Mr. Fox Bourne, who in his Life of John Locke (London, 1876, vol. i. pp. 235, etc.) gives the most satisfactory account of Locke’s connection with the new colony, writes of the Fundamental Constitutions that Locke had a large share in it, though there can be hardly any doubt that it was initiated by Lord Ashley, modified by his fellow-proprietors. He adds: “The original draft, a small vellum-covered volume of seventy-five pages, neatly written, but with numerous erasures and corrections, is preserved among the Shaftesbury Papers (series viii. no. 3), and this interesting document has been printed, verbatim et literatim, by Mr. Sainsbury, in the Appendix to the Thirty-third report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (1872), pp. 258-269.”
The same author refers to a draft extant in Locke’s handwriting, dated 21 June, 1669, which varies in some respects from that later issued by the Proprietors, in print.
There is, or was, in 1845, in the Charleston Library, presented to it by Robert Gilmor, of Baltimore, in 1833, a MS. copy in Locke’s own handwriting, dated July 14, 1669; but the earliest printed copy is one entitled thus: The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, in number a Hundred and Twenty, agreed upon by the Palatine and Lords Proprietors, to remain the sacred and unalterable form and rule of government of Carolina forever. March 1, 1669.[774] Printed first in 1670, the document was reissued, with some modifications, in 1682, and again, with more important modifications, in 1698.[775] It is also contained in A Collection of several pieces of Mr. John Locke, never before printed, and not extant in his works. London, 1720.[776]
It would seem from a map which is given in fac-simile in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, December, 1883 (p. 402), that it describes the “Discovery made by William Hilton of Charles Towne in New England, Marriner, from Cape Hatteraske, Lat: 35° 30′, to the west of Cape Roman in Lat. 32° 30′, In ye yeare 1662, And laid down in the forme as you see by Nicholas Shapley of the town aforesaid, November, 1662.” A small sketch of the map, which is annexed, shows that he passed along the islands which form a barrier to Pamlico Sound, without noticing, or at least indicating, that interior water, and then entering Cape Fear River tracked its shores up to a point where he designated three branches, which he called East, North, and West. The fac-simile given in the Proceedings by Mr. Hassam, from a photograph of the original in the British Museum,[777] is too obscure to make out all the names which occur along the river, while only “Hatterask” and “C. Romana” are noted on the coast. The intervening points, Cape Lookout and Cape Fear, are not named.
Hilton had come to Plymouth (Mass.) while a child, in 1623, whence he followed his father to Piscataqua, but later settled in Newbury and Charlestown, and in the latter place he died in 1675. Shapley is supposed to have been the same who was clerk of the writs in Charlestown in 1662, dying in that town in May, 1663. Although the New England antiquary, James Savage, and others have not supposed this Massachusetts Hilton to have been the same who led the Barbadoes party to Cape Fear the next year, this map and its record would seem to indicate that when the merchants of that island determined to accept the proposals of the Proprietors of Carolina to furnish them with colonists, they placed the expedition which they sent out in August, 1663, under the charge of one who had already explored parts of this coast,—no other than this William Hilton of New England. This exploring party landed at St. Helena and Edisto, and returned to Barbadoes after an absence of five months. Hilton’s True Relation was published in London in 1664.[778]
SHAPLEY’S DRAFT.
The year before (1663), according to Hawks,[779] the Proprietors had issued proposals for the encouragement of settlers within their grant, and we have, as Mr. Rivers has stated, the outcome of the Sandford expedition (1665) preserved in a manuscript among the Shaftesbury Papers, and the results of this seem to have been embodied in what is considered a second and expanded edition of their original proposals, which was now published in London, in 1666,—a mere tract of twelve pages, called A brief description of the Province of Carolina, on the coasts of Floreda; and more perticularly of a New Plantation begun by the English at Cape Feare on that river now by them called Charles-River, the 29th of May, 1664. Together with a most accurate map of the whole province.[780]