FLORENCE O'SULLIVAN

 

• O'Sullivan was a native of Kinsale, Co. Cork, and was a soldier of fortune who came to Carolina on the principal ship of the three-ship fleet that established the first settlement at Charlestowne Landing in 1670. 

• An experienced officer in the service of Britain, he had earlier led sea attacks on the French in the Caribbean and was held hostage for over a year in France before embarking on the Carolina adventure with six others from the Kinsale area, some of them his servants. He was appointed to the powerful position of Deputy to one of the original Lords Proprietary, and soon became surveyor general of the colony. 

• This position involved the critical measurement and allocation of land parcels and house plots in the rapidly developing areas first around Albemarle Point and than at Oyster Point, to which the fledgling city of Charlestowne moved in the 1680s. 

• O'Sullivan's approach and methods as surveyor were criticised by the citizens, and his personal failings highlighted; he was replaced by the equally short-lived John Culpeper. But Florence maintained his contacts at the highest level, acquiring over 2000 acres of land for himself and serving as Commissioner of Public Accounts in 1682-3. 

• His association with Sullivan's Island arises from his appointment in 1672 as supervisor of the signal cannon there and as organiser of the Jeffords Plantation "refuge" for citizens in the event of a French military attack.

• No better or no worse than his fellow-colonizers, he was of a generation of "adventurers whom one cause or another – domestic or political – had induced to seek in the new world fortunes they could not achieve in the old."