Summary Of The Fifth Voyage By John White

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Justin Miller Ms. Bevacqua History 111 19 October 2017 The Lost Colony One of the oldest American mysteries can be traced back to August 1587 when 115 English colonists arrived at Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. John White, the newly elected governor of the colony, decided that once they were settled in he would travel back to England for some needed supplies. As he arrived, a massive naval war broke out between the French and the English which barred him from returning to Roanoke for three years. After leaving his wife, daughter, and infant granddaughter in Roanoke, White was anxious to get back to say the least. Returning to the colony shores puzzled White as there was nobody to be seen. After searching thoroughly …show more content…

This is also the conclusion John White came to, we know this because it is written in his personal journal about finding his lost colony. This journal is commonly referred to as, “The Fifth Voyage”. In it, White explains his time in the war, what he did when he came back to Roanoke, how he tried to contact his family, and where he thought they had gone. “From hence we went thorow the woods to that part of the Iland directly over against Dasamongwepeuk, and from thence we returned by the water side, round about the North point of the Iland, untill we came to the place where I left our Colony in the yeere 1586. In all this way we saw in the sand the print of the Salvages feet of 2 or 3 sorts troaden the night, and as we entred up the sandy banke upon a tree, in the very browe thereof were curiously carved these faire Romane letters C R 0: which letters presently we knew to signifie the place, where I should find the planters seated, with the brown.” This quote from John White’s journal explains what they did when they first returned to the colony and discusses when he found the word “Croatoan” carved into a tree. There is a lot of speculation about the last part of the quote however when he says, “where I should find the planters seated, with the brown.” What I took from this statement is that the planters would be his people and the brown would be the Native Americans, specifically the Croatoan Tribe, which would make sense because there were multiple neighboring Indian tribes who they could have ended up with. Just from hearing what John White has to say is very persuasive in terms of what could have happened in Roanoke, which in the end persuaded me to believe that the Roanoke colonists had been sucked into a

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