Episode Details

On August 27th, 1587, Governor John White stood at the rail of a ship watching the Carolina coast disappear. He was sailing back to England for supplies. Left behind on a sandy barrier island: over a hundred men, women, and children. Among them his daughter, her husband, and his granddaughter — nine days old, the first English child born in America. Her name was Virginia Dare.

White did not intend to be gone long. He would not see his family again for three years.

When he returned, they were gone. Every one of them.

Roanoke is the first great mystery of American history — but it is also the story of everything that produced it. A charter designed to extract profit. A knight named Walter Raleigh selling an impossible dream to a Queen who wanted empire on the cheap. Two native men, Manteo and Wanchese, who saw the same England and drew opposite conclusions. And a colony abandoned, twice, by the country that sent it. The mystery of what happened to those hundred people is still unsolved. This is the story of how they got there.