The Lost Settlers

In 1587, a group of 115 English settlers – men, women and children – sailed from Britain to set up the first English colony in the New World, on Roanoke Island off what is now North Carolina. Two years later, a second expedition set off from England to join them. However, when they arrived, they found the settlement deserted. There were no indications of where the settlers had gone, nor any sign of a struggle, but just one word mysteriously scratched on a tree: “Croatoan”. This was the name of a nearby island where the Indians were known to be friendly, but a trip to the island showed that the settlers had never arrived there. One theory is that they travelled inland, up into the hills of Appalachia, and settled there. No one knows why they might have done this, but fifty years later, when European explorers arrived in Tennessee, the Cherokee Indians told them that there was a group of pale people living in the hills already, people who wore clothes and had long beard. No one ever found this mysterious community. But in a remote and neglected corner of the Appalachians, high up in northeastern Tennessee, there still live some curious people called Melungeons, who have been there for as long as anyone can remember. The Melungeons have most of the characteristics of Europeans – blue eyes, fair hair, lanky build – but a dark, almost Negroid skin coloring that is distinctly non-European. They have English family names, but no one, including the Melungeons themselves, has any idea of where they come from or what their early history might have been. They are as much of a mystery as the lost settlers of Roanoke Island. Indeed, it has been suggested that they may be the lost settlers of Roanoke.