John Lawson--surveyor, traveler, natural historian, and author--was a dominant figure in North Carolina during the first decade of the eighteenth century. During a surveying career, which included his appointment as surveyor-general of North Carolina, Lawson conducted the first survey of the interior of Carolina and participated as cofounder and planner of Bath and New Bern, North Carolina's two oldest towns. His A New Voyage to Carolina; Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of That Country ... (published separately in 1709) was the only book to come out of proprietary North Carolina and has been cited variously as "one of the best travel accounts of the early eighteenth-century colonies" (Hugh T. Lefler), "the most accurate and detached of the early natural histories of America" (U. P. Hedrick), and the "only great book on the Indians" from colonial North Carolina (Richard Beale Davis).

Nothing for certain has been documented about Lawson's...