Earliest Attempts.

The first interest in what would become the Carolinas came not from the English but from the Spanish and the French. While Spaniards had reached the coast of the Carolinas in 1520-1521, they did not actually establish a presence there, content instead to raid the local Indians, capturing seventy of them and bringing them back to Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), where they were freed. In 1540 the explorer Hernando de Soto landed in Florida but proceeded on foot into the interior, reaching the Indian town of Cofitachequi (modern-day Camden, South Carolina), and then on into North Carolina. Spanish interest in a settlement on the Carolina coast sprang from the need to find an emergency haven for the treasure fleet bound from Mexico to Spain through the Bahama Channel —a narrow, fast-flowing passage east of Florida that was plagued by hurricanes...