THE BRITISH:
When Georgia was established as an English
colony in 1733, the Creek Indians granted the British the coastal
land between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers and reserved hunting rights
on Ossabaw, St. Catherines and Sapelo for themselves.
Oglethorpe engaged Mary Musgrove, the
half-Indian, half-British niece of the Creek emperor, as his interpreter.
Widowed twice, Mary married the Reverend Thomas Bosomworth, an exceptionally
ambitious man, and it was presumably under his influence that a Creek
chieftain named Malatchi bestowed the islands of St. Catherines, Ossabaw
and Sapelo on Mary in 1747. The Bosomworths’ plan was to develop
the islands into great plantations but the colonial authorities rejected
their claim of ownership, based on the established policy of limited land
grants. There was also a claim by Mary for money owed to her for
her interpretive services for Oglethorpe. Local Indian relations
were disrupted for more than ten years by the dispute. Henry Ellis,
who was appointed governor in 1760, astutely settled the problem by negotiating
a new treaty with the Creeks, giving St. Catherines to the Bosomworths
and selling Ossabaw and Sapelo to provide the money required to reimburse
Mary without ever acknowledging the land claim.
Sapelo’s first owner was Grey Elliot,
a land speculator who purchased the island from the Crown on the 17th
of May 1760 for £725 sterling. It was surveyed and mapped
in the same year by Henry Yonge and William de Brahm.
In 1762 Elliot sold the island to Andrew
Mackay, who began agriculture on a large scale. Upon his death
in 1769, relatives of Mackay’s widow, William and Lachlan McIntosh,
assisted her in maintaining the property and it was still under cultivation
at the time of the American Revolution. Sapelo still lies within
McIntosh County.
In 1784 John McQueen of South Carolina
purchased the island from the Mackay estate, but he lived beyond
his means and in 1789 sold Sapelo proper, together with Little Sapelo,
Blackbeard and Cabretta Islands to Francis Marie Demoussay Delavauxe
for £10,000. |
