#170 The First English Settlement of South Carolina

The History of the Americans

Jack Henneman

History

4.9 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2024

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The first English settlers in today’s South Carolina departed England in August, 1669, but would not actually get to the coast of Carolina until April and May the next year. Along the way they would lose ships to hurricanes and incompetence, and get into a firefight with Spaniards and their Indian allies on an island off the coast of Georgia. An unknown number would die on an island in the Bahamas. And, yet, once on the banks of the Ashley River, the first English South Carolinians would lose only 12% of their population in their first 18 months, a record of survival in the first “seasoning” year matched only by Maryland in the 17th century.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website – https://thehistoryoftheamericans.com/the-first-english-settlement-of-south-carolina/)

Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina Under the Proprietary Government 1670-1719

L. H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots 1662-1729

George Bancroft, History of the United States of America: From the Discovery of the Continent

Alexander S. Salley, Jr., Narratives of Early Carolina 1650-1708 (Includes narrative of Maurice Mathews)

Letter from Henry Woodward to Sir John Yeamans, September 10, 1670

J. Leitch Wright, Jr., “Spanish Reaction to Carolina,” The North Carolina Historical Review, October 1964.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 170. I'm your host, Jack Heneman,
0:12.7	and I'm recording this episode on November 29th, 2024, in Austin, Texas. Happy Thanksgiving,
0:24.1	everybody. We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without intentional presentism.
0:30.2	It's been longer than I like since the last episode, but I had a better than usual excuse.
0:37.1	Number one son got married the Sunday last.
0:40.9	The wedding was awesome, and with many out-of-town friends and family, there was not much time for 17th century Carolina.
0:49.3	But now there is.
0:51.9	If by some small chance, this is the first time you are listening to this podcast,
0:57.3	and you're not already super knowledgeable about early South Carolina, you would do well to listen
1:03.7	to the two most recent episodes, and especially Barbadians explore South Carolina before this one.
1:12.2	It turns out that the first English settlement of today's South Carolina is at once a
1:18.1	straightforward story involving ships and settlers with supplies and intervening hurricanes
1:25.2	and combative Indians and Spaniards, all stuff we've seen before,
1:31.6	mixed up with more complicated social, economic, and geopolitical considerations than attended
1:38.2	the earlier English expeditions into North America, whether Jamestown or Massachusetts, Maryland, or New Haven.
1:48.2	Here's but one example. As longstanding and attentive listeners well know, Virginia and Maryland
1:54.2	began as top-down ventures, conceived by adventurers, that is, investors, or lordly proprietors with particular objectives in
2:04.4	mind. The settlers were a necessary, if annoying, means to the ends sought by their sponsors.
2:13.7	The New England settlements, however, were really bottoms up, whether coming on the Mayflower or the Hector or in the Winthrop fleet, the settlers came for their own purposes.
2:26.3	And financial returns to investors who remain behind in England, such as they were, were a secondary consideration.
2:35.1	South Carolina was not so easy to characterize.
2:40.0	As we've seen, the settlement of South Carolina began as a top-down venture,
	...

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