Scotland's Lost Colony Found: Rediscovering Stuarts Town, 1682–1688

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic have failed to appreciate the significance of Stuarts Town, Scotland's short-lived colony in Port Royal, South Carolina. This article challenges the current view that Stuarts Town was primarily a business venture, focusing, instead, on the religious impulses that lay just beneath the surface of the Carolina Company. These concerns came to the fore as presbyterian persecution intensified in 1683 and the colony was reimagined as a safe haven for the true church, where the saving remnant of God's people could escape the terrible judgments befalling Scotland and where the gospel would be secure. Its purpose was collective, corporate, social and historical. On the ground in Carolina, however, colonisers behaved more like imperialists than religious refugees. Like Scotland, the Anglo-Spanish borderland was a violent and unstable place that bred fear of displacement and enslavement, but unlike Scotland it lacked a centralised power, giving the Scots an opening to make their bid for empire. They moved aggressively into this power vacuum, seeking in particular to capitalise on the perceived weakness of Spanish Florida to extend their reach into coastal Georgia, the south-eastern interior and as far west as New Mexico. Their actions created great anxiety in the region and, although the collapse of the Stuart regime finally put an end to their hopes, their short-lived colony transformed the borderlands, reorienting English, Spanish and Indian relations, sparking the coalescence of the Yamasee tribe and the Creek confederacy, and giving new life to the Indian slave trade that eventually shattered indigenous societies in the American south-east.