The Search for the Lost Colony 

The story of Sinclair’s colony was known to only a handful. When nothing is heard of the colony after sixty years, Giovanni Verranzano urges the French King Francis I to mount an expedition. His short trip, ostensibly to find a route to China, has only one layover, a two-week stay in the future Newport where a native pilot is reported to have commandeered his ship into harbor. He is greeted by a king with an Orkney name and welcomed by a native population “inclining towards whiteness”. There is however no surviving colony.

Like the fate of the Norse on Greenland, could they have suffered losses in battle or to illness? Or could their dwindling population have caused intermarriage with the Algonquin speaking tribes? There were no answers.

He leaves evidence of a Templar built “tower” on his map and calls the area Refugio. It was to be the last refuge of the order persecuted by the Church. Verrazano then headed home to report the colony was no longer in existence. The tower is of great importance as only a handful exist in the world, mostly where the Templars built them.