Voyage of the Paper Canoe Part 14

CHAPTER XII.

FROM CHARLESTON TO SAVANNAH, GEORGIA.

THE INTERIOR WATER ROUTE TO JEHOSSEE ISLAND.--GOVERNOR AIKEN'S MODEL RICE PLANTATION.--LOST IN THE HORNS.--ST. HELENA SOUND.--LOST IN THE NIGHT.--THE PHANTOM SHIP.--A FINLANDER'S WELCOME.--A NIGHT ON THE EMPEROR'S OLD YACHT.--THE PHOSPHATE MINES.--COOSAW AND BROAD RIVERS.--PORT ROYAL SOUND AND CALIBOGUE SOUND.--CUFFY'S HOME.--ARRIVAL IN GEORGIA.--RECEPTIONS AT GREENWICH SHOOTING-PARK.

Captain N. L. Coste, and several other Charleston pilots, drew and presented to me charts of the route to be followed by the paper canoe through the Sea Island pa.s.sages, from the Ashley to the Savannah River, as some of the smaller watercourses near the upland were not, in 1875, upon any engraved chart of the Coast Survey.

[Ill.u.s.tration: From Bull's Bay, South Carolina, to St. Simon's Sound, Georgia.

Route of Paper Canoe MARIA THERESA From Bull's Bay, N.C.

to St. Simon's Sound, Ga. Followed by N. H. Bishop in 1875 _Copyright, 1878 by Lee & Shepard_]

Ex-Governor William Aiken, whose rice plantation on Jehossee Island was considered, before the late war, the model one of the south, invited me to pa.s.s the following Sunday with him upon his estate, which was about sixty-five miles from Charleston, and along one of the interior water routes to Savannah. He proposed to leave his city residence and travel by land, while I paddled my canoe southward to meet him. The genial editor of the "News and Courier" promised to notify the people of my departure, and have the citizens a.s.sembled to give me a South Carolina adieu. To avoid this publicity,--so kindly meant,--I quietly left the city from the south side on Friday, February 12th, and ascended the Ashley to Wappoo Creek, on the opposite bank of the river.

A steamboat sent me a screaming salute as the mouth of the Wappoo was reached, which made me feel that, though in strange waters, friends were all around me. I was now following one of the salt-water, steamboat pa.s.sages through the great marshes of South Carolina. From Wappoo Creek I took the "Elliot Cut" into the broad Stono River, from behind the marshes of which forests rose upon the low bluffs of the upland, and rowed steadily on to Church Flats, where Wide Awake, with its landing and store, nestled on the bank.

A little further on the tides divided, one ebbing through the Stono to the sea, the other towards the North Edisto. "New Cut" connects Church Flats with Wadmelaw Sound, a sheet of water not over two miles in width and the same distance in length. From the sound the Wadmelaw River runs to the mouth of the Dahoo. Vessels drawing eight and a half feet of water can pa.s.s on full tides from Charleston over the course I was following to the North Edisto River.

Leaving Wadmelaw Sound, a deep bend of the river was entered, when the bluffs of Enterprise Landing, with its store and the ruins of a burnt saw-mill, came into view on the left. Having rowed more than thirty miles from the Ashley, and finding that the proprietor of Enterprise, a Connecticut gentleman, had made preparations to entertain me, this day of pleasant journeying ended.

The Cardinal-bird was carolling his matin song when the members of this little New England colony watched my departure down the Wadmelaw the next morning. The course was for the most part over the submerged phosphate beds of South Carolina, where the remains of extinct species were now excavated, furnishing food for the worn-out soils of America and Europe, and interesting studies and speculations for men of science.

The Dahoo River was reached soon after leaving Enterprise. Here the North Edisto, a broad river, pa.s.ses the mouth of the Dahoo, in its descent to the sea, which is about ten miles distant.

For two miles along the Dahoo the porpoises gave me strong proof of their knowledge of the presence of the paper canoe by their rough gambols, but being now in quiet inland waters, I could laugh at these strange creatures as they broke from the water around the boat. At four o'clock P. M. the extensive marshes of Jehossee Island were reached, and I approached the village of the plantation through a short ca.n.a.l.

Out of the rice-fields of rich, black alluvium rose an area of higher land, upon which were situated the mansion and village of Governor Aiken, where he, in 1830, commenced his duties as rice-planter. A hedge of bright green casino surrounded the well-kept garden, within which magnolias and live-oaks enveloped the solid old house, screening it with their heavy foliage from the strong winds of the ocean, while flowering shrubs of all descriptions added their bright and vivid coloring to the picturesque beauty of the scene.

The governor had arrived at Jehossee before me, and Sat.u.r.day being pay-day, the faces of the negroes were wreathed in smiles. Here, in his quiet island home, I remained until Monday with this most excellent man and patriot, whose soul had been tried as by fire during the disturbances caused by the war.

As we sat together in that room where, in years gone by, Governor Aiken had entertained his northern guests, with Englishmen of n.o.ble blood,--a room full of reminiscences both pleasant and painful,--my kind host freely told me the story of his busy life, which sounded like a tale of romance. He had tried to stay the wild storm of secession when the war-cloud hung gloomily over his state. It broke, and his unheeded warnings were drowned in the thunders of the political tempest that swept over the fair south. Before the war he owned one thousand slaves. He organized schools to teach his negroes to read and write. The improvement of their moral condition was his great study.

The life he had entered upon, though at first distasteful, had been forced upon him, and he met his peculiar responsibilities with a true Christian desire to benefit all within his reach. When a young man, having returned from the tour of Europe, his father presented him with Jehossee Island, an estate of five thousand acres, around which it required four stout negro oarsmen to row him in a day. "Here," said the father to the future governor of South Carolina, as he presented the domain to his son,--"here are the means; now go to work and develop them."

William Aiken applied himself industriously to the task of improving the talents given him. His well-directed efforts bore good fruit, as year after year Jehossee Island, from a half submerged, sedgy, boggy waste, grew into one of the finest rice-plantations in the south. The new lord of the manor ditched the marshes, and walled in his new rice-fields with dikes, to keep out the freshets from the upland and the tides from the ocean, perfecting a complete system of drainage and irrigation. He built comfortable quarters for his slaves, and erected a church and schoolhouse for their use. From the original two hundred and eighty acres of cultivated rice land, the new proprietor developed the wild mora.s.s into sixteen hundred acres of rice-fields, and six hundred acres of vegetable, corn, and provender producing land.

For several seasons prior to the war, Jehossee yielded a rice crop which sold for seventy thousand dollars, and netted annually fifty thousand dollars income to the owner. At that time Governor Aiken had eight hundred and seventy-three slaves on the island, and about one hundred working as mechanics, &c., in Charleston. The eight hundred and seventy-three Jehossee slaves, men, women, and children, furnished a working force of three hundred for the rice-fields.

Mr. Aiken would not tolerate the loose matrimonial ways of negro life, but compelled his slaves to accept the marriage ceremony; and herein lay one of his chief difficulties, for, to whatever cause we attribute it, the fact remains the same, namely, that the ordinary negro has no sense of morality. After all the attempts made on this plantation to improve the moral nature of these men and women, Governor Aiken, during a yellow-fever season in Savannah after the war, while visiting the poor sufferers, intent upon charitable works, found in the lowest quarter of the city, sunk in the most abject depths of vice, men and women who had once been good servants on his plantations.

In old times Jehossee was a happy place for master and for slave. The governor rarely locked the door of his mansion. The family plate, valued at fifteen thousand dollars, was stored in a chest in a room on the ground-floor of the house, which had for its occupants, during four months of the year, two or three negro servants. Though all the negroes at the quarters, which were only a quarter of a mile from the mansion, knew the valuable contents of the chest, it was never disturbed. They stole small things, but seemed incapable of committing a burglary.

When the Union army marched through another part of South Carolina, where Governor Aiken had buried these old family heirlooms and had added to the original plate thirty thousand dollars' worth of his own purchasing, the soldiers dug up this treasure-trove, and forty-five thousand dollars' worth of fine silver went to enrich the spoils of the Union army. Soon after, three thousand eight hundred bottles of fine old wines, worth from eight to nine dollars a bottle, were dug up and destroyed by a Confederate officer's order, to prevent the Union army from capturing them. Thus was plundered an old and revered governor of South Carolina--one who was a kind neighbor, a true patriot, and a Christian gentleman.

The persecutions of the owner of Jehossee did not, however, terminate with the war; for when the struggle was virtually ended, and the fair mansion of the rice-plantation retained its heirlooms and its furniture, Beaufort, of South Carolina, was still under the influence of the Freedman's Bureau; and when it was whispered that Aiken's house was full of nice old furniture, and that a few faithful servants of the good old master were its only guards, covetous thoughts at once stirred the evil minds of those who were the representatives of law and order. This house was left almost without protection. The war was over. South Carolina had bent her proud head in agony over her burned plantations and desolate homes. The victorious army was now proclaiming peace, and generous treatment to a fallen foe. Then to what an almost unimaginable state of demoralization must some of the freedmen's protectors have fallen, when they sent a gunboat to Jehossee Island, and rifled the old house of all its treasures!

To-day, the governor's favorite sideboard stands in the house of a citizen of Boston, as a relic of the war. O, people of the north, hold no longer to your relics of the war, stolen from the firesides of the south! Restore them to their owners, or else bury them out of the sight of your children, that they may not be led to believe that the war for the preservation of the Great Republic was a war for _plunder_;--else did brave men fight, and good women pray in vain. Away with stolen pianos, "captured" sideboards, and purloined silver! What but this petty plundering could be expected of men who robbed by wholesale the poor negro, to protect whose rights they were sent south?

The great political party of the north became the pledged conservator of the black man's rights, and established a Freedman's Bureau, and Freedman's banks to guard his humble earnings. All know something of the workings of those banks; and to everlasting infamy must be consigned the names of many of those conducting them,--men who robbed every one of these depositories of negro savings, and left the poor, child-like freedman in a physical state of dest.i.tution, and in a perfect bewilderment of mind as to who his true friend really was.

A faithful negro of Jehossee Island was but one among thousands of such cases. While the tumult of war vexed the land, the faithful negro overseer remained at his post to guard his late master's property, supporting himself by the manufacture of salt, and living in the most frugal manner to be able to "lay by" a sum for his old age. Having saved five hundred dollars, he deposited them in the nearest Freedman's bank, which, though _fathered_ by the United States government, failed; and the now dest.i.tute negro found himself stripped in the same moment of his hard-earned savings, and his confidence in his new protectors.

As the war of the rebellion was slowly drawing to its close, Mr.

Lincoln's kind heart was drawn towards his erring countrymen, and he made a list of the names of the wisest and best men of the south, who, not having taken an active part in the strife, might be intrusted with the task of bringing back the unruly states to their const.i.tutional relations with the national government. Governor Aiken was informed that his name was upon that list; and he would gladly have accepted the onerous position, and labored in the true interests of the whole people, but the pistol of an a.s.sa.s.sin closed the life of the President, whose generous plans of reconstruction were never realized.

In the birth of our new Centennial let us eschew the political charlatan, and bring forward our statesmen to serve and govern a people, who, to become a unit of strength, must ever bear in mind the words of the great southern statesman, who said he knew "no north, no south, no east, no west; but one undivided country."

On Monday, at ten A. M., two negroes a.s.sisted me to launch my craft from the river's bank at the mouth of the ca.n.a.l, for the tide was very low. As I settled myself for a long pull at the oars, the face of one of the blacks was seemingly rent in twain, as a huge mouth opened, and a pair of strong lungs sent forth these parting words: "_Bully for Ma.s.sachusetts!_"

"How did you know I came from Ma.s.sachusetts?" I called out from the river.

"I knows de cuts ob dem. I suffered at Fort Wagner. Dis chile knows Ma.s.sachusetts."

Two miles further on, Bull Creek served me as a "cut-off," and half an hour after entering it the tide was flooding against me. When Goat Island Creek was pa.s.sed on the left hand, knots of pine forests rose picturesquely in places out of the bottom-lands, and an hour later, at Bennett's Point, on the right, I found the watercourse a quarter of a mile in width.

The surroundings were of a lovely nature during this day's journey. Here marshes, diversified by occasional hammocks of timber dotting their uninteresting wastes; there humble habitations of whites and blacks appearing at intervals in the forest growth. As I was dest.i.tute of a finished chart of the Coast Survey, after rowing along one side of Hutchinson's Island I became bewildered in the maze of creeks which penetrate the marshes that lie between Bennett's Point and the coast.

Making a rough topographical sketch of the country as I descended Hutchinson's Creek, or Big River,--the latter appellation being the most appropriate, as it is a very wide watercourse,--I came upon a group of low islands, and found upon one of them a plantation which had been abandoned to the negroes, and the little bluff upon which two or three rickety buildings were situated was the last land which remained unsubmerged during a high tide between the plantation and the sea.

I was now in a quandary. I had left the hospitable residence of Governor Aiken at ten o'clock A. M., when I should have departed at sunrise in order to have had time to enter and pa.s.s through St. Helena Sound before night came on. The prospect of obtaining shelter was indeed dismal. Just at this time a loud shout from the negroes on sh.o.r.e attracted my attention, and I rested upon my oars, while a boat-load of women and children paddled out to me.

"Is _dat_ de _little_ boat?" they asked, viewing my craft with curious eyes. "And is dat boat made of paper?" they continued, showing that negro runners had posted the people, even in these solitary regions, of the approach of the paper canoe. I questioned these negro women about the route, but each gave a different answer as to the pa.s.sage through the Horns to St. Helena Sound. Hurrying on through tortuous creeks, the deserted tract called "the Horns" was entered, and until sunset I followed one short stream after another, to its source in the reedy plain, constantly retracing the route, with the tide not yet ebbing strong enough to show me a course to the sound. Presently it ebbed more rapidly, and I followed the tide from one intricacy to another, but never found the princ.i.p.al thoroughfare.

While I was enveloped in reeds, and at a loss which way to go, the soft ripple of breaking waves struck my ear like sweet music. The sea was telling me of its proximity. Carefully balancing myself, I stood up in the cranky canoe, and peering over the gra.s.sy thickets, saw before me the broad waters of Helena Sound. The fresh salt breeze from the ocean struck upon my forehead, and nerved me to a renewal of my efforts to get within a region of higher land, and to a place of shelter.

The ebbing tide was yet high, and through the forest of vegetation, and over the submerged coast, I pushed the canoe into the sound. Now I rowed as though for my life, closely skirting the marshes, and soon entered waters covered by a chart in my possession. My course was to skirt the coast of the sound from where I had entered it, and cross the mouths of the Combahee and Bull rivers to the entrance of the broad Coosaw. This last river I would ascend seven miles to the first upland, and camp thereon until morning. The tide was now against me, and the night was growing darker, as the faithful craft was forced along the marshes four miles to the mouth of the Combahee River, which I had to ascend half a mile to get rid of a shoal of frisky porpoises, who were fishing in the current.

Then descending it on the opposite sh.o.r.e, I rowed two miles further in the dark, but for half an hour previous to my reaching the wide debouchure of Bull River, some enormous blackfish surged about me in the tideway and sounded their nasal calls, while their more demonstrative porpoise neighbors leaped from the water in the misty atmosphere, and so alarmed me and occupied my attention, that instead of crossing to the Coosaw River, I unwittingly ascended the Bull, and was soon lost in the contours of the river.

As I hugged the marshy borders of the stream to escape the strong current of its channel, and rowed on and on in the gloom, eagerly scanning the high, sedge-fringed flats to find one little spot of firm upland upon which I might land my canoe and obtain a resting-spot for myself for the night, the feeling that I was lost was not the most cheerful to be imagined. In the thin fog which arose from the warm water into the cool night air, objects on the marshes a.s.sumed fantastical shapes. A few reeds, taller than the rest, had the appearance of trees twenty feet high. So real did these unreal images seem, that I drove my canoe against the soft, muddy bank, repeatedly prompted to land in what seemed a copse of low trees, but in every instance I was deceived. Still I pulled up that mysterious river, ignorant at the time of even its name, praying only for one little spot of upland where I might camp.

While thus employed, I peered over my shoulder, into the gloom, and beheld what seemed to be a vision; for, out of a cloud of mist rose the skeleton lines of a large ship, with all its sails furled to the yards.

"A ship at anchor, and in this out-of-the-way place!" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, scarcely believing my eyes; but when I pointed the canoe towards it, and again looked over my shoulder, the vision of hope was gone.

Again I saw tall masts cutting through the mists, but the ship's hull could not be distinguished, and as I rowed towards the objects, first the lower masts disappeared, then the topmasts dissolved, and later, the topgallant and royal masts faded away. For half an hour I rowed and rowed for that mysterious vessel, which was veiled and unveiled to my sight. Never did so spectral an object haunt or thwart me. It seemed to change its position on the water, as well as in the atmosphere, and I was too busily employed in trying to reach it to discover in the darkness that the current, which I could not distinguish from smooth water, was whirling me down stream as fast as I would approach the weird vessel.

Drawing once more from the current, I followed the marsh until the canoe was opposite the anchorage of a real ship; then, with hearty pulls, I shot around its stern, and shouted: "Ship ahoy!"

No one answered the hail. The vessel looked like a man-of-war, but not of American build. Not a light gleamed from her ports, not a footfall came from her decks. She seemed to be deserted in the middle of the river, surrounded by a desolate waste of marshes. The current gurgled and sucked about her run, as the ebb-tide washed her black hull on its way to the sea. The spectacle seemed now even more mysterious than when, mirage-like, it peered forth from a cloud of mist. But it was real, and not fantastic. Another hail, louder than the first, went forth into the night air, and penetrated to the ship's forecastle, for a sailor answered my call, and reported to the captain in the cabin the presence of a boat at the ship's side.

A quick, firm tread sounded upon the deck; then, with a light bound, a powerfully-built young man landed upon the high rail of the vessel. He peered down from his stately ship upon the little speck which floated upon the gurgling current; then, with a voice "filled with the fogs of the ocean," he thundered forth, as though he were hailing a man-of-war: "What boat's that?"

"Paper canoe Maria Theresa," I replied, in as foggy a voice as I could a.s.sume.

"Where from, and where bound?" again roared the captain.

"_From_ Quebec, Canada, and _bound_ to sleep on board your vessel, if I can ever get up there," I politely responded, in a more subdued voice, for I soon discovered that nature had never intended me for a fog-trumpet.

"Ah, is it you?" cheerily responded the captain, suddenly dispensing with all his fogginess; "I've been looking for you this long time. Got a Charleston paper on board; your trip all in it. Come up, and break a bottle of wine with me."