The General felt the death of his friend so much that he set to work
to find out how other poor debtors lived in the London prisons. He
soon saw that great numbers of them suffered terribly. The prisons
were crowded and filthy. The men shut up in them were ragged and
dirty; some of them were fastened with heavy chains, and a good many
actually died of starvation.

General Oglethorpe could not bear to see strong men killed off in
this manner. He thought that if the best of them--those who were
honest and willing to work--could have the chance given them of
earning their living, that they would soon do as well as any men.
It was to help them that he persuaded the king to give the land of
Georgia.


104. Building the city of Savannah; what the people of Charleston,
South Carolina, did; a busy settlement; the alligators.--General
Oglethorpe took over thirty-five families to America in 1733. They
settled on a high bank of the Savannah[5] River, about twenty miles
from the sea. The general laid out a town with broad, straight,
handsome streets, and with many small squares or parks. He called
the settlement Savannah from the Indian name of the river on which
it stands.

[Illustration: SAVANNAH, AS GENERAL OGLETHORPE LAID IT OUT IN 1733.]

The people of Charleston, South Carolina, were glad to have some
English neighbors south of them that would help them fight the
Spaniards of Florida, who hated the English, and wanted to drive them
out. They gave the newcomers a hundred head of cattle, a drove of