In April, 1670, some one hundred and fifty colonists from England and Barbados disembarked at the mouth of Ashley River. They were the first permanent settlers of South Carolina, the pioneers in a new zone of English colonial expansion and of international conflict, the southern frontier. Destined for Port Royal, the little Carolina fleet had been diverted northward, probably by the uncomfortable neighborhood of the Spanish missions, just beyond the Savannah River. Even at Kiawah the new colonists found themselves only two hundred and fifty miles from the presidio of St. Augustine. Twice that distance separated them from the Chesapeake settlements: five hundred miles of coast as yet unoccupied save at Albemarle Sound, a wretched frontier of Virginia, and at Cape Fear, where two recent attempts at planting had met with failure.