The grant included that territory settled by Roger Green and his men. Among the Proprietors sat Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, the only lord of Carolina actually upon American ground. Following instructions from his seven fellows Berkeley now declared this region separated from Virginia and attached to Carolina. He christened it Albemarle. Strangely enough, he sent as Governor that Scotchman, William Drummond, whom some years later he would hang. Drummond should have a Council of six and an Assembly of freemen that might inaugurate legislation having to do with local matters but must submit its acts to the Proprietaries for veto or approval. This was the settlement in Carolina of Albemarle, back country to Virginia, gatherer thence of many that were hardy and sound, many that were unfortunate, and many that were shiftless and untamed. An uncouth nurse of a turbulent democracy was Albemarle.
Cape Fear, far down the deeply frayed coast, seemed a proper place to which to send a colony. The intrusive Massachusetts men were gone. But "gentlemen and merchants" of Barbados were interested. It is a far cry from Barbados to the Carolina shore, but so is it a far cry from England. Many royalists had fled to Barbados during the old troubles, so that its English population was considerable. A number may have welcomed the chance to leave their small island for the immense continent; and an English trading port as far south as Cape Fear must have had a general appeal. So, in 1665, came Englishmen from Barbados and made, up the Cape Fear River, a settlement which they named Clarendon, with John Yeamans of Barbados as Governor. But the colony did not prosper. There arose the typical colonial troubles-sickness, dissensions, improvidence, quarrels with the aborigines.
Nor was the site the best obtainable. The settlers finally abandoned the place and scattered to various points along the northern coast.
In 1669 the Lords Proprietaries sent out from England three ships, the Carolina, the Port Royal, and the Albemarle, with about a hundred colonists aboard. Taking the old sea road, they came at last to Barbados, and here the Albemarle, seized by a storm, was wrecked. The two other ships, with a Barbados sloop, sailed on anal were approaching the Bahamas when another hurricane destroyed the Port Royal. The Carolina, however, pushed on with the sloop, reached Bermuda, and rested there; then, together with a small ship purchased in these islands, she turned west by south and came in March of 1670 to the good harbor of Port Royal, South Carolina.
Southward from the harbor where the ships rode, stretched old Florida, held by the Spaniards. There was the Spanish town, St. Augustine. Thence Spanish ships might put forth and descend upon the English newcomers. The colonists after debate concluded to set some further space between them and lands of Spain. The ships put again to sea, beat northward a few leagues, and at last entered a harbor into which emptied two rivers, presently to be called the Ashley and the Cooper. Up the Ashley they went a little way, anchored, and the colonists going ashore began to build upon the west bank of the river a town which for the King they named Charles Town. Ten years later this place was abandoned in favor of the more convenient point of land between the two rivers. Here then was builded the second and more enduring Charles Town--Charleston, as we call it now, in South Carolina.
Colonists came fast to this Carolina lying south. Barbados sent many;
England, Scotland, and Ireland contributed a share; there came Huguenots from France, and a certain number of Germans. In ten years after the first settling the population numbered twelve hundred, and this presently doubled and went on to increase. The early times were taken up with the wrestle with the forest, with the Indians, with Spanish alarms, with incompetent governors, with the Lords Proprietaries' Fundamental Constitutions, and with the restrictions which English Navigation Laws imposed upon English colonies. What grains and vegetables and tobacco they could grow, what cattle and swine they could breed and export, preoccupied the minds of these pioneer farmers. There were struggling for growth a rough agriculture and a hampered trade with Barbados, Virginia, and New England--trade likewise with the buccaneers who swarmed in the West Indian waters.
