ROANOKE ISLAND
As cold cases go, the fate of the Lost Colony makes Amelia Earhart's disappearance look like an Easter-egg hunt.
The hapless collection of 117 men, women and children who had sailed from England to Roanoke Island vanished after August 1587, leaving no clues of their whereabouts - or their demise.
Thus began the longest missing-persons pursuit in American history.
In his presentation, "A Very Cold Case: A Progress Report on the Search for the Lost Colonists," East Carolina University anthropology professor Charles Ewen summed up the quest as a series of false leads, hoaxes, questionable hypotheses and frustrated explorations, with a sprinkling of the ridiculous in between.
It's not like people haven't been looking. John White, the colony's governor, first went back in 1590 to conduct an apparently cursory search. Although he found the carved letters "CRO" and "CROATOAN" near the settlement, White never made it to Croatan, which is Buxton today.
"He can't go out there because the weather is bad," Ewen, the director of archaeology laboratories at ECU, said to the audience at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Wednesday.
"So," Ewen said with an exaggerated shrug, "he goes home."
That was met with appreciative laughter.
"And there's the mystery."
White's fruitless jab at finding the colonists was followed about 17 years later with an investigation by explorers from the Jamestown settlement. Out of that came reports that a number of colonists may have been slaughtered by Powhatan Indians.
Since then, professional and amateur historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, sleuths and writers have given the search their best shots. Theories abound on what happened: They starved to death; they were killed by Spaniards or Indians; they drowned; they went 50 miles inland; and - "this is the one everyone wants it to be," Ewen said - they merged with the Indians.
The thrill of the quest to find an artifact, a fort, a grave or, say, the skeleton of the colony's Virginia Dare, the first English baby born in the New World - no matter how far-fetched the chances - has also attracted its share of eccentrics and con men.
Displaying a slide showing several old maps that were marked "the grave of Virginia Dare," Ewen joked that maybe the mystery wouldn't be so hard to solve.
"We could just drive there," he said.
Then there are the Dare stones, carved messages found on stones in the 1930s that some believe tell what happened to the colonists. At the time, the find created a flurry of excitement; they have since been dismissed as a fraud.
A direct link to the Lost Colony has yet to be found. The closest anyone has come is a 16th-century gold crest ring and a gunlock found in archaeological digs at Croatan in the 1990s.
But that hasn't stopped a "cottage industry" of wanna-be mystery-solvers, he said. Genealogists can trace a family name to the colony, and others claim that examinations of a person's DNA could eventually find links to the colony.
Even after many digs at the colony's purported location at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, no evidence of a settlement - or for that matter, a fort - has ever been unearthed.
"After 100 years of archaeologist's work, they're still lost," Ewen said. "Not only do we not know where they went, we don't know where they started from."
Catherine Kozak, (252) 441-1711, cate.kozak@pilotonline.com