Croatan

The Croatan, later also called the Hatteras, were a small Algonquian people of the North Carolina Outer Banks, around Roanoke and Hatteras, perhaps a branch or ally of the Roanoke. Their name may mean council town; werowance chiefs ruled by persuasion and gifts.

They met John White's expeditions of 1585 and 1587, and when White returned in 1590 the abandoned Roanoke settlement held only CROATOAN carved on its palisade, which he read as a sign the colonists had sheltered on Croatoan Island.

They kept the friendship first shown by the guide Manteo, but disease and displacement shrank them to perhaps eighty by 1701. In the Tuscarora War of 1711 they fought on the colonial side and paid heavily, many driven from the islands; by the mid-eighteenth century they had ceased to exist as a separate tribe, their descendants absorbed into neighbouring Algonquian communities and, by uncertain tradition, the Lumbee.