Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE. Tax following articles have been composed from notes which I had collected, while preparing for a private Literary Club an Essay on the Aborigines of our State. They were written in the present form for a daily newspaper, the Columbia "Telegraph;" which feet will be, I hope, an excuse for my inadvertences in style, and for the brevity with which many of the topics are treated. They are the beginning of a series, intended to embrace the principal customs of the Indians; their wars against the colonists; their decay; their removal from the State; the gradual extension of the back-settlements, and several important subjects in our social and politiral history. Having, in some instances, questioned opinions of our historians, I have thought it proper to retain the numerous references to the sources of my information. If my friends, for whom?and at the request of several of whom? this pamphlet is published, shall find what has been written interesting, and not altogether useless, I will endeavor, in my leisure hours, to continue the series. WM. JAS. RIVERS. TOPICS HISTORY OF SOUTH-CAROLINA. Was Cabot The First European Who Visited Our Coast ? There is in Hakluyt's Collection of Voyages, a copy in Latin of the letter patent of Henry the Seventh, of England, dated in the " eleventh year" of his reign, granting to John Cabot and his sons Lewis, Sebastian and Sanctius, full power of discovery and possession, in the name of England, of all heathen countries previously unknown to Christians. In 1497 (in an extract in Hakl. from Cabot's map) the discovery of a part of North America, was made by John and his son Sebastian. In 1498, Sebastian, in a second expedition, sailed along the coast in a southerly direction. The southernmost point reached by him has been ...