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Did Coxe, through his agents in West Jersey, actually emulate those Virginian pioneers whose deeds he so often recalled? His own unsubstantiated claims as a promoter of western exploration were made when he was seeking to sell his Jersey holdings, or later when he was asking royal support for his Carolana enterprise. In one memorial he gave a circumstantial account of a journey of three of his tenants by way of the Schuylkill, Susquehanna, and Ohio rivers to the Mississippi and beyond. At just this period, it is true, the Albanians, spurred by the aggressive Dongan, were challenging the French upon the Great Lakes. 12 Arnout Viele, who returned to Albany in the summer of 1694 from a two years' exploration as far as the Wabash, had followed in the main the route described by Coxe, and had made Minnisink his base. Before Coxe other Englishmen, colonial officials and provincials, had envisaged a West controlled by England in the interest of the fur trade, and eventually, perhaps, of English colonization. But in England Coxe was the first to give currency to this program. By his propaganda he helped to spread a momentous idea: that the destiny of the English in America embraced more than the settlement and exploitation of the Atlantic seaboard. In 1690, Dr. Coxe, still a member of the West Jersey Society, petitioned the King for a grant of an enormous area between 36° 30' and 46° 30', stretching westward from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York to the South Sea. 13 [Note 13: In the Privy Council’s reference of Coxe's petition to the Lords of the Committee there was a recognition that this 'Country being possessed by the English, the Commerce of the French with the Indians will be wholy destroyd.'] His schemes of inland trade were taking shape. But the Lords of Trade declined to help him to a monopoly of the furs of the West. Not long after, he acquired possession of the old patent granted by Charles I in 1629 to Sir Robert Heath, and of a later grant to Lord Maltravers. 14 [Note 14: Scull says (doc. cit., p. 318) between 1692 and 1698. See above, note 11, and evidence below that Coxe had matured his plan by 1697.]  Thus he secured some sort of title to an even vaster western estate: to Norfolk county in Virginia, and by the Heath patent to the province of Carolana which ran from sea to sea between the parallels of 31 ° and 36°. Soon Coxe was deep in the business of colonial promotion. To be sure, subsequent charters to the Carolina proprietors had ignored the Carolana grant. Carolana, moreover, embraced a large part of Florida, and of the great central valley which La Salle had named in honor of Louis XIV. What countenance nlight Coxe expect from the Lords Proprietors? From the mercantilists of the Board of Trade? What sufferance from Madrid or Paris? Where would he find colonists to hold so precarious a frontier for England? As a matter of fact, when Coxe launched his Carolana scheme there were several circumstances to encourage so sanguine a promoter.

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Coxe aquired a Carolana grant from sea to sea across FL and LA

Source: The Southern Frontier #86