Recent Research on Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke Island Colony

A rambling pre-Thanksgiving conversation with my mother this evening led us to the story of the settlement on Roanoke Island sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh in the 1580s. As I had last read about the "Lost Colony" sometime in the 1990s, I was curious about current interpretations of the mystery of the disappearance of the English settlers. A 2020 New York Times article about the publication of Scott Dawson's "The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island" reveals that, while there is no "smoking gun" (as one scholar puts it), there is increasing evidence that the English were taken in by the Croatoan people on Hatteras Island, 65 miles south of Roanoke Island. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 23 November 2021)