One Vessel Survives Hurricanes of 1669 #southcarolinapioneersnet #genealogy

The Ship "Carolina" Survives Hurricanes and Reaches Charleston in 1669

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. They sailed the old sea road which took them first to Barbados. At was at Barbados that the Albemarle was caught in a storm, and wrecked. But there was more trouble ahead. As the other two ships, with a Barbados sloop, sailed on anal approached the Bahamas, the Port Royal was destroyed by another hurricane. The Carolina, however, pushed on with the sloop, reached Bermuda, and rested there. Then, 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, the Spaniards held old Florida where the town of St. Augustine had flourished since the 16th century. From this vantage, the Spanish could easily descend upon the English newcomers. The colonists debated the situation and decided to set some further space between them and lands of Spain. So the ships put out again to sea, beating northward a few leagues until it entered a harbor into which emptied two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper. After going up the Ashley they were able to anchor and the colonists went ashore. On the west bank of the river, they began to build 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. 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. Ten years later the population numbered twelve hundred, and continued 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. Free bootery was allowed to flourish in American seas. Gross governmental faults, Navigation Acts, and a hundred petty and great oppressions, general poverty, adventurousness, lawlessness, and sympathy of mishandled folk with lawlessness, all combined to keep Brother of the Coast, Buccaneer, and Filibuster alive, and their ships upon all seas. Many were no worse than smugglers; others were robbers with violence; and a few had a dash of the fiend. All nations had buccaneers on the seas and the early settlers on these shores never violently disapproved of the pirate. He was often a "good fellow" who delivered needed articles without dues, easy to trade with, and had Spanish gold in his pouch. Pirates frequently came ashore to Charles Town, and they traded with him there. For this reason, at one time Charles Town got the name of "Rogue's Harbor." However, as better emigrants arrived and planted tobacco and wheat along the Ashley and Cooper rivers, the tone changed. But it was not until the final years of the seventeenth century that a ship touching at Charleston left there a bag of Madagascar rice. Planted, it gave increase that was planted again. Suddenly it was found that this was the crop for low-lying Carolina. Rice became her staple, as was tobacco of Virginia. For the rice fields and system of large plantations, an aristocratic structure embraced Charles Town. To escape heat and sickness, the planters of rice and indigo gave over to employees the care of their great holdings and lived themselves in pleasant Charleston. These plantations, with their great gangs of slaves under overseers, also had the indentured white laborers whose passage was paid for by English, who were promised fair freedom after a certain number of years. While the caste system was predominantly strong in England, the charters for the colonies provided an overplus power to grant liberty of conscience, although at home was a hot persecuting time. Thus, Huguenots, Independents, Quakers, dissenters of many kinds, found on the whole refuge and harbor in the colonies. Moreso than any of the other colonies, South Carolina had great plantations, a bustling town society, suave and polished, a learned clergy, an aristocratic cast to life. A place where the sea-line offered access to stretches of rivers to all vessels. 

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