or capers. North Carolina raised tobacco, which was carried by New England traders to Virginia or the Northern colonies. The inhabitants of the Southern province, reinforced by French Huguenots and English dissenters, exported provisions to the West Indies. Yet South Carolina, disappointing to the proprietors, was destined in the next century, when rice became its staple product, to serve in an almost ideal way the purpose for which it had been founded. The Carolina charter had scarcely been issued before the Dutch were ousted from the valley of the Hudson. It was an old grievance that the Hollanders, under many obligations to England, should have presumed to occupy territory already granted by James I to the Plymouth Company. And now, wedged in between the New England and the Southern colonies, holding the first harbor on the continent and well situated to share with France in exploiting the fur trade, the grievance had become intolerable. But the offense of all was the complacence with which the merchants of New Amsterdam ignored the English Trade Acts. Reconciled at last to the strange perversity of Virginia in raising tobacco, the English Government had made the best of a bad bargain by laying a prohibition upon its cultivation in England; yet with this result: an English industry had been suppressed by law only that the Dutch, who still contested England's right to share in the spice and slave trade, might carry Virginia tobacco to European ports, smuggle European commodities into the English settlements, and so diminish the profits of British merchants and annually deprive the royal exchequer of L10,000 of customs revenue. When the Dutch war was imminent in 1664, an English fleet, therefore, took possession of Now Amsterdam in order to secure to England the commercial value of the tobacco colonies. Before the conquest was effected the king conferred upon his brother, the Duke of York, a proprietary feudal grant of all the territory lying between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers.