Between Two Rivers · Episode 1
The Landing
April 1670: the ship Carolina comes up the Ashley River. A king who never visited, a lord who gave his name to both rivers, three ships and only one that made it, and a town that started at Albemarle Point and moved to Oyster Point ten years later.
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Shannon Stand at the tip of the Battery in Charleston and look out at the water. On your left, the Cooper River. On your right, the Ashley.
Carol And a Charlestonian will tell you, with a perfectly straight face, that this is where the two rivers meet to form the Atlantic Ocean.
Shannon They have been saying that for a very long time.
Carol Welcome to Between Two Rivers. A history of Charleston, one era at a time.
Shannon And we're starting at the very beginning. April, 1670. A ship called the Carolina is working its way up the Ashley River.
Carol Episode one. The Landing.
Shannon Before there's a ship, there's a piece of paper. In 1663, King Charles the Second hands an enormous slice of North America to eight of his supporters.
Carol The Lords Proprietors.
Shannon The Lords Proprietors. Men who'd helped put him back on the throne after the English Civil War. And the land is named for him. Carolina, from Carolus, the Latin for Charles.
Carol So the colony is named for Charles, and the town will be named for Charles. He gets a lot of credit for a place he never saw.
Shannon (laughs) He never once set foot in it.
Carol Now, one of those eight Proprietors matters more to us than the others. Anthony Ashley Cooper.
Shannon Ashley. Cooper.
Carol Ashley and Cooper. Both rivers are named for the same man. So when you stand on the Battery, you're standing between two halves of one English lord's name.
Shannon Which is a wonderful thing to know and a terrible thing to explain at a dinner party.
Carol (laughs) I've tried.
Shannon And Ashley Cooper had a personal physician you may have heard of. A young philosopher named John Locke. Locke also served as secretary to the Proprietors.
Carol The John Locke.
Shannon The John Locke. In 1669 he helped draft the colony's grand plan, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. Historians think Ashley Cooper was the main author, with Locke at his side, and the first draft is in Locke's handwriting.
Carol Did it work?
Shannon It was never actually adopted. But it set the tone, and it's an odd mix. It offered a real measure of religious toleration, which is part of why Charleston drew Huguenots and Quakers in its first years, and later, one of the earliest Jewish congregations in America.
Carol And the other side of it?
Shannon It also set up a whole system of colonial nobility, with made-up titles. And it allowed slavery from the start.
Carol An odd mix of ideas for a brand-new colony.
Carol So, the ships. In August 1669, three of them leave England. The Carolina, the Port Royal, and the Albemarle.
Shannon And only one of them makes it.
Carol Only one. The Albemarle is wrecked in a storm at Barbados. The Port Royal is lost in the islands. The accounts disagree about exactly where. The Carolina goes on, and along the way it picks up a sloop and more settlers in Barbados, and a governor in Bermuda.
Shannon Barbados is going to matter a lot to this story. Keep it in your pocket.
Carol Their orders were to settle at Port Royal, down near what's now Beaufort. But when they arrive on the coast, a local leader, the cacique of the Kiawah people, urges them to come north instead, to his own country.
Shannon Why would he want them?
Carol Protection, most likely. The Kiawah were under pressure from the Westo, a powerful and feared group raiding along the coast. A settlement of armed Englishmen nearby looked like a useful ally.
Shannon So the English didn't so much choose Charleston as get invited to it.
Carol That's a fair way to put it. And they had someone on board who could talk to everyone.
Shannon Henry Woodward.
Carol Henry Woodward. A young surgeon who'd volunteered, back in 1666, to be left behind on this coast to live among the native people and learn their language. Then he was taken by the Spanish and held at St. Augustine. He escaped during an English pirate raid, signed on as a ship's surgeon on a privateer, was shipwrecked on the island of Nevis, and was standing there when the Carolina fleet stopped on its way. So he joined them.
Shannon That is three adventure novels in one man.
Carol (laughs) At least.
Shannon So, April 1670. The Carolina comes up the river the English will soon name the Ashley, and the settlers come ashore on the west bank, on a bit of high ground with marsh around it. They call it Albemarle Point.
Carol Not where the city is now.
Shannon Not at all. A few miles up the river, on the other side. It's a defensive choice. A little point of land, easy to wall off, hard to sneak up on.
Carol And who were they?
Shannon About a hundred and fifty set out from England. Fewer came ashore that April, somewhere around a hundred. English colonists, some from Barbados and Bermuda. Their first governor was William Sayle, a Puritan and former governor of Bermuda, nearly eighty years old.
Carol That's not a young man's job.
Shannon It wasn't. He died the following March.
Carol So the town they named Charles Town begins on that little point. A palisade, some cannon, small houses, gardens.
Shannon And a lot of fear. Because about two hundred miles south is St. Augustine, and the Spanish in Florida consider this whole coast theirs.
Carol Did they come?
Shannon They tried. Within months, the Spanish were planning an attack. But the settlers' Indian allies warned them it was coming, and it came to nothing.
Carol So the Kiawah were already earning that alliance.
Shannon They were. And sixteen years later, when a Spanish force really did head this way, a hurricane wrecked it before it got here.
Carol The storm that sank a ship on the way over, and the storm that saved the town.
Shannon (laughs) Charleston has always had a complicated relationship with the weather.
Carol You told me to keep Barbados in my pocket.
Shannon I did. Barbados in the 1600s was the richest English colony in the world. Sugar plantations, worked by enslaved labor.
Carol And Barbadians came to Carolina.
Shannon Planters and their families, in the first years, and they brought that whole way of life with them. Large plantations, and a small, wealthy class at the top.
Carol So when people say Carolina was a colony of a colony —
Shannon That's what they mean. Historians argue about just how much Barbados shaped it, but early Charleston looked as much toward Barbados as it did toward England.
Carol So how does the town get from Albemarle Point to the place we're standing now, at the end of the peninsula?
Shannon By 1680, ten years in, the settlers decide the first spot isn't right. The point is small, the ground is low, and it isn't much of a harbor.
Carol And across the river?
Shannon Across the river is a long neck of land between the Ashley and the Cooper, running down to a point the settlers called Oyster Point. For the shell banks that were piled up along the shore there.
Carol Oyster Point.
Shannon It had everything Albemarle Point didn't. A deep harbor right off the tip. Water on three sides for defense. And room to grow.
Carol So they move the whole town.
Shannon They move the whole town. The Proprietors had been pushing for a port there for years. A surveyor had already laid out a grid of streets for it back in 1672, called the Grand Model. Settlers started building there in the late 1670s, and in 1680 the government moved across. Charles Town starts again at Oyster Point. That's the peninsula. That's the Charleston you know.
Carol And the old site?
Shannon Fields, for a long time. Today it's a state historic site, Charles Towne Landing. You can walk where the first palisade stood, and there's a replica of a seventeenth-century trading ship tied up at the creek.
Carol So you can visit both. Where Charleston started, and where it decided to be.
Shannon If you want to stand in this episode, go to two places.
Carol First, Charles Towne Landing, on the west bank of the Ashley. Walk out to the marsh edge and look across the river toward the city. That's the view the first settlers had of the land they'd move to ten years later.
Shannon Then come back to the peninsula and walk down to White Point Garden and the Battery, at the very tip. That's old Oyster Point. Stand at the seawall, the Cooper on your left, the Ashley on your right.
Carol And try not to tell anyone about the Atlantic Ocean.
Shannon (laughs) You won't be able to help it.
Carol That's the landing. A king who never visited, a lord who gave his name to two rivers, three ships and only one that made it, and a town that started in one place and moved to another.
Shannon Next time, we're on the peninsula, in the early 1700s. The only walled city in British North America. A frontier port with pirates in the harbor.
Carol Including one who, in 1718, blockaded the whole harbor, took hostages, and demanded a chest of medicine.
Shannon Blackbeard.
Carol Blackbeard. That's next time, on Between Two Rivers.