America's First Mystery. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

In August of 1590, John White anxiously sailed from England back to his wife, daughter, and infant granddaughter.

The first English child born in the Americas. He was going towards his new home, the colony of Roanoke, now modern-day North Carolina.

He was the governor of the new colony, and he had been gone three years on a mission to ask Queen Elizabeth for more supplies and support.

But upon his return, he was confused, and then heartbroken.

When his ship landed, White found nothing, no signs of his family, his fellow colonists, and only a few puzzling clues as to what had happened in his three-year absence.

As he stopped to figure out his next move, he stumbled upon a wooden post, with the word Croat Owen carved into it.

It was at this point that an enduring and yet unsolved mystery would fascinate and provoke speculation between American and international historians for hundreds of years to come.

To call it a curse, cultural ignorance, or the most unfortunate sequence of circumstances to hit a small English colony, today we're talking about the lost colony of Roanoke.

Roanoke colony was founded by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1587, and attempted to create the first permanent English settlement in North America, to have a stronghold in the Americas, and to kind of be on the offense of the Spanish, who were quickly gaining traction in what they called the New World.

The English really didn't have a good exploration track record in said New World. In 1583, an explorer named Sir Humphrey Gilbert had briefly claimed St. John's Newfoundland as the first English territory in North America.

But Gilbert was mysteriously lost at sea on his return journey to England, so that territory was dead on arrival. No pun intended.

Roanoke was going to be different, though, and started with some big dreams and some very interested investors, who had watched eagerly as Raleigh brought back plants, animals, and two cooperative open-minded indigenous people back to England to show them that a colony could be a real money maker.

Raleigh also souped up some of his personal journals from his expedition, likening the region to the Garden of Eden, and prophesizing a colony in the area, teaming with precious metals, including silver and gold to usher in, quote, the next golden age.

Was there proof of this? No, no, of course there was not. But honestly, it didn't matter. Raleigh was thinking of having 69 colonists as the inaugural group to populate the first incarnation of the colony, not yet called Roanoke.

Around 600 men were sent, half intending to stay, while others would establish, leave, and maybe come back.

Raleigh stayed back, John White went on the trip, the guy from the top of this episode, who of course was not yet made governor, but was at that point just an illustrator who drew landscapes for records.

The whole establishment of a colony was bad from the get-go, which I don't think a lot of people realized. Seven ships took the 69 people and supplies, the big five were called the Tiger, the Robuck, the Red Lion, Elizabeth, Dorothy, and the smaller two called Penises, which is, didn't have names.

On April 9th, 1585, the ships left England and immediately encountered a storm off the coast of Portugal, separating the Tiger from the rest of the ships and sinking one penace ship.

Thankfully, there was a plan if disaster struck, the ships would regroup off the coast of Puerto Rico.

The Tiger got their first, established a base camp, tried to avoid Spanish ships, which I should mention were all over Puerto Rico.

But the only other ship that showed up was the Elizabeth, which arrived on May 19th.

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