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The reconnaisance voyage considered the foundation of the settlement - named after the recently-restored Charles 
II - was undertaken by William Hilton, in 1663, in his ship, 'The Adventure'. Hilton gave his name to a headland, and to one of the islands which lay off the coast of the territory of Carolina, and its first and chief settlement, Charlestown (Charleston). As well as reconstructions of what an early Carolinan cabin was thought to have looked like, there is a replica of the Adventure at the Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site, on the Ashley River. The site underwent major investment and refurbishment in 2006.
The extent of primary source evidence about the early history of the Carolina settlement which is in the public arena is largely the result of the work of the first state archivist, Alexander S. Salley Jnr. His father had been a medical doctor, serving as a surgeon with the Confederate army during the American Civil War. We have his son to thank for the collected volume of advertisements and travellers' accounts of the Carolina coast, Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650-1708 (New York, 1911), of which those of Francis Yeardley (1654) and Robert Horne (1664) form part of the Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA). Salley also edited three volumes of Warrants for Land in South Carolina, 1672–1721. The most thorough and systematic account of the early years of the Carolina settlement have been made by Professor Louis Roper.
A study of the placement of the land grants, detailed by Salley, shows the development of the headright 
system of allocation and the long lot design of each plot, in which plats laid out along the waterside were five times longer away from the water than along the water's edge. The development of modern Charleston makes it difficult to trace this earlier groundplan, but the last remaining section of street which has some residual seventeenth-century structure, known as 'Rainbow Row' (right), shows houses with tall thin frontages and long groundplans behind.
The low-lying country along the ocean eventually became an ideal location for the cultivation of rice. Carolina adopted plantation society and a slave culture more rapidly than most other settlements on the north American mainland, and, particularly from the early 1800s onwards, Africans from that continent's own rice coast were shipped as slaves, but Carolina's location, and the archipelago of islands that runs along its coast and down to Georgia, meant that a community of escaped slaves was able to establish autonomous societies in the islands. In the case of Carolina, these are known as Gullah and more usually as Gulchee/Geechee further south in the state of Georgia. The distinctive Gullah culture has been under siege since the mid-twentieth century, because of the growth of communication networks which tied the mainland by road to the islands and the islands to each other, which brought increasing utilisation of the sea islands for tourism and leisure. It is difficult to trace the history of slaves which may have escaped to the Sea Islands prior to the nineteenth century.
Along with the land deeds, the early history of Carolina offers a debate between Restoration hierarchy and semi-feudalism and the English Civil War discourse of rights and liberties, both political and religious. The foundational documents which rehearse this debate, including the Fundamental Constitutions of 1 March 1669, can be found as part of the Yale Law School's 'Avalon Project'.
South Carolina Department of Archives and History
Huguenot Society of South Carolina - the offer of religious toleration was one of the major ways in which people were encouraged to the new colonial settlement at Charlestown. Amongst the largest group of non-English immigrants were the Huguenots, who settled in Charlestown and set up their French Protestant Church following their escape in the wake of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685.
Jonathan Green - Green is an artist, now resident in the Everglades' region of Florida, who, having been raised in the Low Country in the 1960s, now paints nostalgic images of the Gullah community of his youth.
The Sea Islands - the contrast between the Gullah culture of the Sea Islands and the current life on Hilton Head Island can be seen in the pages of the island newspaper, The Island Packet, and its special Gullah issue.
L.H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina : Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662-1729 (New York, 2004);
L.H. Roper, 'Conceiving an Anglo-American proprietorship: early South Carolina history in perspective', in L.H. Roper and B. van Ruymbeke (eds.), Constructing early-modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750 (Brill NV., Leiden, 2007);
Alexander S. Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650-1708 (New York, 1911);
Alexander S. Salley, Warrants for Land in South Carolina, 1672–1721 (3 vols.) (Columbia, SC, 1973);
Petitions for land are found at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History in Records of the Grand Council, 1671–1692 (2 vols.) and Records of His Majesty's Council (27 vols.), both of which are arranged in chronological order but unindexed and the precept date is therefore required to locate the petition;
Alexander S. Salley, Jnr., Records of the Secretary of the Province and the Register of the Province of South Carolina, 1671–1675 (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1944);
Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina : a political history, 1663-1763 (Chapel Hill, 1966).