Pirates, Planters, and the Birth of the Grand Strand (1526–1775)

Walk the Ocean Drive beach on a clear morning and the ocean looks exactly the way it always has — wide, unhurried, indifferent to whoever happens to be standing at its edge. The horizon is the same horizon the Waccamaw people watched for thousands of years. It is the same horizon that startled a Spanish lookout on August 9, 1526, when six ships carrying six hundred would-be colonists entered Winyah Bay and dropped anchor in the shallow water near present-day Georgetown. It is the same horizon that pirates scanned in the early 1700s from the hidden coves of Little River and Murrells Inlet, watching for the slow, heavy silhouettes of merchant vessels weighed down with cargo.

This is Article 1 of the Thomas Beach Vacations America 250 series — nine articles marking the 250th anniversary of American independence by telling the Grand Strand’s own role in the story of this nation. That role begins long before 1776. It begins with a people who named the river. It moves through pirate gold and indigo fortunes and rice empires built on enslaved labor. It runs along a 1,300-mile road ordered by an English king that still carries traffic through North Myrtle Beach today. By the time the first shots of the Revolution echoed south from Lexington in 1775, the Grand Strand was already two and a half centuries deep in American history.

Most visitors never hear any of it. That seems like a shame worth correcting.

A Coast Older Than the Country

The sixty miles of coastline we call the Grand Strand stretch from Little River in the north — right on the North Carolina line — down through Cherry Grove, Crescent Beach, Windy Hill, Myrtle Beach, Murrells Inlet, Pawleys Island, and all the way south to Georgetown, where five rivers pour into Winyah Bay. It is one of the longest uninterrupted stretches of sandy beach on the entire Atlantic seaboard, shaped by the same longshore drift and tidal rhythms it has known since long before anyone thought to put a name to it.

The modern place names — Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Murrells Inlet, Conway — are recent inventions in geological and human terms. The geography itself is ancient. And the human history layered into that geography goes back far further than most visitors imagine, through colonial settlement and piracy and rice empires and revolution, all the way to the Indigenous people who were here first and whose name still runs through the landscape like a waterway.

The Waccamaw: The First People of the Strand

Before any European ship appeared on the horizon, the Waccamaw people lived along the dark-water river that still carries their name. Part of the broader family of Siouan-speaking peoples of the Carolinas, the Waccamaw fished the tidal creeks and marshes, harvested the coastal resources of the strand, and built a culture adapted to the particular rhythms of this geography — the flooding rivers, the shifting sandbars, the rich estuaries that made Murrells Inlet and Winyah Bay among the most productive fishing grounds on the Atlantic coast.

Their presence is embedded in the landscape in ways most people drive past without registering. The Waccamaw River. Lake Waccamaw. The Waccamaw Neck — the peninsula of land between the river and the ocean that holds Murrells Inlet, Pawleys Island, and much of the southern Grand Strand. Georgetown County’s earliest colonial records document multiple Indigenous tribes in this region, among them the Sampit, Santee, Winyah, and Pee Dee, whose names grace the rivers and bays of the area to this day. The Waccamaw Indian People maintain tribal ties in the South Carolina Lowcountry, and the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe is a state-recognized nation in North Carolina. They did not disappear. They endured.

European contact, when it came, was devastating. Disease arrived before sustained settlement did, thinning populations that had no resistance to Old World illnesses. By the time English planters began arriving in earnest in the early 1700s, the Indigenous communities of the coastal Carolinas had been catastrophically reduced from their pre-contact numbers. What survived, in part, were the names — pressed into the rivers and the land like a signature that no subsequent owner thought to remove.

Spain Arrives: The 1526 Landing at Winyah Bay

On August 9, 1526 — ninety years before the Mayflower, eighty-one years before Jamestown — six Spanish ships carrying roughly six hundred settlers entered Winyah Bay near present-day Georgetown. The expedition was led by Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a wealthy Spanish judge and magistrate from Hispaniola who had secured a contract from King Charles V to establish a colony on the coast of what the Spanish called La Florida del Norte. He had spent his personal fortune outfitting the fleet. He would not survive to see it fail.

The landing at Winyah Bay was not auspicious. Their largest ship struck a sandbar and sank — the supplies aboard were lost, though no lives were. Their Native American guides, who had been brought from the Caribbean as interpreters, slipped into the forest and vanished within the first few days. Scouting parties rode out to assess the land around what is now Georgetown and Pawleys Island and reported the soil poor, the population sparse. Ayllón decided to move the expedition south — some two hundred miles, according to the historical record — to a more promising river mouth that scholars now believe was Sapelo Sound in present-day Georgia. There, on September 29, 1526, the feast of St. Michael the Archangel, the settlement of San Miguel de Gualdape was formally established. It was the first European colonial settlement in what would become the continental United States — preceding even St. Augustine by nearly forty years.

The colony lasted ten weeks. Disease swept through the settlers. The food ran out. Ayllón himself died on October 18, 1526. A revolt among the enslaved Africans he had brought — the first documented slave rebellion in North American history — shattered whatever remained of colonial order. By mid-November, the survivors had abandoned San Miguel and were sailing back to Hispaniola. Of the six hundred who had left, roughly one hundred and fifty made it home. The Grand Strand had claimed its first European visitors and sent them back to the sea.

The Winyah Bay landing faded from European memory quickly. But the maps drawn after 1526 labeled this stretch of coastline “tierra de Ayllón” — Ayllón’s land — and those maps circulated through the courts and counting houses of Spain, France, and England, keeping the Carolina coast in the European imagination for the century of exploration that followed. The Grand Strand was on the map before any permanent settlement existed anywhere in North America.

The Golden Age of Piracy: Blackbeard, Bonnet, and Drunken Jack

By the early 1700s, the shallow coves and hidden waterways of the northern Grand Strand had become something of an open secret among the most dangerous men on the Atlantic. The Golden Age of Piracy — roughly 1650 to 1720 — filled the sea lanes between the Caribbean and the Carolinas with vessels flying no flag or flying a black one, and the geography of the Grand Strand suited pirates the way it suited no one else. The barrier islands created labyrinthine passages too shallow for naval warships. The inlets of Little River and Murrells Inlet offered protected anchorages where a ship’s hull could be careened and scraped clean of barnacles without detection. Georgetown’s growing wealth, funneling steadily out of Winyah Bay in slow merchant vessels loaded with indigo and rice and naval stores, was an irresistible target.

The most storied pirate in the history of the Carolinas was Edward Teach — known to history as Blackbeard, named for the dense, coal-black beard he plaited with slow-burning fuses of rope and lit during battle so that smoke wreathed his face. Blackbeard operated extensively along the Carolina coast in 1717 and 1718. In early June of 1718, commanding a powerful pirate squadron, he effectively closed the port of Charleston for a week by blockading its harbor — seizing ships, taking hostages from the city’s most prominent families, and demanding medical supplies before he released them. The audacity of the act shocked the colonial governments of the Carolinas and triggered the crackdown that would end the Golden Age of Piracy on this coast within months.

Alongside Blackbeard, for a time, sailed one of the most improbable figures in pirate history: Stede Bonnet, a wealthy Barbadian sugar planter and militia major who in the spring of 1717 — apparently without warning and for reasons his contemporaries found baffling — purchased a ship, hired a crew, and became a pirate. Bonnet had money, education, and social standing. He had no sailing experience whatsoever. Blackbeard, recognizing a useful and easily manipulated ally, took over command of Bonnet’s ship for much of their partnership, relegating the “Gentleman Pirate” to passenger status aboard his own vessel. Together they blockaded Charleston. Together they preyed on Atlantic shipping from Virginia to the Caribbean. Bonnet eventually reclaimed his ship, renamed it the Royal James, and continued raiding on his own — taking more than a dozen prizes in the summer of 1718 before retreating to the Cape Fear River for repairs. It was there that South Carolina’s Colonel William Rhett found him, fought a six-hour naval battle in September 1718, and dragged him in chains to Charleston, where he was hanged on December 10, 1718. The trial transcripts survive. The execution ended, by most accounts, the Golden Age of Piracy on the Carolina coast.

But it is the legend rather than the trial transcript that has lasted longest in the Grand Strand’s memory. Out on a small island in the waterway off Murrells Inlet — visible from the Murrells Inlet MarshWalk, where seafood restaurants string their lights over the marsh — sits what locals have always called Drunken Jack Island. The legend, documented in multiple versions across two centuries of Lowcountry storytelling, says that Blackbeard and his crew anchored in Murrells Inlet one night with a haul of Caribbean rum, feasted on oysters and crab on the island, and in the morning — whether by accident or by decision — sailed away without one of their number. A pirate named Jack. He was left on the island with the rum. When the crew eventually returned, they found Jack’s bones amid the empty casks, smiling, it was said, in the direction of the sea. The island took his name. The restaurant on the MarshWalk took it too — Drunken Jack’s has been a Murrells Inlet institution since 1979, and the legend is told to every table.

Legend or not — and the Drunken Jack story, like most good coastal tales, has been lovingly embellished over generations — the pirate era on the Grand Strand was entirely real. Georgetown County’s own historical records note that at the height of the piracy crisis, more than two thousand pirates were estimated to be operating up and down this stretch of coastline. The slow, heavily laden rice barges and merchant sloops moving in and out of Winyah Bay were easy targets, and the colonial government in Charleston was too distant and too thinly resourced to police waters it could barely chart.

Georgetown Is Born: The Third Oldest City in South Carolina

In 1729, the same year that English planters were laying out a formal grid of streets at the confluence of five rivers — the Black, the Great Pee Dee, the Small Pee Dee, the Waccamaw, and the Sampit — Georgetown was established as a town. Elisha Screven drew up the original four-by-eight block plan that still forms the core of Georgetown’s historic district today, with its original street names and lot numbers intact on the National Register of Historic Places. By 1732 the Crown had designated Georgetown an official port of entry, freeing its merchants and planters from the requirement of routing all foreign trade through Charleston. It was the moment Georgetown’s trajectory as a commercial powerhouse was confirmed.

Georgetown was the third city established in South Carolina, after Charleston and Beaufort. Walking its historic district today — along Front Street above the Sampit River waterfront, past the Kaminski House Museum built around 1760, past the Prince George Winyah Episcopal Church consecrated in 1747 with its original colonial-era brickwork — is to walk through one of the most intact colonial streetscapes in the American South. Most visitors to the Grand Strand drive past Georgetown on U.S. 17 without stopping. That is one of the great undersold detours in American travel. The Rice Museum on Front Street, the maritime museum, the Gullah Museum — the history is all there, laid out and waiting.

Indigo: The Blue Dye That Built the First Fortunes

The first great cash crop of the Grand Strand was not rice. It was indigo — the plant whose fermented leaves produced a deep, saturated blue dye that English textile manufacturers in the mid-1700s could not get enough of. The British Parliament, wanting to reduce dependence on French and Spanish indigo suppliers, offered a direct bounty to colonial planters for every pound of indigo they produced. Georgetown’s planters seized the opportunity with both hands. Between roughly 1745 and 1775, indigo production transformed the Georgetown district from a promising colonial outpost into one of the wealthiest communities in British North America.

The indigo wealth built the plantation houses, funded the Winyah Indigo Society — organized in the early 1740s and incorporated in 1757 and still technically in existence today as one of the oldest social organizations in America — and paid for the first public school for white children between Charleston and Wilmington. The Society had established a free school for the poor by the early 1750s — the school received its royal charter in 1757. It also, critically, created the financial independence that would make Georgetown’s planter class willing to risk everything in a revolution against the British Crown that had made them rich. When the Revolution came and Britain’s market closed, the indigo bounty evaporated overnight. Georgetown’s planters had already begun making the pivot to their second great crop — the one that would make them the wealthiest community in all thirteen colonies.

Carolina Gold: The Rice That Made Georgetown the Wealthiest County in the Colonies

The variety was called Carolina Gold, and its name was apt — it had the color of ripe wheat at harvest and the economic value of something rarer. Rice had been introduced to the South Carolina Lowcountry from Madagascar around 1680, but it was in the river-bottom lowlands of Georgetown County — with their system of tidal rivers that could be coaxed into flooding and draining fields on a controlled schedule — that rice cultivation reached its full and extraordinary potential. By 1840, Georgetown District produced nearly half of the total rice crop of the United States and was the largest rice-exporting port in the world. The per capita income of Georgetown County’s planter class was the highest in all thirteen original colonies — a fact that has no equivalent anywhere in antebellum America.

It is impossible to tell this story honestly without acknowledging who built it. The engineering that made Georgetown’s rice economy possible — the miles of earthen dikes, the precisely calibrated floodgates called trunks, the canal systems that moved river water in and out of fields on tidal schedules — was designed and executed by enslaved Africans, many of them brought specifically from rice-growing regions of West Africa precisely because they already possessed the agricultural and hydraulic knowledge their enslavers lacked. The enslaved population of Georgetown County reached approximately 85 percent of the total population at the height of the rice era. The plantation houses still standing along the rivers — Hopsewee, Brookgreen, Arcadia, Friendfield — were built by enslaved craftsmen, maintained by enslaved labor, and made possible by an economic system that treated human beings as capital. The beauty of the Lowcountry landscape, today, is inseparable from the history of what was required to create it. The Rice Museum on Georgetown’s Front Street tells this story with care and clarity. It is worth an afternoon.

The Gullah Geechee culture that emerged from this history — a rich and distinctive fusion of West African and American Lowcountry traditions in language, cuisine, crafts, and spiritual practice — is one of the most significant cultural contributions in American history. It survives in Georgetown County and across the coastal Carolinas and Georgia, recognized today with a national heritage corridor. The Gullah Museum in Georgetown is one of the best places to encounter that living heritage.

The King’s Highway: The Road That Ran Through It All

Through all of it — the piracy, the indigo boom, the rice empire, the gathering political crisis — one road ran the length of the colonial Atlantic seaboard and passed directly through the Grand Strand. The King’s Highway began as a Native American coastal footpath, was ordered formalized by King Charles II of England around 1660, and took the better part of a century to complete into something resembling a continuous road from Boston to Charleston. By 1735 it was the primary postal route, military corridor, and commercial artery connecting all thirteen colonies. It was the road that colonial news traveled — and the news that mattered most, the news of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, reached South Carolina by riding this road south to the Boundary House at Little River, the first stop on South Carolina soil. The shot heard round the world arrived on the Grand Strand before it arrived almost anywhere else in the Deep South.

That road is still here. In Horry and Georgetown counties it survives as U.S. Highway 17. In stretches of Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, local roads still carry the name Kings Highway on the signs. The Vereen Memorial Historical Gardens in Little River, open daily to the public at 2250 SC-179, preserve a section of the original roadbed — a walking trail through old-growth forest where the packed earth beneath your feet is the same earth horses and riders and postal couriers traveled for a century and a half before the American Revolution. It is one of the most historically significant and least-visited parks on the Grand Strand. Article 2 of this series follows the King’s Highway in depth, tracing the road from its colonial origins to the April morning in 1791 when President George Washington rode it through what is now Windy Hill and gave the neighborhood its name.

On the Eve of Revolution: A Colony Ready to Break

By 1775, Georgetown County was wealthy, educated, politically sophisticated, and deeply irritated with the British Crown. The indigo bounty had been a gift, but the taxes, the trade restrictions, and the steady imposition of parliamentary authority on colonial commerce had worn the patience of Georgetown’s planter class thin. They had money, they had connections, they had the intellectual formation that comes from sending their sons to Cambridge and Edinburgh and the Inns of Court in London. They had, in short, everything needed to join a revolution — and a particular family, the Lynches of Hopsewee Plantation, who would do exactly that.

Thomas Lynch Sr. had already been a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, one of the first organized acts of colonial resistance to British taxation. His son Thomas Lynch Jr. — born at Hopsewee Plantation in 1749, educated at Eton and Cambridge, and back in South Carolina practicing law — was being groomed for the same political path. When the Continental Congress convened and South Carolina needed delegates who combined intellectual credibility with colonial legitimacy, the Lynches answered the call. What happened next — Thomas Lynch Jr.’s signature on the Declaration of Independence and the tragedy that followed — is the subject of Article 4 in this series. For now it is enough to say that the colony the Grand Strand produced was ready for what 1776 would demand of it. The years from 1526 to 1775 had built something here: a community with deep roots, fierce pride, considerable wealth, and the willingness to risk all of it for independence.

Where to Explore This History Today

Every layer of colonial history described in this article has a physical address within easy driving distance of North Myrtle Beach oceanfront homes and oceanfront condos. The history is not behind glass in a distant museum. It is out there in the landscape, walkable and driveable on a sunny afternoon.

Frequently Asked Questions

This is Article 1 of the Thomas Beach Vacations America 250 & the Grand Strand series. Read the series introduction for the full nine-article overview. Historical facts verified against the South Carolina Encyclopedia, Georgetown County historical records, the Wikipedia entries for Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón and San Miguel de Gualdape, the NCpedia entry for Stede Bonnet, the Murrells Inlet MarshWalk historical archive, and the City of Georgetown’s official historical documents. Thomas Beach Vacations is a locally owned vacation rental company serving North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.