Almost simultaneously another colony (Clarendon) was settled in what is now North Carolina. As early as 1660 some adventurers from Massachusetts had gone to the Cape Fear, sometimes called the Charles, River, and purchased lands from the Indians; but in a few years abandoned the situation, leaving their cattle and swine in care of the natives. To the same locality the attention of the inhabitants of Barbadoes[709] was directed on the grant of the territory to the powerful noblemen whose names are given in the charter. The passage already quoted from the letter to Sir William Berkeley had reference to them and their proposal. Explorers, employed by “several gentlemen and merchants” of Barbadoes, were sent out (1663) under command of Hilton, who ascended the Cape Fear far inland, and formed a more favorable opinion of the country than the New Englanders had been enabled to form near the mouth of the river. They purchased from the Indians “the river and land of Cape Fair,” as they express it, and returned to Barbadoes on January 6, 1664. An account of their exploration was published the same year, to which were appended proposals from the Proprietors, through their commissioners, Thomas Mudyford and Peter Colleton, to all who should settle, at their own hazard and expense, south and west of Cape Romano, sometimes called Cape Carteret. This was a bid for volunteer settlers south of the Cape Fear settlement. Nothing whatever, it appears, was accomplished under this offer of the commissioners. In a _Description of the Province_, with liberal privileges offered to settlers, issued also in London (1666), it is stated that a new plantation had been begun by the English at Cape Fear on the 29th of May, 1664. In the following November, Robert Sandford was appointed secretary and John Vassall surveyor of “Clarendon County.”[710] It was time the Proprietors should agree upon some definite and satisfactory terms for settlement in their territory. While they did not sanction the purchase of lands from Indians, as they had also disallowed the claims of the New England adventurers, they made to all colonists, from Barbadoes and elsewhere, liberal offers for settlement; and under “concessions and agreement” a method of government was framed, and John Yeamans of Barbadoes was knighted by the king (through means of Sir John Colleton), and commissioned, in January, 1665, governor of the newly formed Clarendon County[711] and of the territory southward as far as Florida; for in this direction the Proprietors designed to place a third colony or county.