In 1629, King Charles I of England "erected into a province" all the land from the Albemarle Sound in the north to the St. John's River in the south, which he directed should be named Carolana.
The word Carolana is from the word Carolus, the Latin form of Charles
Later years of the early colony Daniel Coxe, an English physician and land speculator, received the land.
By 1698 Coxe had acquired title to the Sir Robert Heath grant of 1629, under which he claimed the region in the rear of the Carolina settlements and including the lower Mississippi Valley. The expedition which was sent out to plant the colony landed at Charleston, South Carolina. But, one ship sailed up the Mississippi River for 100 miles; turning back when Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville informed the captain, on September 15, 1699, that the French already occupied the region. (See Louisiana (New France).) Coxe reasserted his claim to the territory, but his colony never materialized.
In the late 1720s, to the early 1730s, Carolana split into two separate colonies. These became North and South Carolina. The name Carolina was to honor King Charles I of England.