It's one of the biggest mysteries in American history.

In 1590, an English sailor stepped ashore on Roanoke Island off North Carolina.

Just a few years earlier, a colony had been founded there to give the English a foothold in North America.

But that day, the sailor founded not a single living soul.

Every single person had vanished without a trace.

And to this day, their fate remains a mystery.

Oceans of ink have been spilled debating what happened to them.

But no one can say for sure.

Now rather than add my own fruitless conjectures today,

I'm going to focus on something else.

An overlooked angle of the saga, namely the man to blame for the whole misadventure,

a scientist named Thomas Harriet.

Harriet had a thin, stern face with a pointy red goatee.

In the most famous picture of it, he's wearing a frilly Elizabethan color.

It looks like he doesn't even know what the word smile means.

Beyond helping to launch the doomed Roanoke colony,

Harriet's scientific work in North America altered the course of history and profound,

and frankly, disastrous ways.

For one thing, he spawned a public health epidemic that killed well over a hundred million people.

For better or worse, Harriet also helped propel England to the pinnacle of world power.

In Harriet's youth, England was a rude backwater, a laughing stock in Europe.

But his work erased that perception and transformed this laughing stock into the dominant colonial power of the next several centuries.

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