Career
With his brother Valentine he was concerned in a scheme of Welsh colonization in South Carolina, inspired, apparently, by Thomas Nairne. He received large grants near Port Royal and in Craven County, and transported several servants, but soon after his emigration (c. 1712) he embarked upon a series of western adventures. "An English Gent. , who had a particular fancy of rambling among the Indians, " was Spotswood's characterization of Hughes (Official Letters of Alexander Spotswood, edited by R. A. Brock, vol. II, 1885, p. 331). By testimony of Cadillac, "il etoit ingénieur, et géographe, " and, moreover, "homme d'esprit" (Crane, post, p. 99).
As a volunteer Indian agent he traveled widely among the Cherokee and the more distant tribes, and developed a grandiose scheme for supplanting the French in the lower Mississippi Valley. He was intoxicated by his first view of the West and its resources. "There's no land in America now left yt's worth anything, " he wrote, "but what's on the Mesisipi" (Crane, post, pp. 100-01). Accordingly he transformed his colonization scheme into a project for a new British province of Annarea, on the Mississippi, with its center apparently at Natchez or on the Yazoo. He sought the favor of his friend the Duchess of Powis, and of the Duchess of Ormonde; and he petitioned Queen Anne for aid in transporting poor families thither from Wales. French opposition he anticipated, but he stoutly asserted the prior English claim, based upon the Carolinian Indian trade.
Meanwhile, Hughes led a new English trading offensive, which, between 1713 and 1715, threatened to undermine French control in Louisiana. As a result, new trading factories were established; a firmer league was formed with the Chickasaw; and even the Choctaw, with the exception of two loyal villages, were persuaded to desert the French. On the Mississippi his intrigues embraced the tribes from the Illinois country to the Red River and the Gulf. He even dispatched two renegade coureurs de bois as English emissaries to the remote Missouri River Indians. In Canada, as in Louisiana, it was realized that "master You" had precipitated a serious crisis in the West. The winter of 1714-15 saw the climax of Hughes's enterprise, and the débâcle.
After visiting all the old centers of trade he was making his way down the Mississippi from Natchez when, at Manchac, he was seized by the French. In the absence of Cadillac, Bienville had already taken measures to check Hughes's schemes, realizing that "without a prompt remedy the colony would fall into the power of the English. " A prisoner at Mobile, Hughes debated with Bienville the claims of their sovereigns to an imperial region, and boasted of his intended colony. On his release he visited Pensacola, and then set out, alone, through the woods to the Alabamas. Not far from the mouth of the Alabama River he was waylaid and slain by a band of Tohome Indians. Already the wilderness from Port Royal to the Mississippi was aflame with the great Indian rising of 1715.
