This book begins with a discussion of the eight English lords who sought a steady flow of American wealth into their pockets when King Charles II granted the colony to the Lords Proprietors back in 1663. Fifty years on, North Carolina was one of the poorer, if not the poorest, of England's North American colonies. A major issue was wate. On the one hand, the colony was blessed with plenty of it, including several big rivers as well as the huge Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds. Yet it was cursed because the waters were too shallow for large ships, and so North Carolina had no deepwater port. That meant trade and commerce lagged behind badly when compared to Virginia to the north and South Carolina to the south. North Carolina's colonial population was small but politically divided, having just emerged from a vicious internal rebellion that stopped just short of civil war.