And there it will stand, bleak and threatening and pitiless, until the earth and the sea shall give up their dead. And as its nature, so its name, is now, always has been, and always will be, the 'Cape of Fear.'"
But the broad sounds and rivers and fertile
lands which lay behind these barriers of sand
and storm invited immigration, and soon after
the middle of the seventeenth century settlers
began to pour in by different routes. From
Virginia they crowded across into the northern
and eastern sections. The Swiss and the Palatines
came into the Neuse, and by the middle
of the eighteenth century the Highland Scotch
were swarming up the Cape Fear, while the
Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania spread over
the country on both sides of the Yadkin, and
westward to the Catawba, where they were
mingled with the Germans, who also came
mostly by way of Pennsylvania. Coming into
the country by different routes, separated from
each other by the unsettled wilderness, finding
no centre of power or of influence within
the Province to draw them together, each of
these sections lived in a measure to itself, and
communicated with the outside world through
those routes of travel by which each had first
entered the country. The Albemarle section