Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to explore the coastal regions of present-day South Carolina. In 1521, Francisco Gordillo sailed to the Carolina coast from his base in Santo Domingo; no settlement was attempted, but several dozen Native Americans were enslaved.
Five years later, Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón sponsored a short-lived effort to settle several hundred persons in the Winyah Bay area (near present-day Myrtle Beach), but unfavorable weather and sickness soon forced a return to Santo Domingo. Nonetheless, later in the 1500s the Spanish established new bases in Florida and spread northward with a string of small settlements.
The French presence was established in 1562 when Jean Ribault brought a group of French Huguenots to Parris Island, but Spanish power in the area rendered the colony untenable.
The English claim to the area arrived with the 1497 voyage of John Cabot, but efforts to colonize did not occur for more than 130 years. In 1629, a grant was awarded to Sir Robert Heath, which included today's North and South Carolina and all land westward to the Pacific Ocean. No settlement activity took place under Heath and in 1663, the lands were granted to eight of Charles II's most loyal supporters, the "lords proprietors."
Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, assisted by the political philosopher John Locke, drafted the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), an intricate and romanticized feudal scheme that was further burdened by the recommended use of grandiose titles for the nobles and their retainers. Whether or not the cumbersome system was seriously intended to be implemented or was simply a means to appeal to the high-born settlers' vanity is not clear.
