John White's Disappearance Of The Roanoke Colony

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Imagine an explorer going back to his colony and no one was there, no sign of the colonists. This is what explorer John White went through with his colony of Roanoke. Roanoke is still one of the most unknown disappearances of people in the world. The Roanoke colony disappeared because the Croatan tribe had the colonist assimilated with the tribe’s culture. Roanoke has many reasons for its disappearance by the amount of time John White was gone for, the carving of Croatoan on a tree, and the major drought that hit the colonists. There are two major people that played a huge part in this exploration, John White and Sir Walter Raleigh. John White and Walter Raleigh are both from British descent and both worked for the queen. John White had a …show more content…

They were given about three weeks of food and supplies. As supplies grew shorter and shorter, White decided to go back to England to bring back more supplies. White set out to England in mid August and landed at Ireland in October. When he landed on Ireland, the United Kingdom was battling the Spanish by ships. The United Kingdom needed every ship possible to defeat the Spanish Armada. In the summer of 1588 the English navy was able to destroy the Spanish Armada. The naval battles ended and White was finally able to get back to his colony. Their ships had man made issues and they left at the peak of Hurricane season which delayed their arrival to Roanoke Colony . “When they arrived at Roanoke Island on August 18, 1590--coincidentally, the third birthday of little Virginia Dare--they found the settlement long abandoned”(“The Voyages”). Since, Virginia Dare was the first born in Roanoke meaning, White had been gone for three years and the colony just disappeared out of thin air. Three years are plenty of time for a colony of a hundred people to assimilate into a new culture. They only left two clues that shared the same …show more content…

Well in the southeast part of Ame rica in the 1580’s had a severe drought that caused problems to Roanoke. The colonist lost most of their supplies on the way to Roanoke, so they needed to live off the land. Droughts have this thing were they kind of destroy plants because it takes way a lot of the water in an area and plants need water. This is not the only time climate change destroyed or forced to relocate groups because researchers have found “evidence has mounted in recent years that climatic change played a major role in the rise and fall of ancient civilizations, especially in the Middle East and South America” ("Drought May Have"). Researcher have researched the rings in trees from the Roanoke area and found that they had one of the worst droughts since 787 A.D. The researcher were able to figure this out because “the rings (in trees) are regarded as highly accurate gauges of climatic conditions in a given year or even in part of a year, since their thickness and consistency vary with soil moisture, and the year can be pinned precisely by using the most recent year's ring as a benchmark,” (“Drought May Have”). The drought actually saved the colonists because the Croatoan tribe saw that they were struggling with the drought and took the colonist to a place where the drought did not reach. Many researchers believe that the drought that happened in 1587 shows possible future drought issues either