Eleanor Dare

In her book Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (2000), anthropologist Lee Miller speculates that Eleanor and the other members of the Roanoke Colony were religious Separatists who left England at a time when the political climate in England was dangerous for such religious dissidents.

She suggests that this might be why the colonists, two of whom were pregnant women and several of whom were parents with young children, were willing to undertake the dangerous journey to Roanoke Island with low supplies and at a time when England was on the verge of war with Spain.

The colonists, including the women, signed a petition urging White to return to England for supplies, even though he was reluctant to leave his daughter and granddaughter.

Powhatan showed Smith certain artifacts he said had belonged to the colonists, including a musket barrel and a brass mortar.

Survivors were eventually sold into slavery and held captive by differing bands of the Eno tribe, who, Miller wrote, were known slave traders.

William Strachey, a secretary of the Jamestown Colony, wrote in his The History of Travel Into Virginia Britania (1612) that, at the native settlements of Peccarecanick and Ochanahoen, there were reportedly two-story houses with stone walls,built in the English fashion.

[4] Strachey wrote in 1612 that four English men, two boys, and one girl had been sighted at the Eno settlement of Ritanoc, under the protection of a chief called Eyanoco.

[7] In 1701, surveyor John Lawson encountered members of the Hatteras tribe living on Roanoke Island who claimed some of their ancestors were white people.