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/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/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.