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 beards.
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.
(Adapted from The
Lost Continent by Bill Bryson)
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