The Lost Colony of Roanoke

In 1587 a party of English settlers founded a colony on Roanoke Island, off what is now North Carolina. When their governor returned from England three years later, delayed by war, he found the settlement empty and dismantled, every colonist gone without a struggle, and a single word carved into a post: CROATOAN. No bodies, no graves, no certain trace of them has ever been found.

The Lost Colony is America's oldest unsolved disappearance, more than a hundred people erased from the record between one visit and the next. A Man of Coastal Sorrow tells it as 'The Roanoke Erasure'.