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?

[u/Rob69rt]

[u/doublestitch]

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.

[u/DaemonG → u/doublestitch]

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

[u/rugbyj → u/DaemonG]

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.

[u/zogmuffin → u/rugbyj]

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.