under the attractive name of Maryland, to the north and east of Virginia; and now the Quaker Penn (who was nevertheless a very good friend of Charles II) established himself to the north at Philadelphia and founded the colony of Pennsylvania. Its main boundary with Maryland and Virginia was delimited by two men, Mason and Dixon, whose "Mason and Dixon line" was destined to become a very important line indeed in the later affairs of the United States. Carolina, which was originally an unsuccessful French Protestant establishment, and which owed its name not to Charles (Carolus) II of England, but to Charles IX of France, had fallen into English hands and was settled at several points.[1] Between Maryland and New England stretched a number of small Dutch and Swedish settlements, of which the chief town was New Amsterdam. These settlements were captured from the Dutch by the British in 1664, lost again in 1673, and restored by treaty when Holland and England made peace in 1674. Thereby the whole coast from Maine to Carolina became in some form or other a British possession. To the south the Spanish were established; their headquarters were at Fort St. Augustine in Florida, and in 1732 the town of Savannah[2] was settled by a philanthropist Oglethorpe from England, who had taken pity on the miserable people imprisoned for debt in England, and rescued a number of them from prison to become the founders of a new colony, Georgia, which was to be a bulwark against the Spanish. So by the middle of the eighteenth century we have these settlements along the American coastline: the New England group of Puritans and free Protestants, Maine (belonging to Massachusetts), New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts; the captured Dutch group,
- ↑ There is some doubt about the name of Carolina. Channing, in his short history, says it was named in honour of Charles II. Bassett says it was named originally Carolana, in honour of Charles I, in 1629, and kept the name, under the new form of Carolina in honour of Charles II. Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, vol. i. p. 265, speaks of Carolina, in 1629, as named "either in honour of Charles I or because the name had been given by Huguenots in 1562 in honour of Charles IX of France." Another authority speaks of the name as used before, and now no doubt retained in honour of the English king; but, according to him, the name had not been used for the country (called, by the French, Florida), but for a fort in it, the arx Carolana. He adds that in 1629 the name Carolana is used, but Carolina appears afterwards, and becomes normal after 1662.—E. B.
- ↑ From the Spanish word Sabaña = "meadow."—H. H. J.
