How could 115 men, women and children just disappear?
It’s a question that has haunted historians and archeologists for hundreds of years. The mystery began in 1587, when a group of English colonists landed at what is now known as Roanoke Island, which sits in the outer banks of North Carolina. “Their idea was to create an English village,” says journalist Andrew Lawler, author of The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke.
The colonists were middle-class Londoners who sought to escape the city’s filth and disease, and saw the New World as a way to acquire land. “It was an Elizabethan back-to-the-land movement,” Lawler says.
