Episode Details

Three ships left England in 1669 to plant a colony designed in a London drawing room. Eight months later, only one of them reached the Carolina coast — the other two wrecked or scattered along the way. This episode is the founding of Charles Town: the battered voyage, the seventy-nine-year-old governor nobody was sure of, and the second attempt to plant a town by that name on a coast where the first had already failed. It is the story of a hungry, fortified camp on the Ashley River that survived its first years on shipments from Barbados, and survived its first war — a Spanish fleet sent to wipe it out — only because a hurricane turned the Spanish back.

At its center is a local ruler, the cas-sique of Kiawah, who steered the English to his country for reasons of his own, and a young surgeon named Henry Woodward — marooned, captured by the Spanish, sprung by a privateer, and delivered to the colony by accident — who became the one Englishman who could speak with the nations of the interior, and who opened the trade that paid the colony’s bills. Deerskins by the hundred thousand. And, growing on the same paths, a darker trade that Charles Town would grow rich on before it ever grew rich on rice.