The Huguenot enterprise at Beaufort, on Port Royal harbor, was planted in 1562 under the auspices of Coligny, and came to a speedy and unhappy end.

The costly and disastrous experiment of Sir Walter Raleigh was begun in 1584 on Roanoke Island, and lasted not many months.

But the actual occupation of the region was late and slow.

When, after the Restoration, Charles II.
took up the idea of paying his political debts with free and easy cessions of American lands, Clarendon, Albemarle, and Shaftesbury were among the first and luckiest in the scramble.

When the representatives of themselves and their partners arrived in Carolina in 1670, bringing with them that pompous and preposterous anachronism, the "Fundamental Constitutions," contrived by the combined wisdom of Shaftesbury and John Locke to impose a feudal government upon an immense domain of wilderness, they found the ground already occupied with a scanty and curiously mixed population, which had taken on a simple form of polity and was growing into a state.