University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XVIII.

April 24th.—In the morning we found ourselves in chopping
little sea-way for which the "Nina" was particularly
unsuited, laden as she was with provisions and produce.
Eyes and glasses anxiously straining seawards for any trace
of the blockading vessels. Every sail scrutinized, but no
"stars and stripes" visible.

Our captain—a good specimen of one of the inland-water
navigators, shrewd, intelligent, and active,—told me a good
deal about the country. He laughed at the fears of the whites
as regards the climate. "Why, here am I," said he, "going
up the river, and down the river all times of the year, and
at times of day and night when they reckon the air is most
deadly, and I've done so for years without any bad effects.
The planters whose houses I pass all run away in May, and
go off to Europe, or to the piney wood, or to the springs, or
they think they'd all die. There's Captain Buck, who lives
above here,—he comes from the State of Maine. He had
only a thousand dollars to begin with, but he sets to work and
gets land on the Maccamaw River at twenty cents an acre. It
was death to go nigh it, but it was first-rate rice land, and
Captain Buck is now worth a million of dollars. He lives
on his estate all the year round, and is as healthy a man as
ever you seen."

To such historiettes my planting friends turn a deaf ear.
"I tell you what," said Pringle, "just to show you what kind
our climate is. I had an excellent overseer once, who would
insist on staying near the river, and wouldn't go away. He
fought against it for more than five-and-twenty years, but he
went down with fever at last." As the overseer was more
than thirty years of age when he came to the estate, he had

not been cut off so very suddenly. I thought of the quack's
advertisement of the "bad leg of sixty years' standing." The
captain says the negroes on the river plantations are very
well off. He can buy enough of pork from the slaves on one
plantation to last his ship's crew for the whole winter. The
money goes to them, as the hogs are their own. One of the
stewards on board had bought himself and his family out of
bondage with his earnings. The State in general, however,
does not approve of such practices.

At three o'clock, P. M., ran into Charleston harbor, and
landed soon afterwards.

I saw General Beauregard in the evening: he was very
lively and in good spirits, though he admitted he was rather
surprised by the spirit displayed in the North. "A good
deal of it is got up, however," he said, "and belongs to that
washy sort of enthusiasm which is promoted by their lecturing
and spouting." Beauregard is very proud of his personal
strength, which for his slight frame is said to be very
extraordinary, and he seemed to insist on it that the Southern
men had more physical strength, owing to their mode of life
and their education, than their Northern "brethren." In the
evening held a sort of tabaks consilium in the hotel, where a
number of officers—Manning, Lucas, Chestnut, Calhoun, &c.,
—discoursed of the affairs of the nation. All my friends,
except Trescot, I think were elated at the prospect of hostilities
with the North, and overjoyed that a South Carolina regiment
had already set out for the frontiers of Virginia.

April 25th.—Sent off my letters by an English gentleman,
who was taking despatches from Mr. Bunch to Lord Lyons, as
the post-office is becoming a dangerous institution. We hear
of letters being tampered with on both sides. Adams's Express
Company, which acts as a sort of express post under
certain conditions, is more trustworthy; but it is doubtful how
long communications will be permitted to exist between the
two hostile nations, as they may now be considered.

Dined with Mr. Petigru, who had most kindly postponed
his dinner party till my return from the plantations, and met
there General Beauregard, Judge King, and others, among
whom, distinguished for their esprit and accomplishments, were
Mrs. King and Mrs. Carson, daughters of my host. The dislike,
which seems innate, to New England is universal, and
varies only in the form of its expression. It is quite true Mr.
Petigru is a decided Unionist, but he is the sole specimen of

the genus in Charleston, and he is tolerated on account of his
rarity. As the witty, pleasant old man trots down the street,
utterly unconscious of the world around him, he is pointed out
proudly by the Carolinians as an instance of forbearance on
their part, and as a proof, at the same time, of popular unanimity
of sentiment.

There are also people who regret the dissolution of the
Union—such as Mr. Huger, who shed tears in talking of it
the other night; but they regard the fact very much as they
would the demolition of some article which never can be restored
and reunited, which was valued for the uses it rendered
and its antiquity.

General Beauregard is apprehensive of an attack by the
Northern "fanatics" before the South is prepared, and he considers
they will carry out coercive measures most rigorously.
He dreads the cutting of the levées, or high artificial works,
raised along the whole course of the Mississippi, for many
hundreds of miles above New Orleans, which the Federals
may resort to in order to drown the plantations and ruin the
planters.

We had a good-humored argument in the evening about the
ethics of burning the Norfolk navy yard. The Southerners
consider the appropriation of the arms, moneys, and stores of
the United States as rightful acts, inasmuch as they represent,
according to them, their contribution, or a portion of it, to the
national stock in trade. When a State goes out of the Union
she should be permitted to carry her forts, armaments, arsenals,
&c., along with her, and it was a burning shame for the
Yankees to destroy the property of Virginia at Norfolk. These
ideas, and many like them, have the merit of novelty to English
people, who were accustomed to think there were such
things as the Union and the people of the United States.

April 26th.—Bade good-by to Charleston at 9·45 A. M., this
day, and proceeded by railway, in company with Mr. Ward,
to visit Mr. Trescot's Sea Island Plantation. Crossed the
river to the terminus in a ferry steamer. No blockading vessels
in sight yet. The water alive with small silvery fish, like
mullet, which sprang up and leaped along the surface incessantly.
An old gentleman, who was fishing on the pier, combined
the pursuit of sport with instruction very ingeniously by
means of a fork of bamboo in his rod, just above the reel, into
which he stuck his inevitable newspaper, and read gravely in
his cane-bottomed chair till he had a bite, when the fork was

unhitched and the fish was landed. The negroes are very
much addicted to the contemplative man's recreation, and they
were fishing in all directions.

On the move again. Took our places in the Charleston
and Savannah Railway for Pocotaligo, which is the station
for Barnwell Island. Our fellow-passengers were all full of
politics—the pretty women being the fiercest of all—no!
the least good-looking were the most bitterly patriotic, as if
they hoped to talk themselves into husbands by the most unfeminine
expressions towards the Yankees.

The country is a dead flat, perforated by rivers and water
courses, over which the rail is carried on long and lofty trestle-work.
But for the fine trees, the magnolias and live-oak,
the landscape would be unbearably hideous, for there are none
of the quaint, cleanly, delightful villages of Holland to relieve
the monotonous level of rice swamps and wastes of land and
water and mud. At the humble little stations there were invariably
groups of horsemen waiting under the trees, and ladies
with their black nurses and servants who had driven over in
the odd-looking old-fashioned vehicles, which were drawn up
in the shade. Those who were going on a long journey,
aware of the utter barrenness of the land, took with them a
viaticum and bottles of milk. The nurses and slaves squatted
down by their side in the train, on perfectly well-understood
terms. No one objected to their presence—on the contrary,
the passengers treated them with a certain sort of special consideration,
and they were on the happiest terms with their
charges, some of which were in the absorbent condition of life,
and dived their little white faces against the tawny bosom of
their nurses with anything but reluctance.

The train stopped, at 12ċ20, at Pocotaligo; and there we
found Mr. Trescot and a couple of neighboring planters, famous
as fishers for "drum," of which more by and by. I
had met old Mr. Elliot in Charleston, and his account of this
sport, and of the pursuit of an enormous sea monster called
the devil-fish, which he was one of the first to kill in these
waters, excited my curiosity very much. Mr. Elliot has written
a most agreeable account of the sports of South Carolina,
and I had hoped he would have been well enough to have
been my guide, philosopher, and friend in drum-fishing in
Port Royal; but he sent over his son to say that he was too
unwell to come, and had therefore despatched most excellent
representatives in two members of his family. It was arranged

that they should row down from their place and meet
us to-morrow morning at Trescot's Island, which lies above
Beaufort, in Port Royal Sound and River.

Got into Trescot's gig, and plunged into a shady lane with
wood on each side, through which we drove for some distance.
The country, on each side and beyond, perfectly flat—all
rice lands—few houses visible—scarcely a human being on
the road—drove six or seven miles without meeting a soul.
After a couple of hours or so, I should think, the gig turned
up by an open gateway on a path or road made through a
waste of rich black mud, "glorious for rice," and landed us at
the door of a planter, Mr. Heyward, who came out and gave
us a most hearty welcome, in the true Southern style. His
house is charming, surrounded with trees, and covered with
roses and creepers, through which birds and butterflies are
flying. Mr. Heyward took it as a matter of course that we
stopped to dinner, which we were by no means disinclined to
do, as the day was hot, the road was dusty, and his reception
frank and kindly. A fine specimen of the planter man; and,
minus his broad-brimmed straw hat and loose clothing, not a
bad representative of an English squire at home.

Whilst we were sitting in the porch, a strange sort of booming
noise attracted my attention in one of the trees. "It is a
rain-crow," said Mr. Heyward; "a bird which we believe to
foretell rain. I'll shoot it for you." And, going into the hall,
he took down a double-barrelled fowling-piece, walked out, and
fired into the tree; whence the rain-crow, poor creature, fell
fluttering to the ground and died. It seemed to me a kind of
cuckoo—the same size, but of darker plumage. I could
gather no facts to account for the impression that its call is a
token of rain.

My attention was also called to a curious kind of snake-killing
hawk, or falcon, which makes an extraordinary noise
by putting its wings point upwards, close together, above its
back, so as to offer no resistance to the air, and then, beginning
to descend from a great height, with fast-increasing rapidity,
makes, by its rushing through the air, a strange loud hum,
till it is near the ground, when the bird stops its downward
swoop and flies in a curve over the meadow. This I saw two
of these birds doing repeatedly to-night.

After dinner, at which Mr. Heyward expressed some alarm
lest Secession would deprive the Southern States of "ice," we
continued our journey towards the river. There is still a remarkable

absence of population or life along the road, and
even the houses are either hidden or lie too far off to be seen.
The trees are much admired by the people, though they would
not be thought much of in England.

At length, towards sundown, having taken to a track by a
forest, part of which was burning, we came to a broad muddy
river, with steep clay banks. A canoe was lying in a little
harbor formed by a slope in the bank, and four stout negroes,
who were seated round a burning log, engaged in smoking and
eating oysters, rose as we approached, and helped the party
into the "dug-out," or canoe, a narrow, long, and heavy boat,
with wall sides and a flat floor. A row of one hour, the latter
part of it in darkness, took us to the verge of Mr. Trescot's
estate, Barnwell Island; and the oarsmen, as they bent to
their task, beguiled the way by singing in unison a real negro
melody, which was as unlike the works of the Ethiopian Serenaders
as anything in song could be unlike another. It was
a barbaric sort of madrigal, in which one singer beginning
was followed by the others in unison, repeating the refrain in
chorus, and full of quaint expression and melancholy:—

And then some appeal to the difficulty of passing "the Jawdam,"
constituted the whole of the song, which continued with
unabated energy through the whole of the little voyage. To
me it was a strange scene. The stream, dark as Lethe, flowing
between the silent, houseless, rugged banks, lighted up
near the landing by the fire in the woods, which reddened the
sky—the wild strain, and the unearthly adjurations to the
singers' souls, as though they were palpable, put me in mind
of the fancied voyage across the Styx.

"Here we are at last." All I could see was a dark shadow
of trees and the tops of rushes by the river side. "Mind
where you step, and follow me close." And so, groping along
through a thick shrubbery for a short space, I came out on a
garden and enclosure, in the midst of which the white outlines
of a house were visible. Lights in the drawing-room—a
lady to receive and welcome us—a snug library—tea, and
to bed: but not without more talk about the Southern Confederacy,
in which Mrs. Trescot explained how easily she
could feed an army, from her experience in feeding her negroes.