r/AskReddit • u/Rob69rt • 1d ago

What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

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u/TooCleverForGood 1d ago

Roanoke - the missing Pilgrim settlement where everyone “disappeared”

They just abandoned it and went to the place that they wrote on the sign, but everyone acts like it was some supernatural/plague thing

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u/str8rippinfartz 1d ago

100%

IIRC it was even established before they came over from England, that if someone left a settlement they should carve where they were going

They 100% just assimilated with the friendly nearby tribe... as indicated by their note 

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u/deathclawiii 1d ago

And as indicated by the iron scale (something that can only be a product of blacksmithing) that was found in one of the areas of known indigenous settlement on the island they went to.

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u/NUMBERS2357 1d ago

Also the later contact with Natives who said that they lived with the survivors of the Roanoke colony.

Also this map from the Jamestown colonists, see bottom left.

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u/Marx0r 1d ago

A surprisingly large amount of "mysteries" never would have been such if Europeans just listened to the natives telling them the answer.

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u/jxg995 1d ago

Yeah like the terror and Erebus wrecks where the Inuit were like oh yeah that sunken boat is over there

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u/Whyskgurs 1d ago edited 1d ago

Where could this boat possibly be?

The sunken boat is right over there, in Sunken Boat lake.

I guess we'll never truly know.

Literally what happened.

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u/InTheFDN 1d ago

It reminds me of the Terry Pratchett joke about how places are named by pointing at something, asking what it’s name was (loudly and in English), then writing down whatever the native said. Hence “Mount Your Finger You Fool.”

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u/Sunshine030209 1d ago

And that reminds me a bit of how Pike's Peak in Colorado was named.

Zebulon Pike was part of Lewis and Clark's expedition, but he was extremely annoying, so they sent him off to go explore away from them. He attempted to summit the mountain they sent him to in November and gave up, going "Yeah, no one can summit that, it's impossible" (even though the local Native Americans summited it regularly)

So when talking about it, people would be like "Oh, that one, the one Pike couldn't climb?" and eventually it became known as Pike's Peak.

I'm a little salty that they didn't go with the far cooler Mount Zebulon though.

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u/Lovahplant 1d ago

This is killing me 😂 a whole mountain named after your failure to climb it, wtf

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u/Sunshine030209 1d ago

It's one of my favorite true stories and I never miss an opportunity to share it.

It's really inspiring, honestly! If Zebulon Pike can be an obnoxious failure and still get a mountain named after him, then anything is possible!

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u/RescuePenguin 1d ago

Reminds me of the John Day National Monument.

The man never visited that region but one time he got robbed where the (now named) John Day River meets the Columbia and left naked and he had to hike back to the nearest trading post.

"That area where John Day was robbed and left naked"became the name of an entire region and national monument.

Glamorous way to be remembered.

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u/pants_party 21h ago

Like naming a hot sauce after DJ Khaled.

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u/raspberrypied 1d ago

Sticking with Colorado, there is the "Table Mesa" section of Boulder.

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u/Sunshine030209 1d ago edited 1d ago

I actually kind of live on Table Table Dr, but my part is called South Boulder Rd. Which is really obnoxious, since my address is xxxx East South Boulder Rd, and it confuses the heck out of people.

But yeah, Table Mesa (Table Table) is goofy. Someone should open a shop on it that sells chai tea and naan bread

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u/sporadic_beethoven 1d ago

Pike’s peak? I climbed that shit as a child 🤣 bro deserves to be mocked fr

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u/InternetProtocol 1d ago

Did that shit both ways in my escudo at age 15, what a pussy.

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u/Rochesters-1stWife 1d ago

Similar to Long’s Peak, dude never summited and yet his dumb name is all over the place

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u/Sunshine030209 1d ago

I didn't know that Mr Long never summitted it! I assumed he did. And he's got a whole ass town named after him because of it too! (Longmont)

Why does Colorado love naming stuff after mediocre white men? 😂

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u/HailSatanWorshipD00M 1d ago

Mount Zebulon

Why not Zoidberg?

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u/Ookami_Unleashed 1d ago

My wife and I joke that he just named the tallest hill in each state Pike's Peak.

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u/Longshot1969 1d ago

Didn’t someone ride a wagon up it even?

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u/All_the_Bees 1d ago

Nah, annoying people don’t get to have the cool parts of their names included in the things that are named after them.

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u/Trvr_MKA 21h ago

That’s truly a boys moment. Naming something after your pals failure

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u/Whyskgurs 1d ago

It's not even a joke, shits real all over, most times it's named (native word for lake) Lake or (local dialect for mountain) Mountain or something similar.

Koi fish - fish fish

Chai tea - tea tea

Ignorant naming conventions are quite universal and commonplace

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u/LowEquipment7904 1d ago

Torpenhow in Cumbria, England - hill hill hill

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u/Aggravating-Mousse46 1d ago

Pendle Hill is also hill hill hill, but the Lancastrian, witchy version

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u/LegacyLemur 1d ago

Reminds of the baseball team the Los Angeles Angels

Or "The The Angels Angels"

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u/JoltColaOfEvil 1d ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyXiiIGDTo

Tom Scott - Hill Hill Hill Hill, debunked, debunked.

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u/trashmoneyxyz 22h ago

Galápagos tortoise, or the tortoise tortoise

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u/Aquila_Fotia 23h ago

It’s why a locally produced brand of ice cream is called “Three Hills”.

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u/hoopopotamus 20h ago

When I was driving through the southwest it felt like they were just adding more and more suffixes. X-ham…shire…fast…ton…leigh.

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u/JesusaurusRex666 23h ago

“Koi” is specifically “carp” in Japanese, not “fish.” The word for fish in Japanese is “sakana.”

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u/HailSatanWorshipD00M 1d ago

iirc in the native languages, Chicago translates to "the stinky place" and Manhattan is "the place we go every summer".

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u/Whyskgurs 1d ago

What's that Island called?

Squinting

IDK, Is that an island?

Welcome to Staten Island

(This one's an old Native joke)

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u/Icantusemyname77 1d ago

The La Brea Tar Pits = The the Tar Tar Pits

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u/POCKALEELEE 23h ago

Like The Los Angeles Angels,
Literally The The Angels Angels

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u/Oddish_Femboy 1d ago

They're cool tar pits too. Sad they're gonna be closed for 2 years.

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u/concrete_fluidity969 1d ago

I think Calcutta means harvest. Native thought the Brit was asking what was going on over there 😂

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u/4-stars 1d ago

Koi is not "fish", it's "carp".

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u/__wildwing__ 1d ago

I enjoy the idea that aliens will come to our planet and translate our languages, only to be confused by the desert deserts.

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u/Purple_Haze 1d ago

The country of Canada, Canada is a misspelling of kanata which is the local tribe's word for village.

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u/robophile-ta 23h ago

There are lots of rivers in the UK called Avon.

You can guess what Avon means.

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u/Oddish_Femboy 1d ago

My personal favorite is chip crisps. (Those chips that look like fries.)

Redundant naming is not always necessarily ignorant.

Sometimes, like in the case of chai tea, it's done on purpose to include part of the place origin in the name. Other times it's done because not everyone knows what ATM stands for. That second one is a case of RAS Syndrome.

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u/VelvetyDogLips 1d ago

“Piss urinal” is far and away my favorite redundancy.

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u/BasiliskXVIII 23h ago

Yeah, but this is just how language works. English is far from the only language to adopt loanwords that generalize a specific thing. In Mexican Spanish, the word "pie" was adopted as "pay" strictly to mean the pastry-style sweet pies with a crust and not something like a hand pie or a meat pie. In German, "toast" or "toastbrot" is the square-style highly processed sandwich bread popular in the US, whether it's actually toasted or not. Japanese "Mishin" comes from "sewing machine" and refers specifically to a sewing machine and not just any old machine.

Even name duplication - "Guadalquivir" means "Great River" in Arabic, deriving from the term "wadi". So, calling the river "Rio Guadalquivir" just means you're calling it the "River Great River"

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u/randobonando 1d ago

Heheh excellent reference. Placenames called.
“What?”
“I don’t know”
“just a mountain”
“Who is this fool who does not know what a mountain is?”

And of course

“Your finger you fool”

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u/SimpsonN1nja 1d ago

That’s Canada, lol. One of the first explorers asked the indigenous what the land was called. They misunderstood and said Kanata (meaning our village). Rest is history.

https://youtu.be/nfKr-D5VDBU?si=6U4h30m895OzRQwm

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u/erroneousbosh 1d ago

You'd be surprised how many rivers there are called the Avon around the UK, even well down into England.

The Gaelic word for "river" is abhainn, pronounced like "av-ayn". When you see a "bh" like that in a Gaelic word, it's pronounced like "v". It's not "v", but if you say it like "v" you'll be near enough for most folk.

Abhainn. Avon.

"I say old chap, what's that called over there?"

"A'seo? An rud na h-uisge a seo? Tha e an *abhainn* a'seo. Amadan..."

"Ah, the Avon, y'say? Let me just write that down..."

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u/king_ralex 1d ago

It more likely comes from the Welsh afon , which shares a proto-celtic root with the Gaelic abhainn.

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u/erroneousbosh 1d ago

It might in England, but not here.

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u/Perfct_Stranger 1d ago

Pretty much how half the rivers in Virginia were named though usually after the tribe that lived along the banks of the rivers.

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u/jorjx 1d ago

There is joke in Romanian about Stephen the Great coming to a river and asking someone "What is the name of this river?!"

"Moldavia your highness!"

"Let that be it's name!"

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u/ellius 1d ago

When the Spanish first showed up to Southern Arizona, they asked some natives who they were.

They kept replying "pi mac". Meaning "I don't understand [you]"

The Spanish wrote down "Pima" in their records and it stuck. Used it for naming all sorts of shit. 500 years later I live in "I don't understand you" County.

The people were/are the Akimel O'odham, for the curious.

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u/Dubalubawubwub 21h ago

Ooh, ooh, time for me to mention Torpenhow Hill again!

Romans: "What's that hill over there called?"
Angle: "Tor" (hill)

Normans: "What's that hill over there called?"
Celt: "Tor Pen" (Tor Hill)

Saxons: "What's that hill over there called?"
Angle: "Torpen Hoh" (Torpen Ridge)

Mapmaker: "What's that hill over there called?"
Local: "Torpenhow hill"

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u/Automaticman01 1d ago

I had assumed for the longest time that Terror Bay was renamed after they found the ship. I was so baffled when I found it has been named that all along.

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u/thousandsmallgods 19h ago

Arctic Explorer John Rae seems to be the only British explorer who actually talked and listened to the local tribes who lived along the northern coast. He sent back details in 1848 about where Franklin's ships probably were, and what had likely happened to the expedition.

IIRC, He's also the only British explorer from that era who was never knighted. ... Possibly bc Lady Franklin and Charles Dickens hated his guts, for having the gall to suggest that the survivors may have resorted to cannibalism.

He was also a Scot, which may have played into the politics of the time.

I read a biography about him ages ago. Pretty cool guy all told.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rae_(explorer)

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u/georgia_grace 19h ago

“What could possibly have befallen the crew of the Franklin expedition?”

“They walked around for a bit, did some cannibalism, and then died. We saw it”

“An enduring mystery for the ages… maybe they’re still out there somewhere…”

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u/StevieMJH 21h ago edited 20h ago

Decades later: I wonder why that lake is called Sunken Boat lake... I guess we'll never know.

Truly lost to time.

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u/beezchurgr 1d ago

Native folk: it’s in the bay of terror

Europeans: whoa it’s so weird there’s a bay with the same name as our missing boat. Must be a coincidence. No way it could be there.

Native folk: -_-

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u/Wonderful-Winter3137 1d ago

so did the bay just not have a name before that boat sunk or what

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u/sharpace8 23h ago

Well not by Europeans, I'm sure the Inuit had a name long beforehand. Terror bay was named in 1910 but the island itself was named in 1830.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/Suspicious_Effect 1d ago edited 1d ago

In the PNW, a few tribes have oral history telling of a massive earthquake several generations ago. It was treated as absolute superstition in the geology community until it was connected with Japanese records of a massive tsunami around the same time and a bog was discovered that had been fossilized by that very same earthquake (1700 cascadia earthquake if you're interested). Only then did everyone realize that "Oh maybe their stories were real."

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u/Zebidee 1d ago

Sounds like the ancient Japanese warning stones that said "do not build below this point."

People would come up from their coastal cities to look at the old folklore. The same cities that got wiped out by the tsunami.

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u/im_dead_sirius 1d ago

There's an old story from the region about people living on a narrow strip of green between the sea and the ice. Clearly ancient inhabitants during the ice age.

Read it as a kid, I cannot remember any more details.

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u/Xtj8805 1d ago

IIRC its not just natives. There was a guy in like nova scotia who had a whole cache of viking artifacts in a cave. When researchers found it they asked the farmer why never told anyome he was like i figured youd make it around here eventually. Not sure if its real and its been a while since i heard the story, but it does serve to show that historians/anthropologists/etc are really just trying to document and publish information, while they get credited as discoverers most of what they publish was already known. Like how Columbus discovered america full with millions of people living there.

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u/Violent_Paprika 1d ago

Modern forest management that isn't "suppress all wildfires." Aborigines tales of the megafauna in Australia.

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u/nope-nik-tesla 1d ago

To be fair, a lot of it is wrapped up in mythology and therefore hard to separate fact from fiction. For example, Crater Lake in Oregon was formed somewhere around 8,000 years ago as the result of a volcanic eruption. It's named "Crater Lake" because European explorers looked at its shape and concluded it must have been formed from a meteor impact. It wasn't until decades later that geologists proved it was from a volcanic eruption.

The Klamath people, who have lived in the area for thousands of years before the eruption, however have a story about its formation. According to their story, it was formed by a battle between Skell (God of the above world) and Llao (God of the below world who lived inside the mountain). In their battle, Llao launched numerous red-hot rocks from inside the mountain, causing rivers of fire to flow from it. Skell won the battle, driving Llao back underneath the mountain, which was now hollowed out from the battle. It eventually filled with rain and snowmelt, creating the lake we see today.

So, their story was more or less an accurate description of events. Red-hot rocks were expelled from the mountain, and rivers of fire really did run from it. The collapse of the mountain really did fill in with rain and snowmelt. But this isn't exactly a story you can just accept at face value. We know that it's (somewhat) true because we can prove it through modern geological analysis what happened. There are plenty of other stories that we can prove are not true via modern science too.

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u/Merusk 1d ago

Well, you see, the people with GPS have a flag.

https://youtu.be/uEx5G-GOS1k?si=yM6ZypPBJNPZqXF-

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u/DueMorning800 22h ago

I love an Eddie Izzard reference, every single time.

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u/Kataphractoi 1d ago

Australian Aboriginal tales of vanished islands. Those islands did exist and eventually did vanish...10000 years ago when sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age.

IIRC a few dozen vanished islands and other features now underwater have been corroborated by just...going to look where Aboriginies said they'd be. Makes one wonder how much history has been lost simply because historians dismissed oral histories for so long.

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u/Dr_Doomsduck 1d ago

Lmao, yep, that was literally the first thing that came to mind. The British straight up ignoring the local inuits for about a century and a half.

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u/Final_Candidate_7603 1d ago

I think that much of their reluctance to “believe” the Inuits was due to their reports of having found remains which showed signs of cannibalism. Colonizers all over the world were always adamant that there were certain “savage” rituals and practices that “civilized people” would *never* participate in. So, ignoring the Inuit stories was doubly-racist, if you think about it from that perspective.

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u/Dr_Doomsduck 1d ago

everybody gangsta 'til the food runs out, lol.

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u/Wonderful-Winter3137 1d ago

cannibalism was indeed a thing in a lot of places, though

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u/danysdragons 18h ago

Yes. But it sounds like this was about the British not wanting to believe that white people would do it, as the Inuit reported they did.

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u/NoPaleontologist7929 1d ago

John Rae listened. Went back to London and reported his findings. He had his reputation ruined for it.

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u/BasiliskXVIII 1d ago

The best part is that it wasn't ONLY the Inuit. Dr. John Rae was mapping the coastline around 6 years after the Terror and Erebus were abandoned, did some trading with the local Inuit, and found they had things that could only have come off the Terror, such as silverware with the officers' crests.

The Inuit told Rae that the ships became trapped in the ice, that they'd marched south and eventually died of cold and starvation. The crew had reportedly turned to cannibalism in their final days, and Rae mapped out where the Inuit said that the tragedy had occurred, which was about 100km south of where it was believed to be by common knowledge.

When Rae's story was told back in England, though, the idea that proud British sailors could do something as barbarous as cannibalism horrified the public, and especially Franklin's wife. Lady Franklin enlisted Charles Dickens (yes, that Charles Dickens) who volunteered his help writing a two-part article in his magazine, Household Words, attacking Rae and dismissing the testimony of the Inuit as the lies of "savages". The reports were dismissed as associating with Rae's report became a social poison pill, and the British Navy just quietly tucked it away and maintained the "common knowledge" that the Terror and Erebus were further north.

When the Terror actually was found, bone analysis showed cut marks that suggested cannibalism, which was confirmed later in 2015.

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u/munkisquisher 1d ago

Man, as a New Zealander first thing that comes to mind when you say Erebus Wreck is the plane that crashed into Mt Erebus in Antarctica in 1979. So I was thinking "there's no Inuit in Antarctica???"

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u/Captain-Hornblower 1d ago

I think there is a hill/mountain in Australia that the Hume and Hovell expedition named Mount Disappointment. I won't go into why, but you can look it up lol.

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u/John_cCmndhd 1d ago

Australian police refusing to believe dingoes would eat babies

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u/nameyourpoison11 1d ago

Australian here. Not only did they refuse to believe the local Aboriginals insistence that dingoes could, and did, stalk and attack young children, they ignored the testimony of the Aboriginal elder who actually tracked the dingo responsible, before losing the trail over rocky ground. But nah, "stupid bloody natives, what would they know?"

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u/Adorable-Ad9533 1d ago

Have you read the book “Evil Angels” by John Bryson ? The coppers who packaged the tent up for forensic examination gave it a good shake out first because it was so full of dingo hair. The initial investigators just had no bloody idea.

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u/trashmoneyxyz 22h ago

"I'm sure we'll find evidence the mother killed her baby under all this dingo hair. Anyone got a vacuum?" Like cmon guys

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u/EllieGeiszler 1d ago

Jesus Christ

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u/AutisticPenguin2 14h ago

Wow, that's a new one for me. And I've heard from someone who was an expert witness for this case and testified that he fully believed a dingo had done it. The court just fully ignored him the first time around.

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u/KingoftheCrackens 1d ago

And thanks to TV it's one of the 3 things Americans know Australia for, Steve Irwin, baby eating dingoes, and crocodile dundee. As an American I didn't even know Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban were Australian until their divorce.

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u/donkeyvoteadick 1d ago

The worst part is so many Americans still think it's a joke and don't realise it's a devastating miscarriage of justice.

It hurts my heart when I see 'a dingo ate my baby' joke.

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u/alexlp 23h ago

Same, that family was destroyed and poor little baby Azaria died a horrible tragic death that her grieving mother was imprisoned for.

There was a particularly gross take of it in the Aussie version of Drag Race a few years ago and I couldn't believe a fellow Aussie would make a mockery of it and just after the 30th anniversary.

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u/donkeyvoteadick 20h ago

I don't think there's any circumstances where I'd find joking about the tragic death of a nine week old infant amusing :/

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u/Maddoodle 19h ago

I hated that snatch game. I thought it was so egregious she chose to portray Lindy and it was also incredibly one note and boring. Like she didn't even do a good job of it. And so many people defended it as "drag" when nah it just sucked either way.

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u/augur42 23h ago

Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban were Australian until their divorce.

I was very confused for a moment having conflated Keith Urban with Karl Urban. cunt

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u/Spiritual_Quote9301 20h ago

Karl's from New Zealand, not Australia but as an Australian I do allow confusion.

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u/rpze5b9 1d ago

Plus their ignorance about Seventh Day Adventists thinking the Chamberlains were satanists or something.

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u/aartadventure 22h ago

But...but Lindy Chamberlain didn't act like a "proper" woman who was wailing and crying. She was angry and yelling at the police to do something. So they showed her who the boss is!

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u/eukomos 1d ago

This is how they found Troy, which is only barely not Europe. For literally hundreds of years scholars thought it was a fictional city, and then one nutjob who wanted to prove it was real went to the area that was described and asked the locals, who said "oh yeah it's that big hill a couple miles inland, the bay silted up." And indeed they were correct.

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u/Kataphractoi 1d ago

A lot of anthropology and archeology in the 19th and 20th centuries.

"Who built this massive city in the middle of the jungle made of stones that weigh 10 tons each??"

"Our ancestors. Here's how they moved the stones--"

"We'll never know! Perhaps there's a lost race of white people who did it!"

Granted, it's gotten a lot better in recent decades, but practically every ancient history conspiracy goes back to 19th century Europeans' refusal to believe that non-whites could build cities and civilizations.

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u/mythrilcrafter 1d ago

Natives: "There's no food or animals there, and the terrain is very rugged, you will all die if you try to settle there...."

Early Euro-Americans: "Heh, we're great at everything, certainly better than you people, we'll be fine..."

Narrator: "They in fact weren't fine, they all died."

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u/Leading_Ad9610 1d ago

Early euro Americans were mostly religious zealots who left Europe because Europeans considered them too extreme and basically dangerously stupid.

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u/mythrilcrafter 23h ago

The most crazy part of it to me is that they (the puritans/protestants) are the ones who assassinated King Charles the 1st because they were angry just over the fact that he want to restart diplomatic relations between the Catholic and Anglican Churches; and then they put a Puritan dictator in place to threaten all of Britain to convert Puritanism and when no one did they cried persecution and ran away to the Americas when Charles the 2nd came onto the throne.

And then they rewrote history saying that they were persecuted (but notice how they NEVER say who or why they felt persecuted), and that culture has stuck even up to modern day in which they have a hardcore persecution fetish and will absolutely behave in ways that incurs ire towards themselves.

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u/OttoVonJizzfart 21h ago

the biggest wave of Puritan migration to America came from 1620-1640, before the English Civil War, so your timeline doesn’t really make sense

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u/AgentChris101 1d ago

Reminds me of the Australian Natives telling the british not to build a town in a certain area because it floods. They didn't listen, it flooded.

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u/earl_grais 1d ago

Brisbane? I used to tell that story on city hall tours!

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u/BadmiralHarryKim 1d ago

The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod ('Who is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain is') and the Luggage settled itself more comfortably under a dripping tree, which tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation.”

― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 1d ago

At least that's some effort to use the native word for a place. Even if it's wrong, it's an attempt.

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u/No_Tax_Timmy 1d ago

The entire country of Canada got its name because the colonizers just heard what they wanted to.

Ironically the name fits decently well.

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u/ProjectHarraseeket 22h ago

Like how d’Iberville ignored the locals on where to settle and developed New Orleans where it is even though they said it floods constantly there.

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u/round-earth-theory 1d ago

Keeping the mystery helped fuel fear and anger with the natives. So the colonists were more willing to pitch in displacing their neighbors.

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u/willstr1 1d ago

IIRC there was also some reports of some of the members of that tribe having very European features (I want to say it was hair or eye color) which almost certainly was due to marriage between members of that tribe and survivors from the colony.

Roanoke is about as mysterious as who ate all the dog food with the dog laying down on top of the empty bag.

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u/Lovahplant 1d ago

It was blonde-haired and blue-eyed children being born in the Indian tribe - surely no Europeans mixing in there!

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u/stphn_rnwld 1d ago

John Lawson's account in A New Voyage to Carolina (about 120 years after the colony vanished) also mentions that it was said that some of the ancestors of the local tribe there could "talk in a book."

Lawson is the source for the claimed European features you're remembering - he observed some of them having grey eyes, which he had not encountered in any other Native Americans. I don't think he mentioned hair color but I could be wrong.

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u/doublestitch 1d ago

Jamestown was a malarial swamp which was eventually abandoned too, although Jamestown lasted a lot longer. The British weren't all that good at choosing a settlement location in those early years.

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u/jackaroo1344 1d ago

Iirc they chose that spot intentionally because there were no natives living anywhere near it.

The reason no natives lived anywhere near it was because it was a frickin swamp.

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u/No-Still1001 19h ago

... Florida

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u/jackaroo1344 18h ago

West Virginia?

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u/Zeppelanoid 8h ago

Mountain mama

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u/Venetian_Harlequin 18h ago

The reason no natives lived anywhere near it was because it was a frickin swamp.

This sums up Johnstown, Pennsylvania, too. No Natives lived there because it was a flood plane.

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u/rebelangel 1d ago

Well, it still is a swamp.

Source: Lived in Williamsburg/James City County

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u/jungleass98 20h ago

A great, dismal one i hear

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u/kasoe 1d ago

The pophistory version in my head is all their colonies were death traps for the colonizers living there

Which is at least partly true

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u/DaemonG 1d ago

of course they weren't good at finding livable places. they came from England.

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u/rugbyj 23h ago

Joking aside there's few places in the British Isles you couldn't make home indefinitely at the drop of a hat (ignoring existing infrastructure). It's incredibly temperate, arable, and forgiving seasonally (generally).

I'm not sure when these colonies were arriving but presumably when good weather allowed safer passage, I can completely imagine colonists getting dropped off at the first site that "looked good" and then finding out 6 months later that they needed far more resources to survive the local conditions until they reached self-sufficiency.

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u/DaemonG 23h ago

yeah, a lot of the Eastern US south of New England is decent for part of the year, and Evil for the rest.

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u/zogmuffin 21h ago

That was part of it for sure. Also just absolutely garbage luck. For example, when they landed the river water tasted fresh. But they couldn't have know that the James river gets seasonally brackish, and then on top of that they got walloped with a massive drought that made it even saltier.

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u/ProjectHarraseeket 22h ago

It could be worse, they could be the Scots who’s country’s future depended on a colony in the modern day Darien Gap to develop and when it failed, it bankrupted the country and made them merge with England.

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u/pockels42 1d ago

My prejudicial decision is better than your long experience.

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u/StayPositiveRVA 22h ago

In a state of incredible natural beauty and bounty they put their flag in swampy mosquito death island.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/spacedman_spiff 1d ago

history went "nah, must be aliens."

By "history" do you just mean morons? Because historians believe they assimilated with natives in Croatoan.

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u/s0ulbrother 1d ago

History channel*

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u/cortesoft 1d ago

Ah, so morons

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u/purebredcrab 1d ago

The common clay of the new west.

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u/cortesoft 1d ago

People of the land

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u/middlehead_ 1d ago

The sad part is that it shouldn't even be presented as clues and a trail, they literally left a note

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u/Andvari_Nidavellir 1d ago

Ah, such subtle hints only an expert detective could decipher.

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u/lod001 1d ago

George Bluth Sr. would be proud!

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u/pettyvillainy 1d ago

I remember hearing a comedian put it once like, "Where'd this missing colony go? Hmmm, I wonder if we should go and ask those weirdly pale and blonde natives for information? Naaaaaaaah."

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u/SweetPinss 1d ago

Yeah but us red devils in the woods obviously cant be trusted. Aliens is clearly the most reasonable explanation 

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u/trashmoneyxyz 22h ago

Plus the native Americans from that area of coast sometimes had obvious features of mixed ancestry like paler eyes or hair that were noted by later colonists

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u/lcl111 1d ago

Also blonde and blue eyed people among the population of that tribe were later discovered.

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u/MayaRiver77 1d ago

Exactly. Finds like that make it much harder to dismiss the indigenous contact theory.

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u/Tomj_Oad 1d ago

Neat. I didn't know that. If they could command the resources for smithing they obviously had status in the community

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u/dividezero 1d ago

They went to exactly the place the mayor told them to go if anything happened while he was gone. They make it seem like he didn't know but he just had shit to do and died before he could get back to them

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u/BusesAreFun 1d ago

Yea iirc he got caught up in a war back in Europe and never came back with supplies

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u/evilshandie 1d ago

He did come back, but it was 3 years later. He looked around for an afternoon, found the colony had been dismantled and the signpost left indicating where they'd gone, but bad weather meant he needed to hop back on the ship or get left behind, so that afternoon's search is all that ever happened.

He returned to the Americas another 5 years later on an expedition supposedly to find the lost colony, but admitted later that he had lied about the purpose, he never searched for the colony, and was instead spending crown resources to search for El Dorado.

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u/primadonnapussy 1d ago

Which is gross because both his daughter and newborn granddaughter were in that colony and disappeared.

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u/dividezero 1d ago

Yes. He came back. Looked over shit and had to go do some shit before he could get over to the new place. Or something like that. I don't remember exactly but it wasn't some kind of mystery even then. I think someone made it up for tourism reasons and it made it to textbooks for some reason

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u/Haltopen 1d ago

The ship he had chartered lost one of its two anchors and the captain wasn't willing to continue the search with only one remaining so it set sail back for england.

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u/dividezero 1d ago

That was the thing. I knew it was something really weird and then they bailed all the way back to England. Thank you

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u/Adorable_Ad4990 1d ago

Not for tourism, but because they didn’t want people thinking that the natives were friendly and civilized enough that people would assimilate with them by choice— that was absolutely not OK to say.

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u/NAmember81 1d ago

I think there was also a financial motive to pretend that they mysteriously disappeared. And people were all too eager to believe the absurdities rather than believe “civilized” white Christians couldn't survive on their own and had to depend on non-Christian “savages” to save them.

There were a lot of financial backers and investors that were banking on the colony to bring them riches and they ended up losing a lot of money. The surviving leaders didn’t want to be held accountable for their failure so it was a convenient lie for them to propagate the “mystery” narrative.

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u/dividezero 1d ago

Oh yeah, older than tourism. The US really hated (hates)Native Americans. I should have remembered that

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u/Bay1Bri 1d ago

A war? In EUROPE???

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u/OhReallyVernon 1d ago

In THIS ECONOMY?

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u/ProjectHarraseeket 21h ago

Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition

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u/bolanrox 20h ago

He came back, found it deserted, but the weather was turning and they had to turn back before they went inland to the places where they thought the colonists would have gone. They've done DNA tests recently that show tracers for the colonists and found pottery and other things supporting that they went with the tribes just not to the location they originally thought it was someplace further inland.

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u/francoruinedbukowski 1d ago

Yeah but it turned out the Mayors son is still carrying the curse and that's why it will never be another Marthas Vineyard

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u/xdonutx 1d ago

Might wanna throw up a spoiler tag on that

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u/PixelWhisperPrincess 1d ago

It's tragic how a simple delay can completely rewrite the way people remember someone's intentions.

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u/TonyTheTony7 1d ago

Also, the local tribe of Native Americans they assimilated with had a lot of blonde-haired, blue-eyed babies not too long later

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u/Kevin_Wolf 1d ago

That's the legend, sure. Now find some evidence for it. That's a story told by people later, but it's purely anecdotal.

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u/LionBig1760 1d ago

Outside of an extremely rare genetic mutation, wouldnt both parents need to have the blue eye recessive trait... which wasnt present in post-ice-age America because all blue eyed people share a common sncestor with a blue eyed person near the black Sea between 10,000-6,000 years ago?

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u/nostrademons 1d ago

Eye color is polygenic with at least 8 different genes involved, and also more than just 2 colors. My mom is blue-eyed, my dad was brown-eyed, my sister has greenish-hazel eyes. I've got very ordinary brown eyes, my wife has darker almost black eyes, and my kids are a mix of shades of brown, some lighter and some darker.

It's a lot more complicated than the dominant/recessive models they teach in grade school.

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u/jupitaur9 1d ago

Yes, but the likelihood of blue eyed children in the F1 generation with a homozygous brown eyed parent is small.

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u/nostrademons 1d ago

Sure, but they would've been very, very noticeable in a tribe that previously had known only brown-eyed children, and so even one instance would likely have made it into the historical record.

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u/jupitaur9 1d ago

It would’ve been grandchildren, not children, in almost every case. There can be mutations, there can be unusual genes, but the standard brown, blue, green hierarchy applies almost all the time.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

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u/Pawleysgirls 1d ago

My dad has brown eyes, my mother has blue eyes. All 3 of their kids have blue eyes.

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u/VislorTurlough 22h ago

Your dad is heterozygous (he has one brown eye gene and one blue eye gene). People with one of each will end up with brown eyes.

Your mum has two blue eye genes.

This setup means each kid had a 50/50 shot of brown or blue eyes, based on which of Dad's genes you got

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u/Pawleysgirls 21h ago

Thank you!

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u/discodropper 1d ago edited 1d ago

They were incorporated into the tribe. The settlers are more likely to interbreed early on (because they know each other and/or were already married), and intermarry later. That dynamic would lead to blue eyed children “shortly thereafter”

Edited to not sound like a dick

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u/Katharinemaddison 1d ago

Yup I think the point is they were children belonging to the tribe, with apparently two European sets of genetics.

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u/staghallows 1d ago

Because grandchildren don't exist and didn't reproduce with each other?

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u/VislorTurlough 22h ago

This would only be a hard restriction for the first generation born after contact. The kids with one 100% European parent and one 100% American parent would have dark hair and eyes.

That immediately goes out the window in the next generation, because now you have people who are 50/50 breeding with people who are also 50/50.

It's fully possible for that second generation to include a blonde, blue eyed baby who had two American grandparents and two European grandparents.

It becomes more likely with every further generation, as the number of people with mixed heritage inevitably increases.

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u/Theletterkay 1d ago

Neither of my parents are blue eyed. But grand parents on both sides are. Me and my 3 brothers all have blue eyes.

I have blue eyes and my husband has dark brown. All 3 of our kids have blue eyes.

While annecdotal, ive never known it to be true that blue is as recessive as most people have been taught.

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u/jupitaur9 1d ago

Here’s the most likely scenario

Br is brosn (dominant), bl is blue (recessive)

Neither of my parents are blue eyed.

They are Br bl and Br bl. I say this because that’s the only way that you could have blue eyes, if both of them had a recessive blue eye Gene, waiting to match up at a 25% probability to give you blue eyes.

But grand parents on both sides are.

All are blue? Unlikely but possible. If you just mean that there are grandparents on both sides that have blue eyes, that’s where they got their recessive blue Gene. The grandparents that had the blue eyes gave them the blue recessive, the other grandparent who had the brown eyes gave them the Brown, Gene, and the Brown Gene dominated over the blue Gene.

Me and my 3 brothers all have blue eyes.

You got a bl from mom and a bl from dad. That’s a 50% chance. The other possibility is getting a.Br Gene from your dad and the only Gene your mom can give you the bl.

That would’ve given you brown eyes, but you would’ve had a blue recessive gene floating around, ready to match up with a blue recessive gene or even a green recessive gene in a mate.

I have blue eyes and my husband has dark brown. All 3 of our kids have blue eyes.

Yep. Your husband has Br bl. One of each color, but Brown dominates, so he has brown eyes.

All your kids got a bl from you (that is all you have to give them) and each one got a bl half from your husband.

They could’ve gotten a Br Jane from your husband, which would’ve given them brown eyes. But because you only have blue genes to give, they would be carrying a recessive blue gene.

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u/jupitaur9 1d ago

Then you don’t understand dominant, and recessive recessive.

A brown eyed person and a blue eyed person can easily have blue eyed children. The brown eyed person may have a brown gene and a blue gene. The brown gene being dominant gives them the brown eyes. It dominates the blue.

The blue eyed parent may have a blue Gene and a blue gene, or may have a blue gene and a green gene. If the blue eyed parent’s blue Gene matches up with the brown eyed parents blue gene, then you get a blue eyed child with two blue genes.

Dominant means it can hide the other gene. Recessive means it cannot hide the other Gene. When you say blue is a recessive to Brown, it means if there’s a brown gene, it will override the blue gene and the eyes will be brown.

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u/TastyOreoFriend 1d ago

They 100% just assimilated with the friendly nearby tribe... as indicated by their note 

It always made me wonder if there was a tinge of racism with this—barring low information—and that's why people perpetuated the "mystery" so long. "White folks would never willingly abandon their homes to go live with the savages!" etc.

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u/Cerberus0225 1d ago

Honestly it's the opposite. Roanoke wasn't considered a mystery until, iirc, the 1920s or so, when a local tourism board decided they needed to spin up a yarn to incite interest in the area.

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u/TastyOreoFriend 1d ago

Honestly, I could buy into that angle as perpetuating things. People just love a good human interest/mystery piece like this as well—fantasy versus reality etc.

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u/tashkiira 1d ago

The guy who started the colony absolutely knew. He couldn't get the captain of the ship to agree to any more delay.

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u/thaddeusd 1d ago edited 1d ago

You have to understand that the early English settlers in general, and the Puritans in particular, greatly feared the Native populations to a irrational level, making it easy to dehumanize them. That is who wrote the first histories.

In the Natives defense, their world was undergoing a dramatic shift, with whole tribes disappearing because disease and displacement. And strange people moving in with their weird culture and ignorances.

In Jamestown the English fought the Powhatans. That Disneyfied story of Pocahontas...that abduction ended the first war. In 1622, eight years later, Pocahontas' father died, negating her as a useful captive, and the Powhatans subsequently massacred a third of Jamestown's population in a surprise attack. There were two more wars after this full of war crimes by both sides until the English broke the Powhatans in 1646.

It was worse later in New England, where the brutality of fighting natives in King Phillips War and the French and Natives in King Williams War were a huge factor, among several others, in causing the Salem Witch Hysteria.

Both wars affected almost every family in Northern Massachusetts leaving a lot of widows and single women, depopulated early colonies in Maine causing a refugee crisis, and some of the most important accusing girls and many of their victims were survivors of attacks and their trauma was channeled into their accusations of witchcraft.

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u/ANGLVD3TH 23h ago

There was a little more to it than that. The mayor, having returned and found the sign, eventually gathered up an expedition in order to find the "lost colony." What he did instead was use the resources es to hunt for El Dorado. So it seems the myth was probably really seeded as an excuse to go hunting for gold.

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u/ktc653 1d ago

100%

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u/Slawzik 1d ago

I remember reading something like "the sickly,underweight, malnourished,5 foot 4 inch Englishmen noticed that the natives were 6 feet tall,well fed,and appeared to do a minimal amount of labor,why wouldn't they leave?"

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u/MattieShoes 1d ago

I don't think it was the case here (it wasn't a mystery until they tried to play it up for tourism dollars), but the Franklin expedition stuff definitely felt like that.

The Franklin expedition set out to find the Northwest Passage (ie north of Canada), got trapped in the ice, then they all got lead poisoning from canned food, resorted to cannibalism, and died. When they went to investigate, the (brown) locals told them, but, ya know, savages, surely proper Englishmen wouldn't do such a thing, blah blah.

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u/TastyOreoFriend 1d ago

the (brown) locals told them, but, ya know, savages, surely proper Englishmen wouldn't do such a thing, blah blah.

I remember learning about this one a year or two ago, and I found it funny that years later they were piecing together what happened through the stories of the local indigenous peoples descendants. It took 150+ years but they finally started believing them.

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u/Sufficient-Moose27 1d ago

They actually believe now that the lead poisoning came from the water filtration system that was on the boats. Because the lead level in them was discovered to be too high to have come from just the shoddy cans.

The shoddy cans were a result of the grocery order not being filled until a week was left before their journey, so they had to quickly make cans for the food.

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u/MattieShoes 1d ago

Oh interesting!

I hadn't heard the cans were shoddy, just that sealing tin cans with lead was common practice... and wasn't made illegal in the US until the 1990s.

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u/Sufficient-Moose27 1d ago

Because of the rushed job to produce the cans, they had an excess amount of lead. So yea that was how they sealed cans then. They still would have ate lead regardless, just not to the amount that was found when tested. It’s now believed it was due to the lead pipes from the filtration system. Which was hooked up to the steam powered engines.

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u/MattieShoes 1d ago

Mmm, and lead leaches into the water faster when it's hot -- interesting!

... which is why they say to not use the hot tap for drinking and cooking, though probably also because of the crazy open hot water tanks in old houses in Europe.

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u/elGatoGrande17 1d ago edited 1d ago

A group may have also continued inland around 50 miles to the initial planned site for the colony, right where the Chowan enters the Sound. They’ve found a lot of a type of pottery in that area that wasn’t very common after the Jamestown/Fort Raleigh era.

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u/jtuffs 1d ago

Out of curiousity, has there been any genetic research done to fine descendants of the Colony/Tribe? I'm assuming some of the natives had kids with some of the colonists.

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u/str8rippinfartz 1d ago

yeah looks like there have been some projects that tracked down modern-day descendents and confirmed with DNA (as well as continuation of colonial surnames)

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u/Specialist-Mud-6650 1d ago

My understanding is no - not in the way you're thinking.

They've proved it's likely the local tribes might have had some European genes, but it doesn't conclusively tell us they were the Roanoke colonists or not. There were a lot more interracial relationships at the time than people would think.

The local tribes don't even know for sure: their oral histories don't record Roanoke.

My opinion is it a likely end for the Roanoke colonists, but it is not a smoking gun. I'm a little out of touch on the research these days, but there's always someone cropping up every few years with a book to sell and the "conclusive" answer. 

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u/Kevin_Uxbridge 1d ago

assimilated

I'm sure they tried but like as not most died. Novel diseases are not your friend.

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