climate, that even under these discouragements, the colony grew so considerably, that Charles Town has now near * six hundred good houses, and the whole plantation has above forty thousand negro slaves, worth at least a million of pounds sterling, besides an infinite number of cattle. Though it was only within these four years that an end was put to their sorrows; for about that time, the lords proprietors and planters (who long had been heartily tired of each other) were, by the interposition of the legislature, fairly divorced forever, and the property of the whole vested in the crown.

CHAPTER II.

Of the Air, Soil, Climate, and Produce of South Carolina and Georgia. Reasons why this Country is not well peopled with Indians. The Natives described.

FROM what was said in the foregoing chapter it cannot be a matter of wonder that a great part of Carolina should have hitherto remained uninhabited. The whole is divided into two distinct governments, by the names of North Carolina and South Carolina. I shall confine myself to treat of the latter. The new province of Georgia is taken out of it, and divided from it on the north by the river Savannah, equal to the Rhine; its southern boundary is the river Alatamaha; it lies about the 30th and 31st degree, north latitude, in the same climate with Barbary, the north part of Egypt, the south part of Natolia, or Asia Minor, and the most temperate parts of Persia and China.

†The air is healthy, being always serene, pleasant and temperate, never subject to excessive heat or cold, nor to sudden changes; the winter is regular and short, and the summer cooled with refreshing breezes; and though this country is within three hundred miles of Virginia, it never feels the cutting north-west wind in that uneasy and dangerous degree that the Virginians complain of. This wind is generally attributed to those great seas of fresh water which lie to the north-west beyond the Apalachean mountains. It seems a journey of an hundred leagues in that

* See Description Abreg. page 8.

† Archdale's Descrip., p. 7, 8, and Descrip. Abreg., p. 16.

warm climate blunts the edge which the wind gets in its passage over those prodigious lakes. Nor on the other hand does this country ever feel the intense heats of Spain, Barbary, Italy, and Egypt; probably because, instead of the scorching sands of Africk and Arabia, it has to the southward the spacious Bay of Mexico, which is much more temperate in its effect upon the winds, than are those burning sandy deserts.

*The soil of this country is generally sandy, especially near the sea; but it is impregnated with such a fertile mixture that they use no manure, even in their most ancient settlements, which have been under tillage these sixty years. It will produce almost every thing in wonderful quantities with very little culture. Farther up the country the land is more mixed with a blackish mould, and its foundation generally clay good for bricks. They make their lime of oystershells, of which there are great quantities on banks near the shore. All things will undoubtedly thrive in this country that are to be found in the happiest places under the same latitude. Their rice, the only considerable staple which requires many of their hands at present, is known to be incomparably better than that of the East Indies; their pitch, tar and turpentine (of which they export great quantities) are the rewards of their industry in clearing the land of superfluous timber. † Mulberries both black and white, are natives of this soil, and are found in the woods, as are many other sorts of fruit trees of excellent kinds, and the growth of them is surprizingly swift; for a peach, apricot, or nectarine, will, from the stone, grow to be a bearing tree in four or five years time. time. All sorts of corn yield an amazing increase, an hundred fold is the common estimate, though their husbandry is so slight, that they can only be said to scratch the earth and merely to cover the seed. All the best sorts of cattle and fowls are multiplied without number, and therefore almost without a price; you may see there more than a thousand calves in the same inclosure belonging to one person. The vine is also a wild native here, five or six sorts grow wild in the woods; it has been said that the stone of the grape is too large, and the skin too thick, but several who have tried, find all imaginable encouragement to propagate

the different kinds from Europe; nor is it doubted that by proper culture this wild grape may be meliorated, so as well to reward the care of the planter.

The wild beasts are deer, elks, bears, wolves, buffaloes, wild-boars, and abundance of hares and rabbits: they have also a catamountain, or small leopard; but this is not the dangerous species of the East Indies. Their fowls are no less various; they have all the sorts that we have in England, both wild and tame, and many others either useful or beautiful. It would be endless to enumerate their fishes, the river Savannah is plentifully stocked with them of many excellent kinds: no part in the world affords more variety or greater plenty. They have oak, cedar, cypress, fir, walnut, and ash, besides the sassafras. They have oranges, lemons, apples and pears, besides the peach and apricot mentioned before; some of these are so delicious, that whoever tastes them will despise the insipid watery taste of those we have in England; and yet such is the plenty of them, that they are given to the hogs in great quantities. Sarsaparilla, cassia, and other sorts of trees grow in the woods, yielding gums and rosin, and also some oil excellent for curing wounds.

†The woods near the Savannah are not hard to be cleared, many of them have no underwood, and the trees do not stand generally thick on the ground, but at considerable distances asunder. When you fell the timber for use, or to make tar, the root will rot in four or five years, and in the mean time you may pasture the ground. But if you would only destroy the timber, it is done by half a dozen strokes of an axe surrounding each tree a little above the root; in a year or two, the water getting into the wounds, rots the timber, and a brisk gust of wind fells many acres for you in an hour, of which you may then make one bright bonfire. Such will be frequently here the fate of the pine, the walnut, the cypress, the oak, and the cedar. Such an air and soil can only be fitly described by a poetical pen, because there is but little danger of exceeding the truth. Take therefore part of Mr. Waller's description of an island in the neighborhood of Carolina to give you an idea of this happy climate.

* Archdale's Description, p. 7.

† Descr. Abreg. p. 7.

The lofty cedar which to Heav'n aspires,
The prince of trees is fuel for their fires.
The sweet palmettaes a new Bacchus yield,
With leaves as ample as the broadest shield.
Under the shadow of whose friendly boughs
They sit carousing where their liquor grows.
Figs there unplanted through the fields do grow,
Such as fierce Cato did the Romans show;
With the rare fruit inviting them to spoil
Carthage, the mistress of so rich a soil.
With candid plantines and the juicy pine,
On choicest melons and sweet grapes they dine,
And with potatoes fat their lusty swine.

}

The kind spring, which but salutes us here,
Inhabits there and courts them all the year.
Ripe fruits and blossoms on the same trees live,
At once they promise, what at once they give.
So sweet the air, so moderate the clime,
None sickly lives, or dies before his time.
Heav'n sure has kept this spot of earth uncurst,
To shew how all things were created first.

The thought of the poet in the last couplet is adopted by the ingenious Dr. Burnet in his theory of the earth, with fine improvements of it. The Dr. seems fully convinced that the temperament of the climate of Bermudas approaches very near to that of the Antediluvian world, in which he fancies that spring and autumn were continual and universal over the face of the earth, till the Almighty (as Milton has it) turned the poles askance. And by physical reasoning he deduces the longevity of the Antediluvians from this happy equality of seasons, uninterrupted by the shocking vicissitude of heat and cold, which tear the human frame asunder. He thinks that a person born in Bermudas, and continuing there all his life-time, has a moral probability of living three hundred years. This conjecture seems to be supported by what we are told in Purchas's Pilgrimage of one of the Indian kings of Florida, who was three hundred years old, and his father was fifty years older, and then living. The father is described as a skeleton covered with skin; his sinews, veins and arteries, and other parts appeared so clearly through his skin, that a man might easily tell and discern them the one from the other. His son shewed five generations descended from himself. It was such a figure as this Indian king, which induced the ancients to feign that Tithonus being very old was changed into a grasshopper.

year

Now Georgia is just about the middle of Purchas's Florida. But not to go too far with the poet, theorist, and old historian; it is probable those Indians divided the solar into two years as the Virginian Indians did. Let us rely upon what we know at this day; it must not be concealed, that in this country, as almost in every new climate, strangers are apt to have a seasoning; an ague, or sort of a fever; but then it is very slight: And for the rest, people very seldom want health here but by intemperance, (which indeed is too common.) And notwithstanding their several skirmishes with the Spaniards and Indians, and that the plague was imported thither in the year one thousand seven hundred and six; yet there are now several aged persons living at Charles Town, who were of that little number that first settled there and hewed down timber above sixty years ago.

By the healthiness of this climate, and some accounts of Spanish expeditions hither in early times, which were vigorously repulsed by great armies of the natives, one would expect to find the country by this time fully peopled with Indians. It is indeed probable that they were much more numerous in those days than they are at present, or else they could not have defended themselves against the Spaniards as they did. But if their numbers were formerly considerable they have since greatly decreased; and that might easily happen in a century, even though the country be naturally fertile and healthy, for the Indians in all the continent of North America, near the Atlantic ocean, have been discovered to have this resemblance in common: They are small tribes of huntsmen, exceedingly apt to make war upon each other, as our five nations of Iroquois beyond New England and New York, have within these forty years driven many other nations from fertile inland countries, of the extent of many millions of acres, and that not without incredible slaughter. Add to which, that these poor creatures, living with hardly any husbandry, or stores of provisions, must perish in heaps if the fruits of the woods, or their hunting should once fail them; one scanty season would infallibly famish whole nations of them. Another great cause of their destruction was the small-pox, the Europeans brought this distemper among them. Now their common cure in all fevers is to sweat plentifully, and then to stop that evacuation at once by plunging instantly into a river. They cannot be per