of these thirteen colonies were these laws more injurious than
to the infant settlement on the northern shores of Albemarle Sound in
Carolina. The sand bars along the coast prevented the establishment of a
seaport from whence trade could be carried on with the mother country.
The large, English-built vessels could not pass through the shallow
inlets that connect the Atlantic with the Carolina inland waterways. To
have strictly obeyed the laws passed by the British Parliament would
have been the death blow to the commerce and to the prosperity of the
Albemarle settlement. So, for about fifteen years after George Durant
bought his tract of land on Durant's Neck from Kilcokonen, the great
chief of the Yeopims, the planters in Albemarle had paid but little
attention to the trade laws. The Proprietors appointed no customs
collectors in the little colony, and had not considered it worth while
to interfere with the trade which the shrewd New Englanders had built up
in Carolina.

Enterprising Yankee shipbuilders, realizing their opportunity,
constructed staunch little vessels which could weather the seas, sail
over to Europe, load up with goods necessary to the planter, return and
glide down the coast till they found an opening between the dreaded
bars, then, slipping from sound to sound, carry to the planters in the
Albemarle region the cargoes for which they were waiting.

Another law requiring payment of an export tax on tobacco, then the
principal crop of the Albemarle sections, as it was of Virginia, was
evaded for many years by the settlers in this region. Governors
Drummond and Stevens, and John Judkins, president of the council, must
have known of this disregard of the laws, both on the part of the Yankee
shippers and the Albemarle planters. But realizing that too strict an
adherence to England's trade laws would mean ruin to the colonists,
these officers were conveniently blind to the illegal proceedings of
their people.

But after the organization of the board of trade in London, of which
four of the Proprietors were members, the rulers of Carolina determined
to enforce the laws more strictly among their subjects in far-away
Carolina. So Timothy Biggs, of the Little River Settlement, was
appointed surveyor of customs, and Valentine Byrd, of Pasquotank,
collector of customs, with orders to enforce the navigation acts and
other trade laws, so long disregarded.

There was violent opposition to this decision of the L