Into the Cape Fear River adventurers from New England had come as early as 1661, and had begun the raising of cattle on the abundant natural pasturage of the country. They soon abandoned the enterprise, driven off, it is said, by the Indians, whose children they had sent to be sold for slaves in New England. In 1665, Sir John Yeamans, a wealthy planter of Barbadoes, brought in a colony from that island, and began a settlement at “Old Town,” eight miles below the site of Wilmington. This was also abandoned after a few years, Yeamans going back to Barbadoes, and the settlers going either north to the Albemarle section, or south to the new city Charleston, at the confluence of the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers. [Illustration: HARNETT’S HOUSE, “HILTON,” NEAR WILMINGTON.] At the end of the proprietary period the whole of what was known as Clarendon County had only about five hundred white inhabitants. In spite of its noble river and fertile lowlands it had a bad name. Two attempts to settle it had failed, as we have seen; and, added to the terrors of the coast, which its very name, Cape Fear, advertised, the lower river had been for years the refuge and rendezvous of bands of pirates. As early as 1684 they are known to have resorted to these remote and solitary waters, and early in the eighteenth century it was the headquarters of that nefarious band among whom Stead Bonnet and Teach, or Black Beard, were leaders, who with unparalleled insolence lay off the harbor at Charleston and sent a deputation into the city to hector the very Governor and Council, and to demand and obtain certain medical supplies which they needed. This insolence, however, proved their ruin: Governor Johnston and Colonel Rhett attacked Bonnet and his party in their Cape Fear retreats, and carried off all whom they did not kill, to be tried and hanged at Charleston; at about the same time Teach and his crew were attacked and killed or hanged by an expedition from Virginia under officers of the royal navy, so that the Cape Fear was permanently freed from these pests. The settlers from the Albemarle and the Neuse now began to press down toward the fertile bottoms along the northeast branch of the Cape Fear, while about the same time a movement from South Carolina brought a number of its distinguished men into the same region from the opposite direction. The names Moseley, Lillington, Swann, Porter, Ashe, Harnett, Rowan and others, first prominent in the Albemarle settlements, became the leading names in the southern section; while the Moore brothers, descendants of Sir John Yeamans, and already distinguished in the Province of South Carolina, led a number of their best families to seek a new home and to extend the culture of rice into this region. [Illustration: “ORTON HOUSE.”]