Maybe North Carolina's most telling Map; the Moseley Map, 1733

 In 1733 Emund Moseley was North Carolina's Surveyor General, using his own work probably supplemented by prior work by John Lawson, his predessessor inn that office, produced a map of importance. It is the first published map showing what is now called "Thigpe's Trace", a wagon road arcing across the piedmont, connecting Chesapeake Bay with the Guld of Mexico. It also shows a road matrix in the area north of Albemarle sound that confirms a settlement in that region which dated back to the 1650s. Finally, in an inset map, below the main map, it show's Okracoke Island with an anchorage called "Teaches Hole" immediately off-shore, near a large well, a well suitable for replenishing ships quickly. As Captain Teach was hung for piracy ca 1715, the well is likely to have predated his demise. Taken altogether, it makes North Carolina's history  far more interesting than convention teaches it

For example, our history books date the settlement of the piedmont from the 1740s, when government finally came into the backcountry. Thigpen's Trace tells us that there was a wagon road suitable for moving entire farms into the backcountry available long before the 1740s. This is substantiated by land grants made,once government entered the piicture, which enumerated barns, fences, crops, livestock pre-existing in abuindance on the grants first issued by government.

There is little mention of major commerce in the Carolina Sounds in the 16th and 17th century but we now know that the Pamlico Sound was visited by virtually every explorer that coasted the eastern seaboard from north to south. It is likely they learned of it from Grand Banks fishermen who likely saved themselves a long trip through hazardous seas by replenishing food supplies in the Sounds. Later in the 17th and 18th centuries, pirates and privateers raiding the Spanish Main and one another, resupplied in the Sounds, thereby saving themselves a week or more of travel to a safe haven. This commerce has been overlooked because it clashed with a main belief in White supremely in which indigenous people were only capable of subsistence farming, and local barter and exchange. 

We now have proof that they engaged in large scale commercial farming and trade far beyond local needs. William Byrd II visited the villages of a people called Eno who aere under the leadership of "Eno Will." Byrd saw only the tag-end of a man who, in 1701, when John Lawson first met him, controlled the largest corn-bottom, corn growing land in the southeast. It ran thirteen miles from modern Erwin Road, in Durham and Orange Counties, along the course of New Hope Creek to its confluence with the Haw River. Wne Lawson met him he and his villages were thriving, and twenty-five years later, when Byrd saw him he was a wreck and his villages barely subsisting. What happened in the intervening years was the "settlement" of North Carolina by Anglican land thieves.