But a Jape

“The killer left nothing behind, just a bloody knife, a trail of red foot prints leading to the Brooklyn Bridge, a receipt for some rope and a couple of cinder blocks, and a printed out wikiHow article on the top 10 knots for any situation.”

– notes on an unsolvable murder

I know public education can vary a lot throughout the US, so I don’t really know how common it is for American children to learn about this tidbit of colonial history, but the mysterious disappearance of the Roanoke colonists is one of the most baffling pieces of American history I’ve ever been taught. And not baffling in the way it was intended to be presented (“What a spooky mystery!”) but baffling in the sense of, “How does anyone think this is an interesting mystery at all?!”

When I first heard this story, I was sure I must have been missing something. I originally thought “Croatoan” was some nonsense word or lost language, but they knew what it meant! I thought there must have been expeditions or search parties who, perhaps, started disappearing themselves, but no! They fuckin’ told you where they went, it’s just technically unknown because no one bothered to check!

And the thing is, there’s still an interesting historical narrative to be told here, just not as a mystery, but as an examination of early colonizing efforts and the general callousness for human life those in power had at the time – which could be used to inform further discussions about attitudes towards Native Americans and enslaved people as well.

But to present this all as some mystery is like if Sherlock Holmes observed, “Huh, wonder why that dead guy wrote ‘RACHE’ on the wall?” then spent the rest of A Study in Scarlet going on a cocaine bender and forgetting a crime ever even occurred.

– James