WILMINGTON, NC – In 1666, four years before what would become Charleston was colonized, settlers along the coast were unsure of another Charles Towne in the vast area of Carolina that stretched from northern Florida to Virginia.
Two years on their jungle adventure, about 800 people waited for new supply ships that would never arrive. They were at war after Puritan settlers kidnapped native children for slavery. And factions fought while the governor preferred a settlement further south to make a statement against Spanish claims for the same lands.
The agreement on what would become the Cape Fear River was in disarray, and England did not send aid.
That same year, the bubonic plague devastated London, fire decimated much of the city and the British were at war with the Dutch for control of the seas.
The province of Carolina already stretched from Virginia to northern Florida and west to Mississippi and beyond. Courtesy of “Charles Towne on the Cape Fear” by Jack Fryar
With England concerned, settlers 4,000 miles away crossed the Atlantic on their own.
Disillusioned, the settlers began to flee, and the first Charles Towne in Carolina territory would not last another year.
From 1664 to 1667, English settlers from Barbados and a group of New England Puritans worked to build a house in the untouched tangle of swamps and forests in what is now southeastern North Carolina, but almost everything that could go wrong has worked.
The much-needed supply shipments sank, internal strife grew, and in the fall of 1667, a huge hurricane passed through it before it hit the coast at Outer Banks to end the doomed venture.
‘Piece of snake’
“They were practically snake bites from the start,” said Jack Fryar, a historian from Wilmington, North Carolina, who narrated the ill-fated attempt in his first 240-page book “Charles Towne on the Cape Fear: The Rise and Fall from the first Barbadian settlement in Carolina. “
“It was a series of bad luck,” said Fryar during a recent interview.
The initial group of settlers under John Vassall came to the area believing that they had an agreement for more rights than those passed on by the proprietary Lords who controlled the region. King Carlos II granted the land called Carolina to the eight men in 1663 as retribution for helping to elevate him to power and restore the monarchy three years earlier.
In 1665, another group arrived in Charles Towne by mistake, bringing a different set of rules.
John Yeamans and his contingent left Barbados with the intention of establishing a settlement in Port Royal, near present-day Beaufort, “to nudge the Spaniards,” said Fryar. But a storm took them off course and they finally sailed to the Cape Fear area.
When Yeamans arrived, he was appointed governor by decree of the owners, while Vassall, who had been there for more than a year, was appointed vice governor.
To make matters worse, a supply vessel brought by Yeamans sank at the mouth of the river, a refueling ship dispatched to Jamestown sank on its return, and the settlers found themselves operating under a new set of rules.
According to the regulations of 1663 established for the Vassall group in the Declaration and Proposals, the colonists could occupy the west side of the Cape Fear River (initially called Charles River).
“They had a lot of latitude in the way they managed the land,” said Fryar.
Along with the governance and security provisions, it also granted areas based on life stations. Free men and women had more land than hired servants. It is important to note that it did not require the settled lots to be adjacent.
Two years later, the owners issued the concessions and the agreement at the request of the Yeamans representative in England. It was very different from the previous document under which Vassall had resolved Charles Towne.
Lottery lottery
It allowed the distribution of land through a lottery system, with concessions made according to the arrival of the settler. This meant that someone who had already colonized land and dug out a farm for his family could lose it to someone else through an unfortunate drawing.
Land grants, some of up to 22,000 acres, had to be contiguous.
Each plot of land had to be divided into 11 equal plots, with a plot reserved for the owners. The new rule also required that a lot be liquidated before another neighbor. It also limited the façade along water courses to prevent anyone from monopolizing direct access to streams and rivers, invading even more land already occupied.
Under the previous agreement, settlers could place their settlement anywhere upstream and downstream, and they did not have to stand side by side.
“The Lords changed the rules to mimic a system in New England, where lots flocked,” said Fryar. “It doesn’t work very well here.”
The lightest area near the Cape Fear River, north of Town Creek, near Wilmington, NC, was the site of the first Charles Towne settlement in the vast territory of northern Florida to Virginia, originally called Carolina. Although it only lasted three years, Charles Towne was established six years before what is now Charleston to the south. Courtesy of “Charles Towne on the Cape Fear” by Jack Fryar
The owners had little firsthand knowledge of the land and its watery geography. Since the lots had to be contiguous, a settler could end up with a swamp impossible to live under the lottery system.
The terms of the Concessions and the Agreement also favor settlements further south.
For example, settlers in Cape Fear received a more generous distribution of land than those who chose to settle in the northern Albemarle area, but those who chose to join Yeamans’ view of a colony further south in Port Royal would receive more land than those on Cape Fear.
Dissatisfaction with changes in land distribution and the factions competing to stay or go south were seething, but some of the settlers themselves also led the colony to their deaths.
Many of the Puritan settlers kidnapped native children, saying they were civilizing them and teaching Christianity, but they really saw the natives as inferior and wanted to enslave them, Fryar wrote in his book.
This led the native people to retaliate, often shooting arrows at settlers who tended the cattle on their remote farms spread about 60 miles upstream and downstream. Total war broke out, making financiers in London and Barbados less willing to invest in the colony.
‘Don’t waste your time here’
Puritans were also not favored by the owners.
A group of Boston Puritans tried to settle along the Cape Fear River in early 1663, but they abandoned the effort in two months for several reasons and are believed to have placed an unflattering sign at the mouth of the river that would later prove to be be prophetic.
“Basically, it said, ‘… don’t waste your time here,'” said Fryar.
The owners saw the Puritans as closest to Oliver Cromwell, the man who signed Charles I’s death sentence and became Lord Protector during the Commonwealth of England until his death in 1658.
The lords were monarchists and probably did not want the Puritans to establish themselves on the land that the owners hoped to colonize on their own terms, said Fryar.
King Carlos II granted eight landlords the territory called North Carolina from Florida to Virginia, where two different settlements were named in his honor. One, Charles Towne, failed in North Carolina, while the other, now Charleston, resisted in South Carolina. Courtesy of “Charles Towne on the Cape Fear” by Jack Fryar
The abrupt abandonment of the Puritans may also result from hearing that Vassall’s Barbados group had petitioned the owners for their own Cape Fear deal.
When another group from New England returned the following year to join Vassall’s group, the treatment they gave the natives did not help the new settlement.
With England preoccupied with war, pestilence and destruction and the settlers not receiving aid or supplies from outside, many of them were dismayed and started to withdraw.
“People gradually gave up,” said Fryar. “Soon, Vassall stayed with six people.”
Yeamans, who never favored a colony there, had returned to Barbados in early 1666, about a month after disembarking at Charles Towne, and Vassall and the settlers were left on their own.
‘The last straw’
In the fall of 1667, Vassall, with no supplies arriving and settlers dwindling, left the settlement.
“The last straw was a hurricane that passed that fall, and that was it,” said Fryar.
Although a central compound was established at the site, no city has ever developed. With the departure of Vassall, Charles Towne ceased to exist, and no other settlement would come to the region for 50 years.
Three years after the end of North Carolina’s attempt, another English expedition came from Barbados to Carolina. He established what became the Ashley River before moving to its most prominent spot on what would become the Charleston Peninsula.
Charles Town, South Carolina, flourished, said Fryar, because he had the support of the owners under a new set of rules enacted in 1669 and because of his preference for a colony further south to establish a bridgehead against the Spaniards.
“He also had no distractions,” he said.
For a number of reasons, Fryar pointed out: “South Carolina has the famous Charles Town, and North Carolina has the first.”