition and then lost interest when the war at home got expensive.
The First English Colonies in America: Walter Raleigh and the Roanoke Voyages
Sir Walter Raleigh's 1584 Expedition to the New World
Sir Walter Raleigh never set foot on Roanoke Island. The colony that bears his ambition was conceived in London drawing rooms and financed as a speculative venture — part patriotism, part piracy, part real estate scheme. In 1584, Queen Elizabeth I granted Raleigh a patent authorizing him to "discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous Lands, Countries, and territories… not actually possessed of any Christian Prince." The language was a license to claim anything not already claimed by Spain.
Raleigh dispatched two captains — Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe — to scout the coast of what he would name Virginia, after the unmarried queen. They reached the Outer Banks in July 1584 and spent two months trading with the Algonquian-speaking peoples of the region, primarily the Secotan and the Croatoan. Barlowe's written report to Raleigh was a masterpiece of colonial salesmanship: the soil was "the most plentiful, sweet, fruitful and wholesome of all the world," the natives were "most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all guile and treason." Two Indigenous men — Manteo, a Croatoan, and Wanchese, a Secotan — returned to England with the expedition, where they were paraded before the court as living proof of the venture's promise.
The report did what it was designed to do. Raleigh secured funding, ships, and men. What Barlowe's account omitted was more important than what it included: the Outer Banks were a chain of barrier islands with shallow harbors unsuitable for large ships, poor soil for European-style agriculture, and a climate that could shift from mild to brutal without warning. The people Barlowe described as "gentle" and "loving" were sovereign nations with their own political structures, territorial boundaries, and very limited tolerance for uninvited guests who could not feed themselves.
The Failed 1585 Roanoke Colony Under Ralph Lane
Raleigh's first colony arrived on Roanoke Island in 1585 — a garrison of roughly 107 men under the military command of Ralph Lane, with no women, no families, and no intention of self-sufficiency. The plan was simple: hold the island, explore the interior for gold and a passage to the Pacific, and rely on the local Secotan and Croatoan peoples for food while English supply ships made the crossing.
Lane was a soldier, not a diplomat. Within months, the garrison had exhausted the goodwill of every Indigenous community in the region. The Secotan chief Wingina (also known as Pemisapan) had initially welcomed the English, but the colonists' insatiable demand for corn — combined with Lane's habit of taking hostages to ensure compliance — turned alliance into hostility. By spring of 1586, Wingina was coordinating a plan to starve the English out and, if necessary, attack them.
Lane struck first. On June 1, 1586, he led a raiding party to Wingina's village on the mainland under the pretense of negotiation. The English opened fire. Wingina was shot, fled into the woods, and was chased down by one of Lane's Irish soldiers, Edward Nugent, who returned to the group carrying the chief's severed head. The diplomatic landscape of the Outer Banks had been permanently altered — the English had announced themselves as a people who killed under flags of truce.
Days later, Sir Francis Drake arrived with a fleet returning from raiding Spanish Caribbean ports, much as English privateers once operated from Port Royal before the sea swallowed that city whole. Drake offered Lane supplies. A hurricane destroyed the ships carrying them. Lane's men, starving and besieged, abandoned Roanoke and sailed home with Drake. The first English colony in the Americas lasted less than a year and left behind nothing but dead Indigenous leaders and scorched trust.
The 1587 Lost Colony: 117 Colonists Left on Roanoke Island
John White's Role as Governor of the Roanoke Colony
Raleigh's second attempt was designed to correct every failure of the first. The 1587 colony would not be a military outpost — it would be a civilian settlement, a permanent English community rooted by the presence of families. John White, an artist who had accompanied the 1585 expedition and produced detailed watercolors of Algonquian life, was appointed governor. The group of 117 colonists included seventeen women, eleven children, and ninety-one men — the people who would become known to history as America's lost colony. Among them were White's pregnant daughter Eleanor Dare and her husband Ananias Dare, a bricklayer from London.
The original plan called for the colony to settle on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, a deeper and more fertile site than the shallow sounds of the Outer Banks. Roanoke was to be a brief stop — just long enough to collect the fifteen men Raleigh had left as a holding garrison after Lane's departure. The plan fell apart the moment they arrived. The garrison was gone. The only trace was the skeleton of a single man, identity unknown. And the pilot of their ship, Simon Fernandes — a Portuguese navigator with his own privateering agenda — refused to carry the colonists any further north. He wanted to get to the Caribbean to raid Spanish ships before the season ended.
The colonists were put ashore on Roanoke Island on July 22, 1587. They were in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong neighbors. Lane's murder of Wingina the previous year had poisoned relations with the Secotan. The only Indigenous group still willing to engage with the English was Manteo's people, the Croatoan, on their island to the south.
Virginia Dare: The First English Child Born in America
Eleanor Dare gave birth on August 18, 1587. The child — Virginia Dare — was the first English person born in the Americas, a fact that would later be weaponized in ways her parents could never have imagined. Nine days later, another colonist's child was born: Harvie, first name unrecorded, the second English birth in the New World and a footnote that history almost entirely forgot.
White's position was impossible. The Roanoke colony had insufficient supplies. The local Secotan were hostile. The planting season was already over. The colonists collectively petitioned White to sail back to England and personally oversee the resupply mission — the logic being that only the governor himself could cut through Raleigh's bureaucracy and ensure ships returned on time. White resisted. He did not want to leave his daughter, his newborn granddaughter, or the people whose survival depended on his advocacy. The colonists insisted. On August 27, 1587, White boarded a ship for England. He was carrying the future of 117 lives in his ability to return quickly.
He would not set foot on Roanoke again for three years.
Why Did the Roanoke Colony Fail? England's Three-Year Abandonment
How the Spanish Armada Prevented Roanoke's Resupply
White arrived in England in November 1587 and immediately began organizing a resupply fleet. He could not have known that the geopolitical landscape was about to make his colony irrelevant. In 1588, King Philip II of Spain launched the Spanish Armada — 130 warships aimed at the English coast. Elizabeth I issued a general stay on all shipping: no vessel capable of carrying cargo or guns could leave English ports. Every hull was requisitioned for national defense.
White was trapped. The lost colony's supply line had been severed not by distance or weather but by a war between empires — the same kind of great-power collision that would later strand small communities on the edges of colonial ambition, from Pitcairn Island to the abandoned garrison towns of the Caribbean. White managed to secure two small pinnaces in April 1588, too small and poorly armed to be of use to the Armada defense. He loaded them with supplies and sailed. The venture turned to farce almost immediately — the crews, seeing an opportunity, attacked a larger vessel they hoped to capture as a prize. They lost the fight. The ships limped back to England, raided and damaged. White's supplies never reached Roanoke.
The Armada was defeated in August 1588, but the shipping embargo was not lifted quickly. Raleigh, overextended financially and politically, shifted his attention to other ventures. White spent 1589 writing increasingly desperate letters. The Roanoke colony's survival depended on a man with no ships, no money, and a patron who had moved on.
John White's 1590 Return to the Abandoned Roanoke Settlement
White finally secured passage in 1590 — not on a dedicated supply mission, but as a passenger aboard a privateering expedition led by John Watts. The ships' primary purpose was raiding Spanish vessels in the Caribbean; stopping at Roanoke was an afterthought, a brief detour in a profit-seeking voyage. White had no authority over the fleet's schedule, route, or priorities.
The ships reached the Outer Banks on August 15. Rough seas delayed the landing. On August 16, a party attempted to row ashore through heavy surf at Hatteras. One of the boats capsized. Seven men drowned — among the only confirmed deaths in the entire Roanoke story. White finally reached the settlement on August 18. What he found is described in his own account: the palisade standing but overgrown, the houses "taken downe," his personal effects buried and spoiled, and the word CROATOAN carved clearly into the post.
White's account betrays no panic. He interpreted the carving exactly as intended — as a sign that the colonists had relocated to Croatoan Island, voluntarily and without violence. He asked the ships' captain to sail south to Croatoan. The captain agreed, then changed his mind when a cable snapped and an anchor was lost. The fleet had only one remaining anchor. A storm was building. The captain turned the ships toward the Caribbean and eventually back to England.
White never returned. The governor of the lost colony died without answers, and England — newly distracted by the fortunes being made in the East Indies trade — did not send another search party.
What Happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke? Leading Theories
Did the Roanoke Colonists Join the Croatoan Tribe?
The simplest explanation is the one the colonists themselves left behind — and among all lost colony theories, it remains the most widely supported by physical evidence. CROATOAN, carved without a distress symbol, was a pre-arranged signal pointing to a specific destination: the island home of Manteo's people, the only Indigenous nation still on friendly terms with the English. The theory holds that the colonists, abandoned and unable to sustain themselves on Roanoke Island, dismantled their settlement and relocated to Croatoan Island (modern Hatteras Island), where they were absorbed into the Croatoan community through intermarriage and cultural integration.
The evidence is stronger than the mystery industry likes to admit. Archaeological excavations on Hatteras Island, particularly the work of the Croatoan Archaeological Society beginning in the 1990s, have uncovered English artifacts — a gold signet ring, copper farthings, a slate writing tablet, iron tools, a flintlock gun — in layers consistent with late-sixteenth-century Croatoan habitation. These are not trade goods passed along a network; they are personal items found in domestic contexts, the kind of objects people carry when they move.
The Lumbee Tribe of Robeson County, North Carolina, has maintained oral traditions claiming descent from Roanoke colonists who intermarried with Croatoan and other Algonquian-speaking peoples. The Lumbee were first documented by European observers in 1724, already speaking English and practicing some European agricultural methods. Over 90 of the surnames recorded among the Lumbee in early accounts — including Dare, White, and Harvie — match names on the 1587 colonial roster. Genetic evidence remains inconclusive, but the oral tradition is persistent, internally consistent, and predates the lost colony's emergence as a popular American mystery.
The Powhatan Massacre Theory and the Jamestown Connection
A darker theory draws on accounts from the Jamestown colony, established in 1607, twenty years after Roanoke. Captain John Smith and other Jamestown leaders reported that Powhatan, the paramount chief of the Tsenacommacah confederacy in the Chesapeake Bay region, told them he had destroyed a group of English people living with a coastal tribe shortly before Jamestown's arrival. William Strachey, Jamestown's secretary, later wrote that Powhatan "had been at the murder of that colony" and that the survivors had been killed because a local prophecy warned that a nation from the Chesapeake would rise to overthrow his empire.
The theory proposes that some or all of the lost Roanoke colonists eventually made their way to the Chesapeake Bay — their original intended destination — and lived among the Chesapeake tribe for nearly two decades before Powhatan's warriors massacred them around 1606. The timing is suspicious: Powhatan's alleged attack occurred just months before the English returned to Virginia in force. The evidence, however, is secondhand at best. Smith was a self-aggrandizing narrator. Strachey was working from hearsay. No archaeological evidence of an English presence among the Chesapeake has been found.
Both theories may contain partial truths. The colony may have split — some traveling south to Croatoan, others north to the Chesapeake — a possibility consistent with the archaeological record and with the practical reality of 117 people trying to survive in a region where no single community could absorb them all at once.
The 1587 Drought: Tree-Ring Evidence and the Colony's Collapse
In 1998, a team of researchers led by climatologist Dennis Blanton published a dendrochronology study — tree-ring analysis — that reframed every theory about the Roanoke colony's disappearance. The data showed that the period from 1587 to 1589 saw the most severe sustained drought in the region in at least 800 years. Crops failed. Freshwater sources shrank. Even established Indigenous communities with centuries of local agricultural knowledge struggled to feed themselves.
The implications are brutal. The colonists arrived at the worst possible moment. They could not grow food. They could not rely on Indigenous neighbors who were themselves facing starvation. The drought did not kill the colony outright, but it eliminated every viable path to self-sufficiency on Roanoke and made relocation — to Croatoan, to the Chesapeake, to anywhere with better access to food and water — not a choice but a necessity.
The drought also explains why the Secotan, already hostile after Lane's killing of Wingina, would have had zero tolerance for English demands on their dwindling food supply. The colonists were not just unwelcome. They were a survival threat.
The Lost Colony in American Culture: Hoaxes, Myths, and Symbols
The Dare Stones Hoax: Fake Evidence and the Eleanor Dare Forgeries
In 1937, a California man named L.E. Hammond walked into the office of Haywood Pearce Jr., a history professor at Emory University, carrying a 21-pound quartz stone. Carved into one side was a message, allegedly written by Eleanor Dare, addressed to her father: the colonists had fled to the interior after a two-year struggle, most had died of sickness, and Ananias Dare and Virginia Dare were among the dead. The reverse side bore a crude cross and the date 1591.
Pearce was electrified. He authenticated the stone, published his findings, and offered a $500 reward for anyone who found additional stones. Over the next three years, a stonecutter named Bill Eberhardt produced forty-seven more, each advancing the narrative of Eleanor Dare's journey deeper into the interior. Pearce believed them all. The stones were exhibited, lectured about, and treated as the most significant archaeological discovery in American colonial history.
They were forgeries. A 1941 investigation by the Saturday Evening Post exposed Eberhardt's hoax — he had been carving the stones himself in his Georgia workshop and collecting the rewards. The academic fallout was immense. Pearce's reputation was destroyed. The Dare Stones became a cautionary tale about the willingness of educated people to believe what they desperately want to believe. The first stone — Hammond's original — has never been conclusively debunked, and some researchers still argue for its authenticity. The remaining forty-seven are universally dismissed.
The episode illustrates the peculiar gravity of the lost colony: the disappearance is so symbolically loaded that it generates its own evidence. People need the mystery to mean something — and when the real evidence is ambiguous, they will manufacture certainty.
How Virginia Dare Became a White Nationalist Symbol
The same dynamics that produced the Dare Stones hoax have shaped Roanoke's place in American culture for over a century. Paul Green's outdoor drama The Lost Colony, first staged in 1937 on Roanoke Island, is the longest-running outdoor symphonic drama in the United States and has been performed every summer since (with interruptions for World War II and COVID-19). The production dramatizes the colony's story as a tragic romance of English courage and wilderness hardship — a narrative that conveniently erases the Indigenous experience and frames the disappearance as noble sacrifice rather than imperial negligence.
Virginia Dare has been an even more contested symbol. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white supremacist groups adopted her as an icon of "pure" English-descended American identity — the first white child born on American soil. The Virginia Dare brand was used to sell wine, candy, and flour. White nationalist organizations invoked her name to argue for immigration restriction. A statue of Virginia Dare, depicting her as an adult woman despite the fact that she was last seen as a nine-day-old infant, was erected in the Elizabethan Gardens on Roanoke Island in 1859.
The weaponization of Virginia Dare's image follows a pattern familiar across American memorial culture — the same impulse that turned Stone Mountain into a Confederate shrine on a summit where the Klan was reborn. In both cases, the historical facts are less important than the myth they can be made to serve. The Roanoke colony's disappearance has been used to justify narratives of white victimhood, Indigenous savagery, and American exceptionalism — none of which are supported by the evidence, all of which persist because the silence of the historical record leaves room for projection.
Visiting Roanoke Island: Fort Raleigh and the Lost Colony Site Today
Fort Raleigh National Historic Site: What to See at the Lost Colony
Fort Raleigh National Historic Site preserves approximately 513 acres on the northern tip of Roanoke Island, encompassing the reconstructed earthen fort, the Thomas Hariot Nature Trail, and the Waterside Theatre where The Lost Colony is still performed in summer. The earthwork fort — a small, star-shaped embankment — is a 1950 reconstruction based on archaeological surveys, not a surviving original structure. The adjacent museum displays artifacts recovered from the site, including fragments of metallurgical equipment that suggest the colonists were attempting to smelt copper or refine metals, possibly to trade with Indigenous communities.
A lesser-known chapter in Roanoke Island's history sits on the same ground — the Freedmen's Colony. During the Civil War, Union forces occupied Roanoke Island after the Battle of Roanoke Island in February 1862. The island became a refuge for formerly enslaved people fleeing Confederate territory. By 1863, a self-governing community of over 3,000 freed men, women, and children had established farms, schools, and a sawmill on the same ground where White's colonists had disappeared 275 years earlier. The Freedmen's Colony lasted until 1867, when the federal government returned the land to its pre-war white owners. The freed residents were expelled.
The colony has no monument on Roanoke Island. A small exhibit in the Fort Raleigh visitor center acknowledges its existence. The irony is structural: Roanoke Island is famous for 117 white colonists who vanished, and silent about 3,000 Black Americans who were deliberately erased from the land a second time.
How to Visit Roanoke Island and the Outer Banks
Roanoke Island sits within the Outer Banks of North Carolina, accessible via U.S. Highway 64 from the mainland. Fort Raleigh National Historic Site is free to enter and open year-round, though the museum and visitor center have seasonal hours. The Waterside Theatre operates from late May through August for performances of The Lost Colony — tickets are purchased separately and the show runs approximately two hours. The earthwork fort is a brief walk from the parking area. The Thomas Hariot Nature Trail loops through maritime forest along the sound — flat, shaded, and walkable in under thirty minutes.
Hatteras Island, the site of the former Croatoan settlement and the destination indicated by the CROATOAN carving, is roughly ninety minutes south via NC-12 through the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. No formal marker exists at the archaeological excavation sites, but the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras village provides context on the island's layered history, from Indigenous habitation through the colonial period to its centuries-long reputation as a ship-killer.
The emotional experience of Roanoke is quieter than most places of historical tragedy. There is no ruin to walk through, no preserved horror to confront. The earthwork fort is a grassy mound in a clearing. The trees are the same species that grew here in 1587, but not the same trees. The sound laps against the shore in the same rhythm it did when 117 people were here and in the same rhythm it kept when they were not. The site's power is in absence — in standing where people stood and knowing that no one came back for them. Not because the sea was too wide. Because the empire had other things to do.
FAQ
What happened to the lost colony of Roanoke?
The most widely supported theory is that the colonists relocated to Croatoan Island (modern Hatteras Island) and were absorbed into the Croatoan tribe through intermarriage. Before Governor John White left for England in 1587, he and the colonists agreed that if they moved, they would carve their destination into a tree or post. When White returned in 1590, the word CROATOAN was carved into the settlement's gatepost with no distress symbol. Archaeological excavations on Hatteras Island have uncovered English personal artifacts — including a signet ring, writing slates, and copper farthings — in Croatoan domestic contexts dating to the late sixteenth century. A competing theory suggests some colonists traveled north to the Chesapeake Bay and were killed by Powhatan's warriors around 1606, though this rests on secondhand accounts from the Jamestown colony.
What does the word CROATOAN mean?
CROATOAN was the name of both an island and an Algonquian-speaking people located approximately fifty miles south of Roanoke Island, in what is now Hatteras Island, North Carolina. The Croatoan people were the only Indigenous group in the region still on friendly terms with the English colonists in 1587, largely through the diplomatic ties of Manteo, a Croatoan man who had traveled to England twice. When John White found the word carved into a post at the abandoned Roanoke settlement in 1590, he understood it as a pre-arranged signal indicating the colonists had relocated to Croatoan Island voluntarily and without violence.
Who was Virginia Dare?
Virginia Dare was born on August 18, 1587, on Roanoke Island — the first English child born in the Americas. Her parents were Eleanor Dare and Ananias Dare, a bricklayer from London. Her grandfather, John White, was the governor of the Roanoke colony. White last saw Virginia when she was nine days old, before sailing to England for supplies. He never saw her again. In the centuries since, Virginia Dare's image has been co-opted by various groups: she was used as a commercial brand name in the early twentieth century and adopted as a symbol by white nationalist organizations arguing for immigration restriction.
Why did the Roanoke colony fail?
The Roanoke colony's failure resulted from a chain of compounding problems. The colonists were left on Roanoke Island instead of their intended destination at Chesapeake Bay when their ship's pilot refused to sail further north. Relations with the local Secotan people had been destroyed by the previous 1585 colony's violence, including the killing of chief Wingina. Tree-ring analysis has shown that 1587–1589 brought the worst drought in 800 years to the region, making agriculture nearly impossible. Most critically, England failed to resupply the colony for three years — first because the Spanish Armada crisis commandeered all available ships, and then because the colony's patron, Sir Walter Raleigh, lost interest.
What are the Dare Stones?
The Dare Stones are a collection of inscribed rocks allegedly carved by Eleanor Dare, the mother of Virginia Dare, after the Roanoke colonists fled into the interior. The first stone was brought to Emory University professor Haywood Pearce Jr. in 1937 by a man named L.E. Hammond. It described the deaths of most colonists, including Ananias and Virginia Dare. Pearce offered rewards for additional stones, and a stonecutter named Bill Eberhardt produced forty-seven more over the next three years. A 1941 investigation by the Saturday Evening Post exposed Eberhardt's forgeries. The original Hammond stone has never been conclusively debunked, but the remaining stones are universally dismissed as hoaxes.
Can you visit the Roanoke colony site today?
Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island preserves the location of the lost colony and is free to enter year-round. The site includes a reconstructed earthen fort, a museum with artifacts recovered from the area, and the Waterside Theatre, where the outdoor drama The Lost Colony — the longest-running outdoor symphonic drama in the United States — has been performed every summer since 1937. Roanoke Island is accessible via U.S. Highway 64 from the North Carolina mainland. Hatteras Island, the former Croatoan settlement indicated by the CROATOAN carving, is approximately ninety minutes south via NC-12 through Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
Sources
- [Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony] - Lee Miller, Penguin Books (2002)
- [A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke] - James Horn, Basic Books (2010)
- [Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1606] - David Beers Quinn, University of North Carolina Press (1985)
- [The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590: Documents to Illustrate the English Voyages to North America] - David Beers Quinn, ed., Hakluyt Society (1955)
- [John White's Account of the 1590 Voyage to Virginia] - John White, transcribed in Richard Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations (1600)
- [Jamestown and the Forging of Anglo-American Manners] - William Strachey, The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia (c. 1612), Hakluyt Society reprint (1849)
- [Environmental Crisis in Sixteenth-Century North America: The Lost Colony Drought] - Dennis Blanton, David Stahle, and Malcolm Cleaveland, Science Vol. 280 (1998)
- [Hatteras Island Archaeological Field Reports, 1993–2012] - Croatoan Archaeological Society / East Carolina University
- [The Dare Stones: A Re-examination] - Robert E. Betts, North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (1977)
- [Serving Two Masters: The Fate of the Freedmen's Colony on Roanoke Island] - Patricia C. Click, North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 80, No. 1 (2003)
- [The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island] - Scott Dawson, Coastal Research Press (2020)
