The Grand Model - Charles Town

American Political History · Nov 6, 2021 · 25m

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…