OBJECTION!

Assumes Facts Not in Evidence.

Specifically this:

The island seems in a good position to be an important harbor,

Roanoke and really the Outer Banks in general suck for having a port of anything but small size, and boats or ships of anything but modest size. Most of Albermarle Sound barely reaches 10ft in depth, while sand and dirt washed into it from the rivers both helps build the barrier island chains and silt up channels and create banks to further hamper navigation. Meanwhile the brackish water of the Sound makes for a unique but also challenging ecosystem for colonists to survive in, while like any barrier island weather and fresh water are also concerns.

There is a reason that as beautiful and wonderful as they are, the Outer Banks and the Sounds are the gap between the much larger cities and ports of Norfolk on the Chesapeake/James River and Wilmington on the Cape Fear which are more navigable and better suited. But remember that Raliegh's charter was also supposed to have his new site be suited to launching raids or as a privateer base against the Spanish. So it couldnt be too far North, and water that is difficult to navigate a benefit to stopping pursuit. And as with many early New World settlements the first half ok place you get to is where you land.

But those conditions and those in Outer Banks in general arent that great for economic growth of a settlement.

For reference here is the NOAA Chart of the area for the depth and map of the Sound: http://www.charts.noaa.gov/PDFs/12205.pdf

So I’m very late to this, and /u/DBHT14 correctly challenged your assessment of Roanoke’s potential as an English colonial foothold in terms of maritime utility. In addition to Albermale Sound’s challenges to deep water vessels, Roanoke was and is extraordinarily vulnerable to storms, as Francis Drake, Ralph Lane, et al., would learn to their chagrin in the summer of 1586. Don’t feel too bad about that though. Lane, who assumed the leadership authority of the Roanoke effort after Richard Grenville’s departure, called Roanoke “the goodliest soil under the cope of heaven.” But let’s broaden the scope of this answer beyond geography. I won’t argue against the value of that lens, but I think by looking at some of the political, military, and social conditions the Roanoke Algonquian and the English in the region faced we can come to a more complete, though perpetually mysterious, understanding of why this venture was such a dismal failure.

Imagine Ralph Lane standing on the deck of one of Francis Drake’s ships in June of 1586. He’s watching the present-day North Carolina shoreline fade away. With it goes the charge laid in his hands by Queen Elizabeth I through Walter Raleigh two years ago, to search out and assess those pieces of this New World not already in the possession of “any Christian Prynce and inhabited by Christian people,” to establish a base at which English privateering ships could refit to continue their fight against the Catholic Spanish villain in the Americas. Francis Drake is one such privateer, but his ships have not been refitted. To the contrary, they are now laden with additional mouths to feed. The English adventurers in Roanoke are evacuating. They had scrambled aboard, bringing as many of their possessions as they could. What is deemed extraneous is cast overboard, including many of Thomas Harriot’s papers and John White’s drawings. Three Englishmen who had been exploring the interior are left behind. Drake may have cleared his vessels of hundreds of Africans and Central American Indians, looted from the Spanish to make room for his countrymen. This would have been, as Michael L. Oberg puts it, “…a first and almost entirely forgotten ‘Lost Colony,’ ignored by generations of American mythmakers who chose to believe, as one antiquarian put it, that only men of the ‘purest Anglo-Saxon Blood’ colonized America.”

Only a few days prior, the murky water beneath the vessel had been churned to a boil by a fierce hurricane. The storm had savaged the island for four days. No small part of Drake’s fleet was cast out to sea, several pinnaces sunk. With those ships went Lane’s hopes of remaining at Roanoke. On this deck, he may be regretfully imagining the success he might have had in exploring the interior of the region if the one remaining ship Drake could afford to part with were not too large to safely navigate the Outer Banks. As likely, perhaps more, he is thanking God that the storm has given him an exit that might spare him the embarrassment of the spectacular failure of the Roanoke colony. He might think he could safely write that he had done his best, and that circumstances almost entirely outside his control had doomed the effort. In fact, lesser men would have failed earlier. The English were low on food. Grenville had departed prior to the real troubles to retrieve provisions from England, but his relief fleet is nowhere in sight. Perhaps it will never arrive, its voyage interrupted by the Spanish or a storm. Perhaps it would only arrive to find dead men, starved or murdered by Indians. After all, Lane had helped to create mortal enemies of many of the Algonquian in the region. Somewhere beyond that shoreline, the weroance Pemisapan had been beheaded by Lane’s “Irish boy,” Edward Nugent.

Now imagine you are Wanchese. Perhaps you are standing on that shore, watching the English ships fade into the distance. If you are, you are probably doing so with a burning desire for vengeance. You most likely have seen the aftermath of Lane’s assault on the village of Dasemunkepeuc. Pemisapan had watched Lane and twenty-five men approach the village in two boats. He let them enter the village, where they commenced a slaughter that ended in the weaoance’s death and decapitation. Among Pemisapan’s followers were also Croatoan Indians, who had been far friendly to the English than Wanchese thought was wise. They were supporters of Ensenore, the weroance who had argued for more congenial relations between the Roanoke and the English, who feared their “invisible bullets.” But Ensenore had died, severing in Lane’s mind any hope of a productive, conciliatory relationship between the two peoples. His supporters were cut down with Pemisapan’s.

The Croatoan were Manteo’s people. Manteo, who had been in England with Wanchese, learning the English language and sharing their own with Thomas Harriot. Manteo, who led the English to Dasemunkepeuc. Wanchese and Manteo had been side by side when they sailed to England on Arthur Barlowe and Phillip Amadas’s return voyage a few years prior. They sailed up the Thames to London and watched as countryside gave way to densely packed metropolitan bustle. Wanchese noted well the potential wave of humanity that could cross the Atlantic, as the handful under Barlowe and Amadas had. He warned his leadership of it. Pemisapan, it seemed took note, and mistrusted the English until the day Edward Nugent took his head. But he’d let them into Dasemunkepeuc, Wanchese might have though; he hadn’t mistrusted them enough.

In fact, Pemisapan may well have been planning an attack on the English, as Lane anticipated before his preemptive strike at Dasemunkepeuc. Perhaps Pemisapan’s Choanoac rivals had been telling the truth when they told Lane that the weroance was intent on driving the English out, and soon. He may have been manipulating Lane into attacking Pemisapan and hobbling his growing influence among the Algonquian in the area. Whatever the facts of Pemisapan’s intent are, the English attack did nothing positive for the future of the colony. Francis Drake anchored off an English base in disarray. He took on evacuees and set sail for England. Manteo, by then dressed as an Englishman, left with them.