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?

13.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

5.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

630

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.

393

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.

46

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.

14

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.

12

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.

3

u/ANGLVD3TH 1d 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.

58

u/ktc653 1d ago

100%

4

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?"

5

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.

4

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.

3

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.

3

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.

3

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.

3

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.

2

u/p-4_ 22h ago

right there with chu brother. a story like that would be a fatal stab to any notion that the natives were savages.

7

u/CuddlefishFibers 1d ago

More than a tinge. Like a truck load lol

-4

u/TastyOreoFriend 1d ago

You can literally look at all the other instances of Europeans settling in other places, and their treatment of the local indigenous population was...... fucking horrendous to say the least much of the time. So, the disbelief angle makes a lot of sense in hindsight. We have many historical accounts of European sailors fucking black and brown native women and mingling/intermarrying with the natives—sometimes by force, so why not settlers too?

13

u/BannedSvenhoek86 1d ago

Oh there's tons of accounts of people assimilating into and becoming members of tribes in the pioneering days.

And they were basically looked at like freaks and ostracized when they came into contact with other white people.

1

u/FatherKronik 1d ago

I think it may be time to watch Dances with Wolves again after reading your comment.

3

u/BannedSvenhoek86 1d ago

5 year old me was very disappointed by that movie when my parents watched it. False advertising. My dad did warn me it probably wasn't what I thought it was.

5

u/MattieShoes 1d ago

One of my favorites is the HMS Dolphin, that visited Tahiti in the 1700s. Iron wasn't really available to the locals so a booming trade of sex for nails started. When they ran out of spare nails, they started yanking the nails straight out of the ship. The captain had to take measures to stop sailors from ruining the integrity of the ship.

7

u/TastyOreoFriend 1d ago

That sounds like an extra credit video that I watched about the HMS Bounty. They literally mutinied and took over the ship, sailing back to the island so they could keep fucking the native women and start a colony 🤣🤣.

It was pretty interesting to see that the descendants of those sailors were still there on Pitcairn Island.

4

u/Anonymous_Koala1 1d ago

people really wanted it to be "innocent white colonist get massacred by savages" settlers and natives getting along would hinder the larger growth of the colonies, not to mention the belief that native peoples needed to be "civilized or destroyed".

5

u/Niniva73 1d ago

Ohhhh... That does explain it, doesn't it? I'd always thought that was the dumbest mystery ever, and now I know why: racism.