Though nothing but coarse earthen ware was made in America in these colonial days, the new land played no unimportant part in the first steps toward porcelain manufacture in England in the middle of the eighteenth century. It was the custom, when English vessels had discharged their freights in southern American ports, for them to take samples of the alluvial deposits of North and South Carolina, of Georgia and Florida, to carry back to England for English potters and chemists to experiment upon. The Bow china-works began to manufacture porcelain about the year 1744. In that year a sample of china-clay being brought from America, a patent was taken out by Thomas Frye, of West Ham, Essex, and Edward Heylyn, of Bow, for the production of porcelain, of which one of the ingredients was “an earth, the product of the Cherokee nation in America, called by the natives ‘_unaker_.’” When this patent was renewed in 1794, no mention was made of “unaker.” In Plymouth a shrewd old Quaker, William Cookworthy, also had his eye upon the American china-clay. He wrote to Mr. Hingston on May 30, 1745, saying that kaolin and petuntse had been discovered in America, and that he had seen specimens said to have been manufactured from the American materials. One letter of his on the subject runs thus: “I had lately with me the person who hath discovered the china-earth. He had with him several samples of the china ware of their making which I think were equal to the Asiatic. ’Twas found on the back of Virginia, where he was in quest of mines, and having read Du Halde, he discovered both the petuntse and the kaolin. ’Twas this latter earth which he says is essential to the success of the manufacture. He is going for a cargo of it, having bought from the Indians the whole country where it rises. They can import it for £13 per ton, and by that means afford their china as cheap as common stone-ware. The man is a Quaker by profession, but seems to be as thorough a Deist as I ever met with.” In 1768 Cookworthy established the Plymouth china-works, but no further mention is made of the deistical Quaker and his promised cargo of china-earth.