Not only was there no metropolis--for the first fifty years there were no towns. The Palatines and Swiss at the confluence of the Neuse and the Trent laid out the little town of Newbern, and the Moravians, soon after 1750, began their town of Salem, but nowhere else in the Province was a town made the basis of the settlement. The Anglo-Saxon self-reliance and freedom never showed itself more self-reliant and free than in the unconscious daring which spread over thousands of square miles of savage wilderness with never a centre of strength or of succor provided against a time of danger. [Illustration: RESIDENCE OF JAMES SPRUNT. FORMERLY THE RESIDENCE OF GOVERNOR DUDLEY.] Fifty years after the beginning of its permanent settlements, its first town, Bath, had only a dozen small houses, and its second, Newbern, was just founded. Edenton dates from 1716; Beaufort from 1723; Brunswick from 1725, though not incorporated until 1745; and Wilmington from 1730 or 1735. At the end of one hundred years of settlement, North Carolina had only these six villages, and it is doubtful if the most populous had as many as six hundred inhabitants, though there was a population of over fifty thousand in the Province. Bath, incorporated in 1705, was never more than the inconsiderable village which it is to-day. The first town to become of any importance was Edenton, looking southward from a gentle elevation at the head of a beautiful little bay on the north side of the upper end of Albemarle Sound. Over against this bay the broad mouths of the Chowan and the Roanoke brought her the trade of the back country, and down the sound and across the shifting bars at Ocracoke and New Inlet a little fleet of schooners and brigs began to carry on trade coastwise and with the West Indies, and presently across the ocean.