Some interesting subjects, indicative of the condition of the colony in these early times, must be briefly noticed: the emission of paper money consequent upon the expenses of the Indian war; the occasional rating of commodities for exchange; the indigenous products of the soil and staples of export; the forwarding of tobacco abroad through Virginia, and troubles about boundary lines; the customs and modes of life among the gentry or planters and the humbler classes, and among their close neighbors, the Indian tribes; the visits of pirates to the coast, both in North and South Carolina, notably Teach or Blackbeard, and the romantic defeat of him in Pamlico Sound; the settling, at first, along the streams, which became the principal highways for travel and commerce; the ill effects necessarily resulting from the habitations being far apart, and from the fact that there was very little social intercourse; the transmission of letters only by special messengers; the disadvantageous nature of the coast section, retarding the prosperity of the colony. During the proprietary period, or the first sixty-six years of the colony, the people clung to the seaboard and that part of it which had no good port of entry. This was as great a misfortune as it was to cling to the border line of Virginia. The accession of population, including foreigners, came chiefly through that border. In 1690 and again in 1707, bodies of French Protestants arrived, and settled in Pamlico and on the Neuse and Trent; and three years after some Swiss and Germans settled at Newbern. The whites in the province numbered at this time about 5,000. Large tracts of unoccupied land lay between the selected points of settlement. A few towns had been begun: the first, forty-two years after the first settling in the province. If a good harbor had been selected and a town properly fortified built there for exports, the progress of North Carolina might have been more rapid and substantial. The metropolis was Edenton (founded 1715) on the Chowan. The legislature met there. It contained forty or fifty houses. There was no church there. The Rev. Dr. Hawks says: “For long, long years there were no places of worship. They never amounted to more than some half dozen of all sorts, while the Proprietors owned Carolina; and when their unblessed dominion ended, there was not a minister of Christ living in the province.” There had been, however, missionaries sent out by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel; and there were some pious gentlemen in the colony who gave them welcome and all the assistance in their power. But while a few of the missionaries were exemplary and accomplished much good, others were a positive hindrance to “the propagation of the gospel.”