Charles MacCarthy was a resident of Rhode Island in 1677. When he came to the colony is unknown. He resided on the island of St. Christopher, otherwise known as St. Kitts, before arriving in Rhode Island, a fact mentioned in his will. Some of the recording clerks of those days were not particularly brilliant in writing proper names, Irish or otherwise. They appear to have in a way adopted the phonetic idea of spelling, that is, according to sound. But it frequently happened that some names sounded differently to different clerks and thus, as in the case of Charles MacCarthy, we have a variety of spelling. At the same time it should be said, in justice to the clerks, that there were instances, no doubt, when they should not be held responsible for variations that appear. Orthography was not fixed then as now. The Rhode Island pioneer of whom we are treating has had his name rendered as Macarte, Macarta, Macarty, Mackarte, and Mecarty. In his will it is “Macarte,” but whether that was the form authorized by him, or whether it was the work of the clerk who drew up the will, cannot now be determined. The same name applied to other early Rhode Island people is also recorded as Maccartee and McCartie. The style “Mac Carthy,” used, for the sake of uniformity, in the caption of this paper, and in the text, is that common to the MacCarthys Mor, the MacCarthys Reagh, the MacCarthys Glas, and other grand divisions of this great Irish clan. Charles, the Rhode Island settler, had a brother who went from Ireland to Spain. This brother had been exiled and may have been among the Irish troops who, in 1652, after surrendering to Cromwell and Ireton, were allowed to depart and enlist in the Spanish service. These troops embarked for Spain at Kinsale, Waterford, Galway, Limerick, and Bantry. With them also went many of the Irish nobility and gentry who had been ruthlessly dispossessed of their estates. In more propitious times some of these exiles returned from Spain. Charles’s brother did so and from Kinsale wrote to Charles whom he supposed to be still in St. Christopher, urging him to return to Ireland. But Charles had, in the meantime, left St. Christopher and was probably then in Rhode Island. Though long delayed, the letter finally reached its destination, but Charles never went back nor, it is believed, did he and his brother ever meet again. In 1677, Charles was one of a party of forty-eight settlers to whom a grant of five thousand acres, to be called East Greenwich, was made by the general assembly of Rhode Island. The grant was awarded largely for services rendered during King Philip’s War (1675–’76). This would seem to indicate that Charles MacCarthy had been a participant in that war and it is quite within the bounds of probability that he had seen military service, too, in the Old Land. At a session of the general assembly held at Newport, R. I., May, 1677, it was