**Content Warning**: This episode includes a very brief description of the gruesome atrocities by the Spanish against Native Americans. If you wish to skip it, skip from minute marker 8:20 to 8:50.

This episode strips away the myth of Roanoke as a spooky disappearance and instead digs into the context that doomed it from the start, exploring England’s late-1500s colonial ambitions, rivalry with Spain, and the dangerous blend of greed, religion, and entitlement driving expansion. Through the contrasting experiences of Manteo and Wanchese, it highlights early cross-cultural encounters, English assumptions of superiority, and a string of poor leadership decisions that quickly soured relations with Native peoples. The takeaway: what’s truly fascinating about Roanoke isn’t that it was lost, but that it was ever sent at all.

The two major sources for this series of episodes are:

• The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, by Andrew Lawler, published in 2018 by Anchor Books
• The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island, by Scott Dawson, published in 2020 by The History Press

To get updates and other content, follow me on Instagram and Threads @thecuriousalexjones.

To get updates and other content, follow @thecuriousalexjones on Instagram and Threads.