William Sayle

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William Sayle was the governor of South Carolina from 1670 to 1671.

William Sayle had led the settlement of the Bahamas by puritans from Bermuda in October, 1648. He left Bermuda with seventy settlers, many of whom were driven out by intolerance and persecution resulting from the conflict between the Church of England and Bermuda's Independent Puritans (mostly Presbyterians). As the Church of England attempted to assert its authority, similar conflicts were taking place in other parts of the English realm, and in English-ruled Ireland, from where Presbyterian settlers would re-immigrate to North America, where they became known as Scots-Irish, or Scotch-Irish. A year later, the Government of Bermuda ordered two other ministers, and sixty of their followers, to emigrate to the Bahamas. The Bermudians settled on Eleuthera, establishing England's control of that archipelago.

Roughly ten-thousand Bermudians emigrated before US Independence closed the door on the efflux. Many went to the West Indies, but most undoubtedly went to North American colonies. At first, this meant mostly to Virginia, of which Bermuda had once been a part, and with which it maintained a close relationship. When England, later Britain, began settling the north of Florida, which had been taken from Spain, Bermudian settlers flooded into the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. In 1670, William Sayle, then in his eighties, became the first Governor of South Carolina, arriving with a number of Barbadian and Bermudian families and founding the town of Charles Towne.