It’s sleeping with the fishes. Probably.

In order to find the “CROATAN” (and “CRO”; one on a fence post, the other on a tree) carving we’d first have to find the settlement itself.

If we take a look at Roanoke Island, we can see Fort Raleigh on the northern side, as well as the Lost Colony Theater, and some homes built precariously close to a rapidly eroding shoreline.

Most searches for the settlement have been conducted on the northern shore of the island, near Fort Raleigh, as settlers would not have been inclined to venture much further than the palisade. In 1972 Robert Dolan and Kenton Bosserman published a paper that attributed the failure to find the Roanoke Colony to rapid erosion of this shoreline. Using geographic surveys between 1851 and 1970, they found that 982 feet of the island had given way to the sea. Extrapolating from that data, they proposed that the shoreline had retreated roughly a quarter of a mile since 1585. You can see how that looks here.

It wasn’t until 1653 that another European saw the remains of the colony, and he gave us no real clues as to the location. After that we get John Lawson’s 1701 report of locating the Fort and some English coins and weapons. It isn’t until 1770 that the site of the fort is indicated on John Collet’s map of North Carolina.

One of the earliest “excavations” at the fort was in 1862 by Union soldiers. A vial of quicksilver and an axe were among the finds. From 1895 to 1935 the land was in the possession of the Roanoke Colony Memorial association. No European artifacts were discovered in this period, nor from 1935 to 1941, when the site was owned by the State. Since 1941, the site has been under the control of the National Park Service. Numerous digs failed to yield much of substance.

In the 1990s, a team led by Ivor Noël Hume found what appears to be a workshop in which Thomas Harriot and Joachim Gans conducted examinations of plants and metals during the 1585 expedition. Hume further suggested that this find indicated that the fort came after the lab. That statement was controversial to say the least, as the National Park Service has only recently agreed to posthumously publish his findings.

Not everyone agrees with the idea that the settlement has been victim to erosion, though. In particular Eric Klingelhofer, of the First Colony Foundation. This October the foundation and the National Park Service are set to begin re-excavating certain areas.

Sorry to disappoint.

Further reading:

Skowronek, Russell K., and John W. Walker. "European ceramics and the elusive “Cittie of Raleigh”." Historical Archaeology 27, no. 1 (1993): 58-69.

Dolan, Robert, and Kenton Bosserman. "Shoreline erosion and the lost colony." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 62, no. 3 (1972): 424-426.

Quinn, David B. Set fair for Roanoke: voyages and colonies, 1584-1606. UNC Press Books, 1985.