The Secotans were one of several groups of Native Americans dominant in the Carolina sound region, between 1584 and 1590, with which English colonists had varying degrees of contact.

The English, the Spanish, and the Native American groups they had contact with each acted against the others, as counter-colonizers of the Carolinas as exhibited through the study of Roanoke Island.

In 1533, Spanish officials began to harass the English in Spain, who were required as Englishmen to "swear under oath" that Henry VIII was the head of the church.

In 1585, the Englishman Richard Hakluyt published a book, Discourse of Western Planting, which concluded that the English should establish their own colony in the mid-latitudes of North America, to end dependency on Spanish goods, by creating their own supply lines.

[8] In one such account, Manteo, of the Croatoan (Hatteras), explained his own tribal history, in relation to a neighboring tribe at the mouth of the Neuse River, the Neusiok, referred to as the Neiosioke by Barlowe.

The Englishmen, uncertain of "whether their perswasion be to the ende they may be revenged of their enemies, or for the love they beare to us," declined to help the Croatoan wage war against their rivals.

British settlement in the area increased soon afterward, and the land was officially transferred from the Virginia Colony to the Province of Carolina in 1665.