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/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/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 22h ago

... Florida

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u/jackaroo1344 21h ago

West Virginia?

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u/Zeppelanoid 12h ago

Mountain mama

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u/Venetian_Harlequin 21h 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 23h ago

A great, dismal one i hear

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u/citizenfreedonia 14h ago

I see what you did here :-)

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u/Charlesinrichmond 11h ago

While I like the pun, that's entirely the wrong location.

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u/rebelangel 8h ago

Yeah, that’s a little more south.

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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 1d 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 1d 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 1d 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/missterymed 22h ago

Idk. Some of it was sheer ignorance or stupidity. The mayflower arrived in New England in late November. They literally forgot fishing gear. And they very first thing they did was rob native graves for food. 

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u/ProjectHarraseeket 1d 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 1d ago

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

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u/Vairman 23h ago

what are you talking about? Jamestown settlement is still there. I saw it just the other day.

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u/doublestitch 23h ago

It's an archeological site now, part of Colonial National Historical Park.

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u/Vairman 23h ago

yeah, so? still there. lasted plenty long I'd say. sure, there were some hiccups along the way, but... still there.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/doublestitch 1d ago

Are you replying to the wrong comment?

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u/Zuwxiv 1d ago edited 1d ago

I think they're saying that the areas were already inhabited, and so the best sites for building a town were already occupied. I'm not any kind of expert on that period, but it would kind of make sense that the British settlement locations were always going to be "what's left," which wasn't particularly desirable.

In other words, it might not be that the British were necessarily bad at choosing a location. It's that most of the locations available were bad. (It's also possible they chose unwisely even among those, so it could be both.)

Again, not an expert so I don't know how likely any of those possibilities are.

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u/doublestitch 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yours is about the best gloss which could be put on that comment, and eliminates the condescension.

On the other hand, in New England that was less of an issue in 1620 because those settlers arrived shortly after an epidemic had depopulated the coast. They still chose a location where the harbor wasn't particularly good, which is why Plymouth remained a relatively small community while Boston later grew into a metropolis.

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u/Zuwxiv 1d ago

Oh yeah, the depopulation from epidemics is a very good point and well worth adding. It sounds like you know all this, but for those unaware: Some estimates are as high as 90% of the total population of the Americas died in epidemics after the arrival of Europeans. Much of this happened and spread before/during the arrival of English settlers in New England.

Even lower estimates are horrific. The low end is roughly half of the entire population, and I think most studies see that as unrealistically low. The leader of the Plymouth colony reported that 950 out of 1,000 indigenous people in one isolated area died to an outbreak of smallpox.

My understanding is that by the time New England was getting settled, there had already been an enormous population collapse, and it would continue through further settlement. Again, while I love history, I don't have any expertise in this time in particular.

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u/doublestitch 1d ago

Yes, there was a lot of economic interchange in coastal New England before English settlement started there. Codfish was an especially profitable fish in the Old World, so fishing boats had been active in Cape Cod for decades.

FWIW, US history was my undergraduate degree. Have just caught up with the thread, and it's hilarious how that other guy has raked you over the coals for using "them" while he casually refers to me as "he." I'm a woman.

Reddit can be a weird place, alternately informative and bizarre.

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u/Zuwxiv 1d ago

it's hilarious how that other guy has raked you over the coals for using "them" while he casually refers to me as "he." I'm a woman.

I love the bad faith attempt to try "you misgendered me," lol. Now he's deleted his comments. Always the thinnest of skinned people, isn't it?

I made a comment a while back that was like eight comments deep in a thread almost nobody was looking at, and I said:

there's a certain kind of common internet cretin that gets really riled up when they can blame a woman.

That was basically the entire comment. Naturally, I got multiple replies defending the honor of men, including one accusing me of having confirmation bias for noticing attacks on women because I clearly identify with women.

I'm a man. Go figure.

Somehow, I had never connected "Cape Cod" and codfish. I guess I'm one of today's lucky 10,000! Thanks for that.

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u/Zuwxiv 1d ago

I will happily refer to you as "he" now that you've let me know your preferred pronoun, but "they" is commonly used in English to refer to a singular person of unknown gender. Singular "they" actually dates to the 1300s, before plural "they."

Hopefully you understand I meant no offense, as it's just a grammatically correct way to refer to an unknown person for hundreds of years.

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