Voyage of the Paper Canoe - Chapters X-XI



CHAPTER X. 
FROM CAPE HATTERAS TO CAPE FEAR, NORTH CAROLINA. 
CAPE HATTERAS LIGHT. -- HABITS OF BIRDS. -- STORM AT HATTERAS INLET -- 
MILES OF WRECKS. -- THE YACHT JULIA SEARCHING FOR THE PAPER CANOE. -- 
CHASED BY PORPOISES. -- MARSH TACKIES. -- OCRACOKE INLET. -- A GRAVE-YARD 
BEING SWALLOWED UP BY THE SEA. -- CORE SOUND. -- THREE WEDDINGS AT HUNTING 
QUARTERS. -- MOREHEAD CITY. -- NEWBERN. -- SWANSBORO. -- A PEA-NUT 
PLANTATION. -- THE ROUTE TO CAPE FEAR. 

CAPE HATTERAS is the apex of a triangle. It is the easternmost part of the 
state of North Carolina, and it extends farther into the ocean than any 
Atlantic cape of the United States. It presents a low, broad, sandy point 
to the sea, and for several miles beyond it, in the ocean, are the 
dangerous Diamond Shoals, the dread of the mariner. 

The Gulf Stream, with its river-like current of water flowing northward 
from the Gulf of Mexico, in its oscillations from east to west frequently 
approaches to within eighteen or twenty miles of the cape, filling a large 
area of atmosphere with its warmth, and causing frequent local 
disturbances. The weather never remains long in a settled state. As most 
vessels try to make Hatteras Light, to ascertain their true position, &c., 
and because it juts out so far into the Atlantic, the locality has become 
the scene of many wrecks, and the beach, from the cape down to Hatteras 
Inlet, fourteen miles, is strewn with the fragments of vessels. 

The coast runs north and south above, and east and west south of the cape. 
The old light house had been replaced by the finest light-tower I had ever 
examined, which was completed in 1870. It is one hundred and ninety feet 
in height, and shows a white, revolving light. 

Body Island Light, though forty feet less in elevation, is frequently seen 
by the Hatteras light-keeper, while the splendid Hatteras Light had been 
seen but once by Captain Hatzel, of Body Island. One nautical mile south 
of Hatteras Light is a small beacon light-tower, which is of great service 
to the coasting-vessels that pass it in following the eighteen-feet curve 
of the cape two miles from the land inside of Diamond Shoals. 

While speaking of light-houses, it may be interesting to naturalists who 
live far inland to know that while (as they are well aware) thousands of 
birds are killed annually during their flights by striking against 
telegraphic wires, many wild-fowls are also destroyed by dashing against 
the lanterns of the light- towers during the night. While at Body Island 
Beach, Captain Hatzel remarked to me that, during the first winter after 
the new light-tower was completed, the snow-geese, which winter on the 
island, would frequently at night strike the thick glass panes of the 
chamber, and fall senseless upon the floor of the gallery. The second 
season they did not in a single instance repeat the mistake, but had 
seemingly become educated to the character of the danger. 

I have seen one lantern damaged to the amount of five hundred dollars, by 
a goose breaking a pane of glass and striking heavily upon the costly lens 
which surrounds the lamp. Light-keepers sometimes sit upon the gallery, 
and, looking along the pathway of light which shoots into the outer 
darkness over their heads, will see a few dark specks approaching them in 
this beam of radiance. These specks are birds, confused by the bright 
rays, and ready to fall an easy prey to the eager keeper, who, quickly 
levelling his double-barrelled gun, brings it to bear upon the opaque, 
moving cloud, and with the discharge of the weapon there goes whirling 
through space to the earth below his next morning's breakfast of wild-
fowl. 

I found Mr. W. R. Jennett and his first assistant light-keeper, Mr. A. W. 
Simpson, intelligent gentlemen. The assistant has devoted his time, when 
off duty, to the study of the habits of food-fishes of the sound, and has 
furnished the United States Commission of Fisheries with several papers on 
that interesting subject. 

Here also was Mr. George Onslow, of the United States Signal Service, who 
had completed his work of constructing a telegraph line from Norfolk along 
the beach southward to this point, its present terminus. With a fine 
telescope he could frequently identify vessels a few miles from the cape, 
and telegraph their position to New York. He had lately saved a vessel by 
telegraphing to Norfolk its dangerous location on Hatteras beach, where it 
had grounded. By this timely notice a wrecking-steamer had arrived and 
hauled the schooner off in good condition. 

A low range of hills commences at Cape Hatteras, in the rear of the light-
house, and extends nearly to Hatteras Inlet. This range is heavily wooded 
with live-oaks, yellow pines, yaupons, cedars, and bayonet-plants. The 
fishermen and wreckers live in rudely constructed houses, sheltered by 
this thicket, which is dense enough to protect them from the strong winds 
that blow from the ocean and the sound. 

I walked twelve miles through this pretty, green retreat, and spent Sunday 
with Mr. Homer W. Styron, who keeps a small store about two miles from the 
inlet. He is a self-taught astronomer, and used an ingeniously constructed 
telescope of his own manufacture for studying the heavens. 

I found at the post-office in his store a letter from a yachting party 
which had left Newbern, North Carolina, to capture the paper canoe and to 
force upon its captain the hospitality of the people of that city, on the 
Neuse River, one hundred miles from the cape. Judge I.E. West, the owner 
of the yacht "Julia," and his friends, had been cruising since the 
eleventh day of the month from Ocracoke Inlet to Roanoke Island in search 
of me. Judge West, in his letter, expressed a strong desire to have me 
take my Christmas dinner with his family. This generous treatment from a 
stranger was fully appreciated, and I determined to push on to Morehead 
City, from which place it would be convenient to reach Newbern by rail 
without changing my established route southward, as I would be compelled 
to do if the regular water route of the Neuse River from Pamlico Sound 
were followed. 

On this Saturday night, spent at Hatteras Inlet, there broke upon us one 
of the fiercest tempests I ever witnessed, even in the tropics. My 
pedestrian tramp down the shore had scarcely ended when it commenced in 
reality. For miles along the beach thousands of acres of land were soon 
submerged by the sea and by the torrents of water which fell from the 
clouds. While for a moment the night was dark as Erebus, again the vivid 
flash of lightning exposed to view the swaying forests and the gloomy 
sound. The sea pounded on the beach as if asking for admission to old 
Pamplico. It seemed to say, I demand a new inlet; and, as though trying to 
carry out its desire, sent great waves rolling up the shingle and over 
into the hollows among the hills, washing down the low sand dunes as if 
they also were in collusion with it to remove this frail barrier, this 
narrow strip of low land which separated the Atlantic from the wide 
interior sheet of water. 

The phosphorescent sea, covered with its tens of millions of animalcula, 
each one a miniature light-house, changed in color from inky blackness to 
silver sheen. Will the ocean take to itself this frail foothold? -- we 
queried. Will it ingulf us in its insatiable maw, as the whale did Jonah? 
There was no subsidence, no pause in the storm. It howled, bellowed, and 
screeched like a legion of demons, so that the crashing of falling trees, 
and the twisting of the sturdy live oak's toughest limbs, could hardly be 
heard in the din. Yet during this wild night my storm-hardened companion 
sat with his pretty wife by the open fireplace, as unmoved as though we 
were in the shelter of a mountain side, while he calmly discoursed of 
storms, shipwrecks, and terrible struggles for life that this lonely coast 
had witnessed, which sent thrills of horror to my heart. 

While traversing the beach during the afternoon, as wreck after wreck, the 
gravestones of departed ships, projected their timbers from the sands, I 
had made a calculation of the number of vessels which had left their hulls 
to rot on Hatteras beach since the ships of Sir Walter Raleigh had 
anchored above the cape, and it resulted in making one continuous line of 
vessels, wreck touching wreck, along the coast for many, many miles. 
Hundreds of miles of the Atlantic coast beaches would have been walled in 
by the wrecks could they have come on to the strand at one time, and all 
the dwellers along the coast, outside of the towns, would have been placed 
in independent circumstances by wrecking their cargoes. 

During this wild night, while the paper canoe was safely stowed in the 
rushes of the marsh at the cape, and its owner was enjoying the warmth of 
the young astronomer's fire at the inlet, less than twenty miles from us, 
on the dangerous edge of Ocracoke shoals, the searching party of the yacht 
Julia were in momentary expectation of going to the bottom of the sound. 
For hours the gallant craft hung to her anchors, which were heavily backed 
by all the iron ballast that could be attached to the cables. Wave after 
wave swept over her, and not a man could put his head above the hatches. 
Then, as she rolled in the sea, her cabin-windows went under, and streams 
of water were forced through the ports into the confined space which was 
occupied by the little party. For a time they were in imminent danger, for 
the vessel dragged anchor to the edge of the shoal, and with a heavy thud 
the yacht struck on the bottom. All hopes of ever returning to Newbern 
were lost, when the changing tide swung the boat off into deeper water, 
where she rode out the storm in safety. 

Before morning the wind shifted, and by nine o'clock I retraced my steps 
to the cape, and on Tuesday rowed down to Hatteras Inlet, which was 
reached a little past noon. Before attempting to cross this dangerous 
tidal gate-way of the ocean I hugged the shore close to its edge, and 
paused to make myself familiar with the sandhills of the opposite side, a 
mile away, which were to serve as the guiding-beacons in the passage. How 
often had I, lying awake at night, thought of and dreaded the crossing of 
this ill-omened inlet! It had given me much mental suffering. Now it was 
before me. Here on my right was the great sound, on my left the narrow 
beach island, and out through the portal of the open inlet surged and 
moaned under a leaden sky that old ocean which now seemed to frown at me, 
and to say: "Wait, my boy, until the inlet's waves deliver you to me, and 
I will put you among my other victims for your temerity." 

As I gazed across the current I remarked that it did not seem very rough, 
though a strong ebb was running out to the sea, and if crossed 
immediately, before the wind arose, there could be no unreasonable risk. 
My canvas deck-cover was carefully pulled close about my waist, and a 
rigid inspection of oars and row-locks was made; then, with a desire to 
reserve my strength for any great demand that might be made upon it a 
little later, I rowed with a steady stroke out into Hatteras Inlet. There 
was no help nearer than Styron's, two miles away on the upper shore, while 
the beach I was approaching on the other side was uninhabited for nearly 
sixteen miles, to the village at its southern end, near Ocracoke Inlet. 
Upon entering the swash I thought of the sharks which the Hatteras 
fishermen had told me frequently seized their oars, snapping the thin 
blades in pieces, assuring me, at the same time, that mine would prove 
very attractive, being so white and glimmering in the water, and offering 
the same glittering fascination as a silver-spoon bait does to a blue-
fish. These cheerful suggestions caused a peculiar creeping sensation to 
come over me, but I tried to quiet myself with the belief that the sharks 
had followed the blue-fish into deeper water, to escape cold weather. 

The canoe crossed the upper ebb, and entered an area where the ebb from 
the opposite side of the inlet struck the first one. While crossing the 
union of the two currents, a wind came in at the opening through the 
beach, and though not a strong one, it created a great agitation of the 
water. The dangerous experience at Watchapreague Inlet had taught me that 
when in such a sea one must pull with all his strength, and that the 
increased momentum would give greater buoyancy to the shell; for while 
under this treatment she bounced from one irregular wave to another with a 
climbing action which greatly relieved my anxiety. The danger seemed to be 
decreasing, and I stole a furtive glance over my shoulder at the low dunes 
of the beach shore which I was approaching, to see how far into the inlet 
the tide had dragged me. The white water to leeward warned me of a shoal, 
and forced me to pull hard for the sound to escape being drawn into the 
breakers. This danger was hardly passed, when suddenly the waters around 
me seethed and foamed, and the short waves parted and closed, as great 
creatures rose from the deep into the air several feet, and then fell 
heavily into the sea. My tiny shell rocked and pitched about wildly as 
these animals appeared and disappeared, leaping from the waves all around 
me, diving under the boat and reappearing on the opposite side. They 
lashed the current with their strong tails, and snorted or blowed most 
dismally. For an instant surprise and alarm took such possession of me 
that not a muscle of my arms obeyed my will, and the canoe commenced to 
drift in the driving stream towards the open sea. This confusion was only 
momentary, for as soon as I discovered that my companions were porpoises 
and only old acquaintances, I determined to avoid them as soon as 
possible. 

With a quick glance at my stern range, a sandhill on the shore of the 
inlet, and another look over my shoulder for the sand dunes of the other 
side, I exerted every muscle to reach the beach; but my frisky friends 
were in no mood to leave me, but continued their fun with increased energy 
as reinforcements came up from all directions. The faster I rowed the more 
they multiplied, ploughing the sea in erratic courses. They were from five 
to seven feet in length, and must have weighed from two hundred to four 
hundred pounds each. Though their attentions were kindly meant, their 
brusqueness on such an unsteady footing was unpardonable. I most feared 
the strong, shooting movements of their tails in the sudden dives under my 
canoe, for one sportive touch of such a caudality would have rolled me 
over, and furnished material for a tale the very anticipation of which was 
unpleasant. 

The aquatic gambols of the porpoises lasted but a few minutes after they 
had called in all their neighbors, and had chased me into three feet depth 
of water. They then spouted a nasal farewell, which sounded more catarrhal 
than guitaral, and left me for the more profitable occupation of fishing 
in the tide-way of the inlet, while I rowed into a shallow cove, out of 
the ebb, to rest, and to recover from the effects of my fright. 

As I pulled along the beach the tide receded so rapidly that the canoe was 
constantly grounding, and wading became necessary, for I could not get 
within several feet of the shore. When five miles from Hatteras Inlet I 
espied an empty grass cabin, which the fishermen used in February while 
catching shad; and, as a southerly wind was now blowing from the sea, and 
rain was falling, it offered a night's shelter for the traveller. This 
Robinson Crusoe looking structure was located upon the low land near the 
sound, while bleak, sharp-pointed, treeless and grassless sandhills, blown 
into shape by the winds, arose in the background, and cut off a view of 
the ocean, which, judging from the low, melancholy moaning coming over the 
dunes, was in a sad mood. 

The canoe was hauled into the bushes and tied securely for fear a 
deceptive tide might bear it away. The provisions, blankets, &c., were 
moved into the grass hut, which needed repairing. The holes in the south 
wall were soon thatched, and a bed easily prepared from the rushes of the 
marsh. It mattered not that they were wet, for a piece of painted canvas 
was spread over them, and the inviting couch finished. 

As fresh water can usually be obtained on all these low beaches by digging 
two or three feet into the sand, I looked for a large clam-shell, and my 
search being rewarded, I was soon engaged in digging a well near the 
cabin. 

Upon looking up from my work a curious sight met my gaze. In some 
mysterious way every sharp-pointed sand-hill had been covered by a black 
object, which swayed about and nodded up and down in a strange manner. As 
I watched the development of this startling phenomenon, the nodding, black 
objects grew in size until the head, body, and four legs of a horse were 
clearly cut against the sky. A little later every crest was surmounted by 
the comical figure of a marsh-tacky. Then a few sheep came out of the 
hollows among the hills and browsed on the coarse grass near the cabin, as 
though they felt the loneliness of their situation so far removed from 
mankind. With the marsh-ponies, the sheep, the wild-fowls of the sound, 
and the sighing sea for companions, the night passed away. 

The bright moonlight roused me at five o'clock in the morning, and I 
pushed off again in shoal water on an ebb-tide, experiencing much 
difficulty in dragging the canoe over shallow places until deep water was 
entered, when the row to Ocracoke became an agreeable one. The landing-
place at Ocracoke, not far from the lighthouse, was reached at noon, and 
the people gathered to see the paper boat, having been notified of my 
proximity by fishermen. 

The women here can pull a pretty good stroke, and frequently assist their 
husbands in the fisheries. These old dames ridiculed the idea of having a 
boat so small and light as the canoe. One old lady laid aside her pipe and 
snuff-paddle (snuff-rubbing is a time-honored institution in the south), 
and roughly grasping the bow of the craft, lifted it high in the air, 
then, glancing at the fine model, she lowered it slowly to the ground, 
exclaiming, "I reckon I wouldn't risk my life acrossing a creek in her." 

These people told me that the yacht Julia had stopped there to make 
inquiries for me, and had departed for Newbern. 

It was more than a mile from the landing to Ocracoke Inlet, and a mile and 
three quarters across it to the beach. A straight course from the landing 
to the village of Portsmouth, on the lower side of the inlet, was a 
distance of five miles, and not one of the hardy watermen, who thumped the 
sides of my boat with their hard fists to ascertain its strength, believed 
that I could cross the sound to the other village without rolling over. 
One kind-hearted oysterman offered to carry myself and boat to Portsmouth, 
but as the day was calm, I rowed away on the five-mile stretch amid 
doleful prognostications, such as: "That feller will make a coffin for 
hisself out of that yere gimcrack of an egg-shell. It's all a man's life 
is wurth to go in her," &c. 

While approaching the low Portsmouth shore of the sound, flocks of Canada 
geese flew within pistol-shot of my head. A man in a dug-out canoe told me 
that the gunners of the village had reared from the egg a flock of wild 
geese which now aggregated some seven or eight hundred birds, and that 
these now flying about were used to decoy their wild relatives. 

Near the beach a sandy hill had been the place of sepulture for the 
inhabitants of other generations, but for years past the tidal current had 
been cutting the shore away until coffin after coffin with its contents 
had been washed into the sound. Captain Isaac S. Jennings, of Ocean 
County, New Jersey, had described this spot to me as follows: 

"I landed at Portsmouth and examined this curious burial-ground. Here by 
the water were the remains of the fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters 
of the people of the village so near at hand; yet these dismal relics of 
their ancestors were allowed to be stolen away piecemeal by the 
encroaching ocean. While I gazed sadly upon the strata of coffins 
protruding from the banks, shining objects like jewels seemed to be 
sparkling from between the cracks of their fractured sides; and as I tore 
away the rotten wood, rows of toads were discovered sitting in solemn 
council, their bright eyes peering from among the debris of bones and 
decomposed substances." 

Portsmouth Island is nearly eight miles long. Whalebone Inlet is at its 
lower end, but is too shallow to be of any service to commerce. Hatteras 
and Ocracoke inlets admit sea-going vessels. It is thirty-eight miles from 
Whalebone Inlet to Cape Lookout, which projects like a wedge into the sea 
nearly three miles from the mainland, and there is not another passage 
through the narrow beach in all that distance that is of any use to the 
mariner. Following the trend of the coast for eleven miles from the point 
of Cape Lookout, there is an inlet, but, from the character of its channel 
and its shallowness, it is not of much value. 

Leaving Portsmouth, the canoe entered Core Sound, which grew narrower as 
the shoals inside of Whalebone Inlet were crossed, partly by rowing and 
partly by wading on the sand-flats. As night came on, a barren stretch of 
beach on my left hand was followed until I espied the only house within a 
distance of sixteen miles along the sea. It was occupied by a coasting 
skipper, whose fine little schooner was anchored a long distance from the 
land on account of the shoalness of the water. Dreary sand-hills protected 
the cottage from the bleak winds of the ocean. 

While yet a long distance from the skipper's home, a black object could be 
seen crawling up the sides of a mound of white sand, and after it reached 
the apex it remained in one position, while I rowed, and waded, and pulled 
my canoe towards the shore. When the goal was reached, and the boat was 
landed high up among the scrub growth, I shouldered my blankets and 
charts, and plodded through the soft soil towards the dark object, which I 
now recognized to be a man on a lookout post. He did not move from his 
position until I reached the hillock, when he suddenly slid down the bank 
and landed at my feet, with a cheery -- 

"Well, now, I thought it was you. Sez I to myself, That's him, sure, when 
I seed you four miles away. Fust thinks I, It's only a log, or a piece of 
wrak-stuff afloating. Pretty soon up comes your head and shoulders into 
sight; then sez I, It's a man, sure, but where is his boat? for you see, I 
couldn't see your boat, it was so low down in the water. Then I reckoned 
it was a man afloating on a log, but arter a while the boat loomed up too, 
and I says, I'll be dog-goned if that isn't him. I went up to Newbern, 
some time ago, in the schooner, and the people there said there was a man 
coming down the coast a-rowing a paper boat on a bet. The boat weighed 
only fifty-eight pounds, and the man had a heft of only eighty pounds. 
When pa and me went up to the city agin, the folks said the man was close 
on to us, and this time they said the man and his boat together weighed 
only eighty pounds. Now I should think you weighed more than that 
yourself, letting alone the boat." 

Having assured the young man that I was indeed myself, and that the 
Newbern people had played upon his credulity, we walked on to the house, 
where the family of Captain James Mason kindly welcomed me to a glowing 
wood-fire and hearty supper. Though I had never heard of their existence 
till I entered Core Sound, the kindness of these people was like that of 
old friends. 

Half a mile below Captain Mason's home, a short time before my visit, a 
new breach had been made by the ocean through the beach. About twenty 
years before a similar breach had occurred in the same locality, and was 
known during its short life as "Pillintary Inlet." The next day I crossed 
the sound, which is here four miles in width, and coasted along to the 
oystermen's village of Hunting Quarters, on the mainland. The houses were 
very small, but the hearts of the poor folks were very large. They came to 
the water's edge and carried the canoe into the only store in the 
neighborhood. Its proprietor, Mr. William H. Stewart, insisted upon my 
sharing his bachelor's quarters in an unfinished room of the storehouse. 
My young host was hardly out of his teens. In his boyish way he kindly 
remarked: 

"I am here all alone. Father told me, before he died, never to let a 
stranger pass my door but to make him share my lodgings, humble though 
they are; and now, any way, you're just in time for the fun, for we are to 
have three weddings to-night, and all the boys and girls of the 
neighborhood will be at Hunting Quarters." 

I entered a mild protest against joining in the festivities, on the plea 
of not having received an invitation; at which the handsome youth laughed 
heartily. 

"Invitation!" he exclaimed; "why, no one ever gives out invitations in 
Hunting Quarters. When there is to be a 'jolliflcation' of any sort, 
everybody goes to the house without being asked. You see we are all 
neighbors here. Up at Newbern and at Beaufort, and other great cities, 
people have their ways, but here all are friends." 

So we went to the little house in the piny forest, where two hearts were 
to be made one. The only room on the first floor was crowded with people. 
The minister had not arrived, and the crowd was gazing at the young groom 
and his pretty bride-elect as they sat in two chairs in the middle of the 
company, with their arms around each other, never speaking a word to any 
one. The heavy weight of people began to settle the floor, and as two 
joists gave way I struggled to escape through an open window, thinking we 
would be precipitated into the cellar below. But the good-natured company 
took no notice of the snapping timbers, only ejaculating, "She'll soon 
touch bottom;" and to my inquiries about the inconvenience of being 
pitched through to the cellar, a rustic youth, with great merriment 
depicted upon his countenance, replied: 

"Sullers, captain, why, there ain't a suller to a buildin' within thirty 
miles of the Quarters. We never uses sullers hereabouts." 

By my side was a young fisherman, who had got home from a cruise, and was 
overflowing with affection towards every girl present. "O, gals," he would 
cry, "you don't know how nice I feels to get back to you once more!" 
Throwing his arms around a bright-eyed girl, who vainly tried to escape 
him, he said, "O, weary mariner, here is thy rest! No more shall he wander 
from thee." 

This sentimental strain was interrupted by an old lady, who reached her 
arm over my shoulder to administer a rebuke. "Sam, ye're a fool!" she 
cried; "ye're beside yourself to-night, and afore this paper-canoe 
captain, too. Ef I was a gal I'd drap yere society, wid yere familiar ways 
right in company." 

The blow and the admonition fell harmlessly upon the head and the heart of 
the sailor, who replied, "Aunty, I knows my advantages in Hunting 
Quarters -- women is plenty, and men is few." 

The crowd roared with laughter at this truism, but were quieted by the 
shout of a boy that the preacher was a-coming; whereupon the reverend 
gentleman elbowed his way through the guests to the quiet couple, and 
requested them to stand up. A few hurried words by the clergyman, a few 
bashful replies from the young people, and the two were made one. The 
crowd rushed outside of the house, where a general scramble took place 
among the boys for their girls. Then a procession was formed, headed by 
the clergyman, which marched along the sandy road to another house in the 
woods, where the second marriage was to be celebrated. 

It was amusing to see the young men dash away from the procession, to run 
to the village store for candy at twenty-five cents per pound, containing 
as much terra alba (white clay) as sugar. With well-filled pockets they 
would run back to the procession and fill the girls' aprons with the 
sweets, soon repeating the process, and showering upon the fair ones 
cakes, raisins, nuts, and oranges. The only young man who seemed to find 
no favor in any woman's eyes invested more capital in sweetmeats than the 
others; and though every girl in the procession gave him a sharp word or a 
kick as he passed, yet none refused his candies as he tossed them at the 
maidens, or stuffed them into the pockets of their dresses. 

The second ceremony was performed in about three minutes, and the preacher 
feeling faint from his long ride through the woods, declared he must have 
some supper. So, while he was being served, the girls chatted together, 
the old ladies helped each other to snuff with little wooden paddles, 
which were left protruding from one corner of their mouths after they had 
taken "a dip," as they called it. The boys, after learning that the 
preacher had postponed the third marriage for an hour, with a wild shout 
scampered off to Stewart's store for more candies. I took advantage of the 
interim to inquire how it was that the young ladies and gentlemen were 
upon such terms of pleasant intimacy. 

"Well, captain," replied the person interrogated, "you sees we is all 
growed up together, and brotherly love and sisterly affection is our 
teaching. The brethren love the sisteren; and they say that love begets 
love, so the sisteren loves the brethren. It's parfecly nateral. That's 
the hull story, captain. How is it up your way?" 

At last the preacher declared himself satisfied with all he had eaten, and 
that enough was as good as a feast; so the young people fell into line, 
and we trudged to the third house, where, with the same dispatch, the 
third couple were united. Then the fiddler scraped the strings of his 
instrument, and a double-shuffle dance commenced. The girls stamped and 
moved their feet about in the same manner as the men. Soon four or five of 
the young ladies left the dancing-party, and seated themselves in a 
corner, pouting discontentedly. My companion explained to me that the 
deserters were a little stuck-up, having made two or three visits on a 
schooner to the city (Newbern), where they had other ways of dancing, and 
where the folks didn't think it pretty for a girl to strike her heels upon 
the floor, &c. 

How long they danced I know not, for the prospect of a long row on the 
morrow sent me to rest in the storehouse, from which I was called by a 
kind old couple sending for me to take tea with them at half an hour after 
midnight. Unwilling to wound the sensitive feelings of these hospitable 
people, I answered the summons in propia persona, and found it was the 
mother of bride No. 1, to whom I was indebted for the invitation. A well-
filled table took up the space in the centre of the room, where a few 
hours before the timbers creaked beneath the weight of the curious crowd; 
and there, sitting on one side in the same affectionate manner I have 
described, were the bride and groom, apparently unmoved by the change of 
scene, while the bride's mother rocked in her chair, moaning, "O John, if 
you'd taken the other gal, I might have stood it, but this yere one has 
been my comfort." 

At dawn the canoe was put into Core Sound, and I followed the western 
shore, cheered by the bright sun of our Saviour's natal day. At noon the 
mouth of the thoroughfare between Harker's Island and the mainland was 
unintentionally passed, and I rowed along by the side of the island next 
Fort Macon, which is inside of the angle made by Cape Lookout. 

Finding it impossible to reach Newbern via Morehead City that day, the 
canoe was beached upon the end of Harker's Island, where I breakfasted at 
the fashionable hour of two P. M., with men, women, and children around 
me. My mode of cooking the condensed food and liquid beef; so quickly 
prepared for the palate, and the remarkable boat of paper, all filled the 
islanders with wonder. They were at first a little shy, looking upon the 
apparition -- which seemed in some wonderful way to have dropped upon 
their beach -- with the light of curiosity in their eyes. 

Then, as I explained the many uses to which paper was put, even to the 
paying off of great national debts, my audience became very friendly, and 
offered to get me up a Christmas dinner in their cabins among the groves 
of trees near the strand, if I would tarry with them until night. But time 
was precious; so, with thanks on my part for their kind offers, we parted, 
they helping me launch my little boat, and waving a cheerful adieu as I 
headed the canoe for Beaufort, which was quietly passed in the middle of 
the afternoon. 

Three miles further on, the railroad pier of Morehead City, in Bogue 
Sound, was reached, and a crowd of people carried the canoe into the 
hotel. A telegram was soon received from the superintendent of the 
railroad at Newbern, inviting me to a free ride to the city in the first 
train of the following morning. 

The reader who has followed me since I left the chilly regions of the St. 
Lawrence must not have his patience taxed by too much detail, lest he 
should weary of my story and desert my company. Were it not for this fear, 
it would give me pleasure to tell how a week was passed in Newbern; how 
the people came even from interior towns to see the paper canoe; how some, 
doubting my veracity, slyly stuck the blades of their pocket-knives 
through the thin sides of the canoe, forgetting that it had yet to 
traverse many dangerous inlets, and that its owner preferred a tight, dry 
boat to one punctured by knives. Even old men became enthusiastic, and 
when I was absent from my little craft, an uncontrollable ambition seized 
them, and they got into the frail shell as it rested upon the floor of a 
hall, and threatened its destruction. It seemed impossible to make one 
gentleman of Newbern understand that when the boat was in the water she 
was resting upon all her bearings, but when out of water only upon a thin 
strip of wood. 

"By George," said this stout gentleman in a whisper to a friend, "I told 
my wife I would get into that boat if I smashed it." 

"And what did the lady say, old fellow?" asked the friend. "O," he 
replied, '"she said, 'Now don't make a fool of yourself, Fatness, or your 
ambition may get you into the papers,'" and the speaker fairly shook with 
laughter. 

While at Newbern, Judge West and his brother organized a grand hunt, and 
the railroad company sent us down the road eighteen miles to a wild 
district, where deer, coons, and wild-fowl were plentiful, and where we 
hunted all night for coons and ducks, and all day for deer. Under these 
genial influences the practical study of geography for the first time 
seemed dull, and I became aware that, under the efforts of the citizens of 
Newbern to remind me of the charms of civilized society, I was, as a 
travelling geographer, fast becoming demoralized. 

Could I, after the many pleasures I was daily enjoying, settle down to a 
steady pull and one meal a day with a lunch of dry crackers; or sleep on 
the floor of fishermen's cabins, with fleas and other little annoyances 
attendant thereon? Having realized my position, I tore myself away from my 
many new friends and retraced my steps to Morehead City, leaving it on 
Tuesday, January 5th, and rowing down the little sound called Bogue 
towards Cape Fear. 

As night came on I discovered on the shore a grass cabin, which was on the 
plantation of Dr. Emmett, and had been left tenantless by some fisherman. 
This served for shelter during the night though the struggles and 
squealings of a drove of hogs attempting to enter through the rickety door 
did not contribute much to my repose. 

The watercourses now became more intricate, growing narrower as I rowed 
southward. The open waters of the sound were left behind, and I entered a 
labyrinth of creeks and small sheets of water, which form a network in the 
marshes between the sandy beach-islands and the mainland all the way to 
Cape Fear River. The Core Sound sheet of the United States Coast Survey 
ended at Cape Lookout, there being no charts of the route to Masonboro. I 
was therefore now travelling upon local knowledge, which proves usually a 
very uncertain guide. 

In a cold rain the canoe reached the little village of Swansboro, where 
the chief personage of the place of two hundred inhabitants, Mr. McLain, 
removed me from my temporary camping-place in an old house near the 
turpentine distilleries into his own comfortable quarters. 

There are twenty mullet fisheries within ten miles of Swansboro, which 
employ from fifteen to eighteen men each. The pickled and dried roe of 
this fish is shipped to Wilmington and to Cincinnati. Wild-fowls abound, 
and the shooting is excellent. The fishermen say flocks of ducks seven 
miles in length have been seen on the waters of Bogue Sound. Canvas-backs 
are called "raft-ducks" here, and they sell from twelve to twenty cents 
each. Wild geese bring forty cents, and brant thirty. 

The marsh-ponies feed upon the beaches, in a half wild state, with the 
deer and cattle, cross the marshes and swim the streams from the mainland 
to the beaches in the spring, and graze there until winter, when they 
collect in little herds, and instinctively return to the piny woods of the 
uplands. Messrs. Weeks and Taylor had shot, while on a four-days' hunt up 
the White Oak River, twenty deer. Captain H. D. Heady, of Swansboro, 
informed me that the ducks and geese he killed in one winter supplied him 
with one hundred pounds of selected feathers. Captain Heady's description 
of Bogue Inlet was not encouraging for the future prosperity of this 
coast, and the same may be said of all the inlets between it and Cape 
Fear. 

Rainy weather kept me within doors until Friday, the 7th of January, when 
I rowed down White Oak River to Bogue Inlet, and turned into the beach 
thoroughfare, which led me three miles and a half to Bear Inlet. My course 
now lay through creeks among the marshes to the Stand-Back, near the 
mainland, where the tides between the two inlets head. Across this shoal 
spot I traversed tortuous watercourses with mud flats, from which beds of 
sharp raccoon oysters projected and scraped the keel of my boat. 

The sea was now approached from the mainland to Brown's Inlet, where the 
tide ran like a mill-race, swinging my canoe in great circles as I crossed 
it to the lower side. Here I took the widest thoroughfare, and left the 
beach only to retrace my steps to follow one nearer the strand, which 
conducted me to the end of the natural system of watercourses, where I 
found a ditch, dug seventy years before, which connected the last system 
of waters with another series of creeks that emptied their waters into New 
River Inlet. 

Emerging from the marshes, my course led me away from New River Inlet, 
across open sheets of water to the mainland, where Dr. Ward's cotton 
plantation occupied a large and cultivated area in the wilderness. It was 
nearly two miles from his estate down to the inlet. The intervening flats 
among the island marshes of New River were covered with natural beds of 
oysters, upon which the canoe scraped as I crossed to the narrow entrance 
of Stump Sound. Upon rounding a point of land I found, snugly ensconced in 
a grove, the cot of an oysterman, Captain Risley Lewis, who, after 
informing me that his was the last habitation to be found in that 
vicinity, pressed me to be his guest. 

The next day proved one of trial to patience and muscle. The narrow 
watercourses, which like a spider's web penetrate the marshes with 
numerous small sheets of water, made travelling a most difficult task. At 
times I was lost, again my canoe was lodged upon oyster-beds in the 
shallow ponds of water, the mud bottoms of which would not hear my weight 
if I attempted to get overboard to lighten the little craft. 

Alligator Lake, two miles in width, was crossed without seeing an 
alligator. Saurians are first met with, as the traveller proceeds south, 
in the vicinity of Alligator Creek and the Neuse River, in the latitude of 
Pamplico Sound. During the cold weather they hide themselves in the soft, 
muddy bottoms of creeks and lagoons. All the negroes, and many of the 
white people of the south, assert, that when captured in his winter bed, 
this huge reptile's stomach contains the hard knot of a pine-tree; but for 
what purpose he swallows it they are at a loss to explain. 

In twelve miles of tortuous windings there appeared but one sign of human 
life -- a little cabin on a ridge of upland among the fringe of marshes 
that bordered on Alligator Lake. It was cheering to a lonely canoeist to 
see this house, and the clearing around it with the season's crop of corn 
in stacks dotting the field. All this region is called Stump Sound; but 
that sheet of water is a well-defined, narrow, lake-like watercourse, 
which was entered not long after I debouched from Alligator Lake. Stump 
Inlet having closed up eighteen months before my visit, the sound and its 
tributaries received tidal water from New Topsail Inlet. 

It was a cold and rainy evening when I sought shelter in an old boat-
house, at a landing on Topsail Sound, soon after leaving Stump Sound. 
While preparing for the night's camp, the son of the proprietor of the 
plantation discovered the, to him, unheard-of spectacle of a paper boat 
upon the gravelly strand. Filled with curiosity and delight, he dragged 
me, paddle in hand, through an avenue of trees to a hill upon which a 
large house was located. This was the boy's home. Leaving me on the broad 
steps of the veranda, he rushed into the hall, shouting to the family, 
"Here's a sailor who has come from the north in a PAPER boat." 

This piece of intelligence roused the good people to merriment. 
"Impossible!" "A boat made of paper!" "Nonsense!" 

The boy, however, would not be put down. "But it is made of paper, I tell 
you; for I pinched it and stuck my nails into it," he replied earnestly. 

"You are crazy, my boy," some one responded; "a paper boat never could go 
through these sounds, the coon oysters would cut it in pieces. Now tell 
us, is the sailor made of paper, like his boat?" 

"Indeed, mother, what I tell you is true; and, O, I forgot! here's the 
sailor on the steps, where I left him." In an instant the whole family 
were out upon the veranda. Seeing my embarrassment, they tried, like well-
bred people, to check their merriment, while I explained to them the way 
in which the boy had captured me, and proposed at once returning to my 
camp. To this, however, they would not listen; and the charming wife of 
the planter extended her hand to me, as she said, "No, sir, you will not 
go back to the wet landing to camp. This is our home, and though marauding 
armies during the late war have taken from us our wealth, you must share 
with us the little we have left." This lady with her two daughters, who 
inherited her beauty and grace of manner, did all in their power to make 
me comfortable. 

Sunday was the coldest day of the season; but the family, whose 
hospitality I enjoyed, rode seven miles through the woods, some on 
horseback, some in the carriage, to the little church in a heavy pine 
forest. The next day proved stormy, and the driving sleet froze upon the 
trees and bound their limbs and boughs together with an icy veneer. My 
host, Mr. McMillan, kindly urged me to tarry. During my stay with him I 
ascertained that he devoted his attention to raising ground-peas, or 
peanuts. Along the coast of this part of North Carolina this nut is the 
chief product, and is raised in immense quantities. The latter state alone 
raises annually over one hundred thousand bushels; while Virginia and 
Tennessee produce, some years, a crop of seven hundred thousand bushels. 

Wednesday opened with partially clearing weather, and the icy covering of 
the trees yielded to the softening influences of a southern wind. The 
family went to the landing to see me off, and the kind ladies stowed many 
delicacies, made with their own hands, in the bow of the boat. After 
rowing a half-mile, I took a lingering look at the shore, where those who 
four days ago were strangers, now waved an adieu as friends. They had been 
stript of their wealth, though the kind old planter had never raised his 
hand against the government of his fathers. This family, like thousands of 
people in the south, had suffered for the rash deeds of others. While the 
political views of this gentleman differed from those of the stranger from 
Massachusetts, it formed no barrier to their social intercourse, and did 
not make him forget to exhibit the warm feelings of hospitality which so 
largely influence the Southerner. I went to him, as a traveller in search 
of truth, upon an honest errand. Under such circumstances a Northerner 
does not require a letter of introduction to nine out of ten of the 
citizens of the fifteen ex-slave states, which cover an area of eight 
hundred and eighty thousand square miles, and where fourteen millions of 
people desire to be permitted to enjoy the same privileges as the 
Constitution of the United States guarantees to all the states north of 
Mason and Dixon's line. 

From Sloop Landing, on my new friends' plantation, to New Topsail Inlet I 
had a brisk row of five miles. Vessels drawing eight feet of water can 
reach this landing from the open sea upon a full tide. The sea was rolling 
in at this ocean door as my canoe crossed it to the next marsh 
thoroughfare, which connected it with Old Topsail Inlet, where the same 
monotonous surroundings of sand-hills and marshes are to be found. 

The next tidal opening was Rich Inlet, which had a strong ebb running 
through it to the sea. From it I threaded the thoroughfares up to the 
mainland, reaching at dusk the "Emma Nickson Plantation." The creeks were 
growing more shallow, and near the bulkhead, or middleground, where tides 
from two inlets met, there was so little water and so many oyster reefs, 
that, without a chart, the route grew more and more perplexing in 
character. It was a distance of thirty miles to Cape Fear, and twenty 
miles to New Inlet, which was one of the mouths of Cape Fear River. From 
the plantation to New Inlet, the shallow interior sheets of water with 
their marshes were called Middle, Masonboro, and Myrtle sounds. The canoe 
could have traversed these waters to the end of Myrtle Sound, which is 
separated from Cape Fear River by a strip of land only one mile and a half 
wide, across which a portage can be made to the river. Barren and 
Masonboro are the only inlets which supply the three little sounds above 
mentioned with water, after Rich Inlet is passed. 

The coast from Cape Fear southward eighty miles, to Georgetown, South 
Carolina, has several small inlets through the beach, but there are no 
interior waters parallel with the coast in all that distance, which can be 
of any service to the canoeist for a coast route. It therefore became 
necessary for me to follow the next watercourse that could be utilized for 
reaching Winyah Bay, which is the first entrance to the system of 
continuous watercourses south of Cape Fear. 

The trees of the Nickson Plantation hid the house of the proprietor from 
view; but upon beaching my canoe, a drove of hogs greeted me with friendly 
grunts, as if the hospitality of their master infected the drove; and, as 
it grew dark, they trotted across the field, conducting me up to the very 
doors of the planter's home, where Captain Mosely, late of the Confederate 
army, gave me a soldier's hearty welcome. 

"The war is over," he said, "and any northern gentleman is welcome to what 
we have left." Until midnight, this keen-eyed, intelligent officer 
entertained me with a flow of anecdotes of the war times, his hair-breadth 
escapes, &c.; the conversation being only interrupted when he paused to 
pile wood upon the fire, the chimney-place meantime glowing like a 
furnace. He told me that Captain Maffitt, of the late Confederate navy, 
lived at Masonboro, on the sound; and that had I called upon him, he could 
have furnished, as an old officer of the Coast Survey, much valuable 
geographical information. This pleasant conversation was at last 
interrupted by the wife of my host, who warned us in her courteous way of 
the lateness of the hour. With a good-night to my host, and a sad farewell 
to the sea, I prepared myself for the morrow's journey. 



CHAPTER XI. 
FROM CAPE FEAR TO CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA. 
A PORTAGE TO LAKE WACCAMAW. -- THE SUBMERGED SWAMPS. -- NIGHT AT A 
TURPENTINE DISTILLER -- A DISMAL WILDERNESS. -- OWLS AND MISTLETOE. -- 
CRACKERS AND NEGROES. -- ACROSS THE SOUTH CAROLINA LINE. -- A CRACKER'S 
IDEA OF HOSPITALITY. -- POT BLUFF. -- PEEDEE RIVER. -- GEORGETOWN. -- 
WINYAH BAY. -- THE RICE PLANTATIONS OF THE SANTEE RIVERS. -- A NIGHT WITH 
THE SANTEE NEGROES. -- ARRIVAL AT CHARLESTON. 

To reach my next point of embarkation a portage was necessary. Wilmington 
was twelve miles distant, and I reached the railroad station of that city 
with my canoe packed in a bed of corn-husks, on a one-horse dray, in time 
to take the evening train to Flemington, on Lake Waccamaw. The polite 
general freight-agent, Mr. A. Pope, allowed my canoe to be transported in 
the passenger baggage-car, where, as it had no covering, I was obliged to 
steady it during the ride of thirty-two miles, to protect it from the 
friction caused by the motion of the train. 

Mr. Pope quietly telegraphed to the few families at the lake, "Take care 
of the paper canoe;" so when my destination was reached, kind voices 
greeted me through the darkness and offered me the hospitalities of Mrs. 
Brothers' home-like inn at the Flemington Station. After Mr. Carroll had 
conveyed the boat to his storehouse, we all sat down to tea as sociably as 
though we were old friends. 

On the morrow we carried the Maria Theresa on our shoulders to the little 
lake, out of which the long and crooked river with its dark cypress waters 
flowed to the sea. A son of Mr. Short, a landed proprietor who holds some 
sixty thousand acres of the swamp lands of the Waccamaw, escorted me in 
his yacht, with a party of ladies and gentlemen, five miles across the 
lake to my point of departure. It was now noon, and our little party 
picnicked under the lofty trees which rise from the low shores of Lake 
Waccamaw. 

A little later we said our adieu, and the paper canoe shot into the 
whirling current which rushes out of the lake through a narrow aperture 
into a great and dismal swamp. Before leaving the party, Mr. Carroll had 
handed me a letter addressed to Mr. Hall, who was in charge of a 
turpentine distillery on my route. "It is twenty miles by the river to my 
friend Hall's," he said, "but in a straight line the place is just four 
miles from here." Such is the character of the Waccamaw, this most crooked 
of rivers. 

I had never been on so rapid and continuous a current. As it whirled me 
along the narrow watercourse I was compelled to abandon my oars and use 
the paddle in order to have my face to the bow, as the abrupt turns of the 
stream seemed to wall me in on every side. Down the tortuous, black, 
rolling current went the paper canoe, with a giant forest covering the 
great swamp and screening me from the light of day. The swamps were 
submerged, and as the water poured out of the thickets into the river it 
would shoot across the land from one bend to another, presenting in places 
the mystifying spectacle of water running up stream, but not up an 
inclined plain. Festoons of gray Spanish moss hung from the weird limbs of 
monster trees, giving a funeral aspect to the gloomy forest, while the 
owls hooted as though it were night. The creamy, wax-like berries of the 
mistletoe gave a Druidical aspect to the woods, for this parasite grew 
upon the branches of many trees. 

One spot only of firm land rose from the water in sixteen miles of 
paddling from the lake, and passing it, I went flying on with the 
turbulent stream four miles further, to where rafts of logs blocked the 
river, and the sandy banks, covered with the upland forest of pines, 
encroached upon the lowlands. This was Old Dock, with its turpentine 
distillery smoking and sending out resinous vapors. 

Young Mr. Hall read my letter and invited me to his temporary home, which, 
though roughly built of unplaned boards, possessed two comfortable rooms, 
and a large fireplace, in which light-wood, the terebinthine heart of the 
pine-tree, was cheerfully blazing. 

I had made the twenty miles in three hours, but the credit of this quick 
time must be given to the rapid current. My host did not seem well pleased 
with the solitude imposed upon him. His employers had sent him from 
Wilmington, to hold and protect "their turpentine farm," which was a 
wilderness of trees covering four thousand acres, and was valued, with its 
distillery, at five thousand dollars. An old negro, who attended the still 
and cooked the meals, was his only companion. 

We had finished our frugal repast, when a man, shouting in the darkness, 
approached the house on horseback. This individual, though very tipsy, 
represented Law and Order in that district, as I was informed when "Jim 
Gore," a justice of the peace, saluted me in a boisterous manner. Seating 
himself by the fire, he earnestly inquired for the bottle. His stomach, he 
said, was as dry as a lime-kiln, and, though water answers to slake lime, 
he demanded something stronger to slake the fire that burned within him. 
He was very suspicious of me when Hall told him of my canoe journey. After 
eying me from head to toe in as steady a manner as he was capable of, he 
broke forth with: "Now, stranger, this won't do. What are ye a-travel'ing 
in this sort of way for, in a paper dug-out?" 

I pleaded a strong desire to study geography, but the wise fellow replied: 

"Geography! geography! Why, the fellers who rite geography never travel; 
they stay at home and spin their yarns 'bout things they never sees." 
Then, glancing at his poor butternut coat and pantaloons, he felt my blue 
woollen suit, and continued, in a slow, husky voice: "Stranger, them 
clothes cost something; they be store-clothes. That paper dug-out cost 
money, I tell ye; and it costs something to travel the hull length of the 
land. No, stranger; if ye be not on a bet, then somebody's a-paying ye 
well for it." 

For an hour I entertained this roughest of law dignitaries with an account 
of my long row, its trials and its pleasures. He became interested in the 
story, and finally related to me his own aspirations, and the difficulties 
attending his efforts to make the piny-woods people respect the laws and 
good government. He then described the river route through the swamps to 
the sea, and, putting his arm around me in the most affectionate manner, 
he mournfully said: 

"O stranger, my heart is with ye; but O, how ye will have to take it when 
ye go past those awful wretches to-morrow; how they will give it to ye! 
They most knocked me off my raft, last time I went to Georgetown. Beware 
of them; I warn ye in time. Dern the hussies." 

Squire Jim so emphasized the danger that I became somewhat alarmed, for, 
more than anything else, I dreaded an outbreak with rough women. And then, 
too, my new acquaintance informed me that there were four or five of these 
wretches, of the worst kind, located several miles down the stream. As I 
was about to inquire into the habits of these ugly old crones, Mr. Hall, 
wishing to give Squire James a hint, remarked that Mr. B_____ might at any 
time retire to the next room, where half the bed was at his disposal. 

"Half the bed!" roared the squire; "here are three of us, and where's my 
half?" 

"Why, squire," hesitatingly responded my host, Mr. B_____ is my guest, and 
having but one bed, he must have half of it -- no less." 

"Then what's to become of me?" thundered his Majesty of the law. 

Having been informed that a shake-down would have been ready had he given 
notice of his visit, and that at some future time, when not so crowded, he 
could be entertained like a gentleman, he drew himself up, wrapped in the 
mantle of dignity, and replied: 

"None of that soft talk, my friend. This man is a traveller; let him take 
travellers' luck -- three in a bed to-night. I'm bound to sleep with him 
to-night. Hall, where's the bottle?" 

I now retired to the back room, and, without undressing, planted myself on 
the side of the bed next the wall. Sleep was, however, an unattainable 
luxury, with the squire's voice in the next room, as he told how the 
country was going to the dogs, because "niggers and white folks wouldn't 
respect the laws. It took half a man's time to larn it to 'em, and much 
thanks he ever got by setting everybody to rights." He wound up by 
lecturing Hall for being so temperate, his diligent search in all 
directions for bottles or jugs being rewarded by finding them filled with 
unsatisfactory emptiness. 

He then tumbled into the centre of the bed, crowding me close against the 
wall. Poor Hall, having the outside left to him, spent the night in 
exercising his brain and muscles in vain attempts to keep in his bed; for 
when his Majesty of the law put his arms akimbo, the traveller went to the 
wall, and the host to the floor. Thus passed my first night in the great 
swamps of the Waccamaw River. 

The negro cook gave us an early breakfast of bacon, sweet potatoes, and 
corn bread. The squire again looked round for the bottle, and again found 
nothing but emptiness. He helped me to carry my canoe along the unsteady 
footing of the dark swamp to the lower side of the raft of logs, and 
warmly pressed my hand as he whispered: "My dear B____, I shall think of 
you until you get past those dreadful 'wretches.' Keep an eye on your 
little boat, or they'll devil you." 

Propelled by my double paddle, the canoe seemed to fly through the great 
forest that rose with its tall trunks and weird, moss-draped arms, out of 
the water. The owls were still hooting. Indeed, the dolorous voice of this 
bird of darkness sounded through the heavy woods at intervals throughout 
the day. I seemed to have left the real world behind me, and to have 
entered upon a landless region of sky, trees, and water. 

"Beware of the cut-offs," said Hall, before I left. Only the Crackers and 
shingle-makers know them. If followed, they would save you many a mile, 
but every opening through the swamp is not a cut-off. Keep to the main 
stream, though it be more crooked and longer. If you take to the cut-offs, 
you may get into passages that will lead you off into the swamps and into 
interior bayous, from which you will never emerge. Men have starved to 
death in such places." 

So I followed the winding stream, which turned back upon itself, running 
north and south, and east and west, as if trying to box the compass by 
following the sun in its revolution. After paddling down one bend, I could 
toss a stick through the trees into the stream where the canoe had cleaved 
its waters a quarter of a mile behind me. 

The thought of what I should do in this landless region if my frail shell, 
in its rapid flight to the sea, happened to be pierced by a snag, was, to 
say the least, not a comforting one. On what could I stand to repair it? 
To climb a tree seemed, in such a case, the only resource; and then what 
anxious waiting there would be for some cypress-shingle maker, in his dug-
out canoe, to come to the rescue, and take the traveller from his 
dangerous lodgings between heaven and earth; or it might be that no one 
would pass that way, and the weary waiting would be even unto death. 

But sounds now reached my ears that made me feel that I was not quite 
alone in this desolate swamp. The gray squirrels scolded among the tree-
tops; robins, the brown thrush, and a large black woodpecker with his 
bright red head, each reminded me of Him without whose notice not a 
sparrow falleth to the ground. 

Ten miles of this black current were passed over, when the first signs of 
civilization appeared, in the shape of a sombre-looking, two-storied 
house, located upon a point of the mainland which entered the swamp on the 
left shore of the river. At this point the river widened to five or six 
rods, and at intervals land appeared a few inches above the water. 
Wherever the pine land touched the river a pig-pen of rails offered 
shelter and a gathering-place for the hogs, which are turned loose by the 
white Cracker to feed upon the roots and mast of the wilderness. 

Reeve's Ferry, on the right bank, with a little store and turpentine-
still, twenty miles from Old Dock, was the next sign of the presence of 
man in this swamp. The river now became broad as I approached Piraway 
Ferry, which is two miles below Piraway Farm. Remembering the warnings of 
the squire as to the "awful wretches in the big pine woods," I kept a 
sharp lookout for the old women who were to give me so much trouble, but 
the raftsmen on the river explained that though Jim Gore had told me the 
truth, I had misunderstood his pronunciation of the word reaches, or river 
bends, which are called in this vicinity wretches. The reaches referred to 
by Mr. Gore were so long and straight as to afford open passages for wind 
to blow up them, and these fierce gusts of head winds give the raftsmen 
much trouble while poling their rafts against them. 

My fears of ill treatment were now at rest, for my tiny craft, with her 
sharp-pointed bow, was well adapted for such work. Landing at the ferry 
where a small scow or flat-boat was resting upon the firm land, the 
ferryman, Mr. Daniel Dunkin, would not permit me to camp out of doors 
while his log-cabin was only one mile away on the pine-covered uplands. He 
told me that the boundary-line between North and South Carolina crossed 
this swamp three and a half miles below Piraway Ferry, and that the first 
town on the river Waccamaw, in South Carolina, Conwayborough, was a 
distance of ninety miles by river and only thirty miles by land. There was 
but one bridge over the river, from its head to Conwayborough, and it was 
built by Mr. James Wortham, twenty years before, for his plantation. This 
bridge was twenty miles below Piraway, and from it by land to a settlement 
on Little River, which empties into the Atlantic, was a distance of only 
five miles. A short canal would connect this river and its lumber regions 
with Little River and the sea. 

For the first time in my experience as a traveller I had entered a country 
where the miles were short. When fifteen years old I made my first journey 
alone and on foot from the vicinity of Boston to the White Mountains of 
New Hampshire. This boyish pedestrian trip occupied about twenty-one days, 
and covered some three hundred miles of hard tramping. New England gives 
honest measure on the finger-posts along her highways. The traveller 
learns by well-earned experience the length of her miles; but in the 
wilderness of the south there is no standard of five thousand two hundred 
and eighty feet to a statute mile, and the watermen along the sea-coast 
are ignorant of the fact that one-sixtieth of a degree of latitude (about 
six thousand and eighty feet) is the geographical and nautical mile of the 
cartographer, as well as the "knot" of the sailor. 

At Piraway Ferry no two of the raftsmen and lumbermen, ignorant or 
educated, would give the same distance, either upon the lengths of 
surveyed roads or unmeasured rivers. "It is one hundred and sixty-five 
miles by river from Piraway Ferry to Conwayborough," said one who had 
travelled the route for years. The most moderate estimate made was that of 
ninety miles by river. The reader, therefore, must not accuse me of 
overstating distances while absent from the seaboard, as my friends of the 
Coast Survey Bureau have not yet penetrated into these interior regions 
with their theodolites, plane-tables, and telametrerods. To the canoeist, 
who is ambitious to score up miles instead of collecting geographical 
notes, these wild rivers afford an excellent opportunity to satisfy his 
aims. 

From sixty to eighty miles can be rowed in ten hours as easily as forty 
miles can be gone over upon a river of slow current in the northern 
states. There is, I am sorry to say, a class of American travellers who 
"do" all the capitals of Europe in the same business-like way, and if they 
have anything to say in regard to every-day life in the countries through 
which they pass, they forget to thank the compiler of the guide-book for 
the information they possess. 

There was but one room in the cabin of my new acquaintance, who 
represented that class of piny-woods people called in the south -- because 
they subsist largely upon corn, -- Corn Crackers, or Crackers. These 
Crackers are the "poor white folks" of the planter, and "de white trash" 
of the old slave, who now as a freedman is beginning to feel the 
responsibility of his position. 

These Crackers are a very kind-hearted people, but few of them can read or 
write. The children of the negro, filled with curiosity and a newborn 
pride, whenever opportunity permits, attend the schools in large numbers; 
but the very indolent white man seems to be destitute of all ambition, and 
his children, in many places in the south, following close in the father's 
footsteps, grow up in an almost unimaginable ignorance. 

The news of the arrival of the little Maria Theresa at Piraway Ferry 
spread with astonishing rapidity through the woods, and on Sunday, after 
"de shoutings," as the negroes call their meetings, were over, the blacks 
came in numbers to see "dat Yankee-man's paper canno." 

These simple people eyed me from head to foot with a grave sort of 
curiosity, their great mouths open, displaying pearly teeth of which a 
white man might well be proud. "You is a good man, capt'n -- we knows dat,
" they said; and when I asked why, the answer showed their childlike 
faith. "'Cause you couldn't hab come all dis way in a paper boat if de 
Lord hadn't helped you. He dono help only good folks." 

The Cracker also came with his children to view the wonder, while the 
raftsmen were so struck with the advantages of my double paddle, which 
originated with the inhabitants of the Arctic regions, that they laid it 
upon a board and drew its outlines with chalk. They vowed they would 
introduce it upon the river. 

These Crackers declared it would take more than "de shoutings," or any 
other religious service, to improve the moral condition of the blacks. 
They openly accused the colored preachers of disturbing the nocturnal rest 
of their hens and turkeys; and as to hog-stealing and cow-killing, "Why, 
we won't have any critters left ef this carpet-bag government lasts much 
longer!" they feelingly exclaimed. 

"We does nothing to nobody. We lets the niggers alone; but niggers will 
steal -- they can't help it, the poor devils; it's in 'em. Now, ef they 
eats us out of house and home, what can a poor man do? They puts 'em up 
for justices of peace, and sends 'em to the legislature, when they can't 
read more'n us; and they do say it's 'cause we fit in the Confederate 
sarvice that they razes the nigger over our heads. Now, does the folkes up 
north like to see white people tyrannized over by niggers? Jes tell 'em 
when you go back, stranger, that we's got soulds like yours up north, and 
we's got feelings too, by thunder! jes like other white men. This was a 
white man's country once -- now it's all niggers and dogs. Why, them 
niggers in the legislature has spitboxes lined with gold to spit in! 
What's this country a-coming to? We wish the niggers no harm if they lets 
our hogs and chickens alone." 

After this tirade it was amusing to see how friendly the whites and blacks 
were. The Crackers conversed with these children of Ham, who had been 
stealing their hams for so long a time, in the most kindly way, realizing, 
perhaps, that they had various peculiar traits of their own, and must, 
after all, endure their neighbors. 

A traveller should place facts before his readers, and leave to them the 
drawing of the moral. Northern men and women who go to the southern states 
and reside for even the short space of a year or two, invariably change 
their life-long views and principles regarding the negro as a moral and 
social creature. When these people return to their homes in Maine or 
Massachusetts (as did the representatives of the Granges of the northern 
states after they had visited South Carolina in 1875) a new light, derived 
from contact with facts, dawns upon them, while their surprised and 
untravelled neighbors say: "So you have become Southern in your views. I 
never would have thought that of you." 

The railroad has become one of the great mediums of enlightenment to 
mankind, and joins in a social fraternity the disunited elements of a 
country. God grant that the resources of the great South may soon be 
developed by the capital and free labor of the North. Our sister states of 
the South, exhausted by the struggles of the late war which resulted in 
consolidating more firmly than ever the great Union, are now ready to 
receive every honest effort to develop their wealth or cultivate their 
territory. Let every national patriot give up narrowness of views and 
sectional selfishness and become acquainted with (not the politicians) the 
people of the New South, and a harmony of feeling will soon possess the 
hearts of all true lovers of a government of the people. 

The swamp tributaries were swelling the river into a very rapid torrent as 
I paddled away from the ferry on Monday, January 18. A warmer latitude 
having been reached, I could dispense with one blanket, and this I had 
presented to my kind host, who had refused to accept payment for his 
hospitality. He was very proud of his present, and said, feelingly, "No 
one shall touch this but me." His good wife had baked some of a rich and 
very nice variety of sweet-potatoes, unlike those we get in New Jersey or 
the other Middle States-which potatoes she kindly added to my stores. They 
are not dry or mealy when cooked, but seem saturated with honey. The poor 
woman's gift now occupied the space formerly taken up by the blanket I had 
given her husband. 

From this day, as latitude after latitude was crossed on my way southward, 
I distributed every article I could spare, among these poor, kind-hearted 
people. Mr. McGreggor went in his Rob Roy canoe over the rivers of Europe, 
"diffusing cheerfulness and distributing Evangelical tracts." I had no 
room for tracts, and if I had followed the example of my well- intentioned 
predecessor in canoeing, it would have served the cause of truth or creed 
but little. The Crackers could not read, and but few of the grown negroes 
had been taught letters. They did not want books, but tobacco. Men and 
women hailed me from the banks as I glided along in my canoe, with, "Say, 
captain, hab you eny 'bacca or snuff for dis chile?" Poor humanity! The 
Cracker and the freedman fill alike their places according to the light 
they possess. Do we, who have been taught from our youth sacred things, do 
more than this? Do we love our neighbor as ourself? 

For twenty miles (local authority) I journeyed down the stream, without 
seeing a human being or a dwelling-place, to Stanley's house and the 
bridge; from which I urged the canoe thirty-five miles further, passing an 
old field on a bluff, when darkness settled on the swamps, and a heavy 
mist rose from the waters and enveloped the forests in its folds. With not 
a trace of land above water I groped about, running into what appeared to 
be openings in the submerged land, only to find my canoe tangled in 
thickets. It was useless to go further, and I prepared to ascend to the 
forks of a giant tree, with a light rope, to be used for lashing my body 
into a safe position, when a long, low cry engaged my attention. 

"Waugh! ho! ho! ho! peig -- peig - pe-ig - pe-ig," came through the still; 
thick air. It was not an owl, nor a catamount that cried thus; nor was it 
the bark of a fox. It was the voice of a Cracker calling in his hogs from 
the forest. This sound was indeed pleasant to my ears, for I knew the 
upland was near, and that a warm fire awaited my benumbed limbs in the 
cabin of this unknown man. Pushing the canoe towards the sound, and 
feeling the submerged border of the swamp with my paddle, I struck the 
upland where it touched the water, and disembarking, felt my way along a 
well-trodden path to a little clearing. Here a drove of hogs were crowding 
around their owner, who was scattering kernels of corn about him as he 
vociferated, "pe-ig -- pe-ig - pe-ig - pig - pig - pig." We stood face to 
face, yet neither could see the face of the other in the darkness. I told 
my tale, and asked where I could find a sheltered spot to camp. 

"Stranger," slowly replied the Cracker, "my cabin's close at hand. Come 
home with me. It's a bad night for a man to lay out in; and the niggers 
would steal your traps if they knew you had anything worth taking. Come 
with me." 

In the tall pines near at hand was a cabin of peeled rails, the chinks 
between them being stuffed with moss. A roof of cypress shingles kept the 
rain out. The log chimney, which was plastered with mud, was built outside 
of the walls and against an end of the rustic-looking structure. The wide-
mouthed fireplace sent forth a blaze of light as we entered the poor man's 
home. I saw in the nicely swept floor, the clean bed-spreads, and the 
general neatness of the place, the character of Wilson Edge's wife. 

"Hog and hominy's our food here in the piny woods," said Mr. Edge, as his 
wife invited us to the little table; "and we've a few eggs now and then to 
eat with sweet potatoes, but it's up-hill work to keep the niggers from 
killing every fowl and animal we have. The carpet-bag politicians promised 
them every one, for his vote, forty acres of land and a mule. They sed as 
how the northern government was a-going to give it to um; but the poor 
devils never got any thanks even for their votes. They had been stuffed 
with all sorts of notions by the carpet-baggers, and I don't blame um for 
putting on airs and trying to rule us. It's human natur, that's all. We 
don't blame the niggers half so much as those who puts it in their heads 
to do so; but it's hard times we've had, we poor woods folks. They took 
our children for the cussed war, to fight fur niggers and rich people as 
owned um. 

"We never could find out what all the fuss was about; but when Jeff Davis 
made a law to exempt every man from the army who owned fifteen niggers, 
then our blood riz right up, and we sez to our neighbors, 'This ere 
thing's a-getting to be a rich man's quarrel and a poor man's fight.' 
After all they dragged off my boy to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and 
killed him a fighting for what? Why, for rich nigger owners. Our young men 
hid in the swamps, but they were hunted up and forced into the army. 
Niggers has been our ruin. Ef a white man takes a case before a nigger 
justice, he gives the nigger everything, and the white man has to stand 
one side. Now, would you folks up north like to have a nigger justice who 
can't read nor count ten figgurs?" 

I tried to comfort the poor man, by assuring him that outside of the 
political enemies of our peace, the masses in the north were honestly 
inclined towards the south now that slavery was at an end; and that wrong 
could not long prevail, with the cheerful prospect of a new 
administration, and the removal of all unconstitutional forces that preyed 
upon the south. 

The two beds in the single room of the cabin were occupied by the family; 
while I slept upon the floor by the fire, with my blankets for a couch and 
a roll of homespun for a pillow, which the women called "heading." They 
often said, "Let me give you some heading for your bed." We waited until 
eight o'clock the next day for the mists to rise from the swamps. My daily 
trouble was now upon me. How could I remunerate a southerner for his cost 
of keeping me, when not, in the true sense of the word, an invited guest 
to his hospitality? 

Wilson Edge sat by the fire, while his wife and little ones were preparing 
to accompany me to see the paper boat. "Mr. Edge," I stammered, "you have 
treated me with great kindness, your wife has been put to some 
inconvenience as I came in so unexpected a manner, and you will really 
oblige me if you will accept a little money for all this; though money 
cannot pay for your hospitality. Grant my wish, and you will send me away 
with a light heart." The poor Cracker lowered his head and slowly ran his 
fingers through his coal black hair. For a moment he seemed studying a 
reply, and then he spoke as though HE represented the whole generous heart 
of the south. 

"Stranger," he slowly articulated, "Stranger, I have known white men to be 
niggers enough to take a stranger's money for lodgings and vittles, but I 
am not that man." 

We found the canoe as it had been left the night before, and I was soon 
pulling down the river. The great wilderness was traversed thirty miles to 
the county town of Conwayborough, where the negroes roared with laughter 
at the working of the double paddle, as I shot past the landing-place 
where cotton and naval stores were piled, waiting to be lightered nine 
miles to Pot Bluff, -- so called from the fact of a pot being lost from a 
vessel near it, -- which place is reached by vessels from New York drawing 
twelve feet of water. Though still a long distance from the ocean, I was 
beginning to feel its tidal influences. At Pot Bluff, the landing and 
comfortable home of its owner, Mr. Z. W. Dusenberry, presented a pleasant 
relief after the monotony of the great pine forests. This enterprising 
business man made my short stay a very pleasant one. 

Wednesday, January 20th, was cold for this latitude, and ice formed in 
thin sheets in the water-pails. Twenty-two miles below Pot Bluff, Bull 
Creek enters the Waccamaw from the Peedee River. At the mouth of this 
connecting watercourse is Tip Top, the first rice plantation of the 
Waccamaw. The Peedee and its sister stream run an almost parallel course 
from Bull Creek to Winyah Bay, making their debouchure close to the city 
of Georgetown. Steam sawmills and rice plantations take the place of the 
forests from a few miles below Tip Top to the vicinity of Georgetown. 

Mr. M. L. Blakely, of New York, one of the largest shingle manufacturers 
of the south, occupied as his headquarters the Bates Hill Plantation, on 
the Peedee. This gentleman had invited me, through the medium of the post-
office, to visit him in the rice-growing regions of South Carolina. To 
reach his home I took the short "cut-off" which Bull Creek offered, and 
entered upon the strongest of head-currents. The thick yellow, muddy 
torrent of the Peedee rushed through Bull Creek with such volume, that I 
wondered if it left much water on the other side to give character to the 
river, as it followed its own channel to Winyah Bay. 

One and a half miles of vigorous paddling brought me to a branch of the 
watercourse, which is much narrower than the main one, and is consequently 
called Little Bull Creek. This also comes from the Peedee River, and its 
source is nearer to the Bates Hill plantation than the main Bull Creek. To 
urge the canoe up this narrow stream three miles and a half to the parent 
river Peedee, was a most trying ordeal. At times the boat would not move a 
hundred feet in five minutes, and often, as my strength seemed failing me, 
I caught the friendly branches of trees, and held on to keep the canoe 
from being whirled down the current towards the Waccamaw. After long and 
persistent efforts had exhausted my strength, I was about to seek for a 
resting-place in the swamp, when a view of the broad Peedee opened before 
me, and with vigorous strokes of the paddle the canoe slowly approached 
the mighty current. A moment more and it was within its grasp, and went 
flying down the turbulent stream at the rate of ten miles an hour. 

A loud halloo greeted me from the swamp, where a party of negro shingle-
makers were at work. They manned their boat, a long cypress dug-out, and 
followed me. Their employer, who proved to be the gentleman whose abiding-
place I was now rapidly approaching, sat in the stern. We landed together 
before the old plantation house, which had been occupied a few years 
before by members of the wealthy and powerful rice-planting aristocracy of 
the Peedee, but was now the temporary home of a northern man, who was 
busily employed in guiding the labors of his four hundred freedmen in the 
swamps of North and South Carolina. 

The paper canoe had now entered the regions of the rice-planter. Along the 
low banks of the Peedee were diked marshes where, before the civil war, 
each estate produced from five thousand to forty thousand bushels of rice 
annually, and the lords of rice were more powerful than those of cotton, 
though cotton was king. The rich lands here produced as high as fifty-five 
bushels of rice to the acre, under forced slave labor; now the free blacks 
cannot wrest from nature more than twenty-five or thirty bushels. 

Fine old mansions lined the river's banks, but the families had been so 
reduced by the ravages of war, that I saw refined ladies, who had been 
educated in the schools of Edinburgh, Scotland, overseeing the negroes as 
they worked in the yards of the rice-mills. The undaunted spirit of these 
southern ladies, as they worked in their homes now so desolate, roused my 
admiration. 

A light, graceful figure, enveloped in an old shawl, and mounted on an old 
horse, flitted about one plantation like a restless spirit. 

"That lady's father," said a gentleman to me, "owned three plantations, 
worth three millions of dollars, before the war. There is a rice-mill on 
one of the plantations which cost thirty thousand dollars. She now fights 
against misfortune, and will not give up. The Confederate war would not 
have lasted six months if it had not been for our women. They drove 
thousands of us young men into the fight; and now, having lost all, they 
go bravely to work, even taking the places of their old servants in their 
grand old homes. It's hard for them, though, I assure you." 

On Tuesday, January 25th, I paddled down the Peedee, stopping at the 
plantations of Dr. Weston and Colonel Benjamin Allston. The latter 
gentleman was a son of one of the governors of South Carolina. He kindly 
gave me a letter of introduction to Commodore Richard Lowndes, who lived 
near the coast. From the Peedee I passed through a cut in the marshes into 
the broad Waccamaw, and descended it to Winyah Bay. 

Georgetown is located between the mouths of the Peedee and Sampit rivers. 
Cautiously approaching the city, I landed at Mr. David Risley's steam saw-
mills, and that gentleman kindly secreted my boat in a back counting-room, 
while I went up town to visit the post-office. By some, to me, 
unaccountable means, the people had heard of the arrival of the paper 
boat, and three elaborately dressed negro women accosted me with, "Please 
show wees tree ladies de little paper boat." 

Before I had reached my destination, the post-office, a body of men met 
me, on their way to the steam-mill. The crowd forced me back to the canoe, 
and asked so many questions that I was sorely taxed to find answers for 
these gentlemen. There were three editors in the crowd: two were white 
men, one a negro. The young men, who claimed the position of 
representatives of the spirit of the place and of the times, published 
"The Comet," while the negro, as though influenced by a spirit of sarcasm, 
conducted "The Planet." The third newspaper represented at the canoe 
reception was the " Georgetown Times," which courteously noticed the 
little boat that had come so far. "The Planet" prudently kept in the dark, 
and said nothing, but "The Comet," representing the culture of the young 
men of the city, published the following notice of my arrival: 

"Tom Collins has at last arrived in his wonderful paper boat. He has it 
hitched to Mr. Risley's new saw-mill, where every one can have a view. He 
intends shooting off his six-pounder before weighing anchor in the 
morning. Hurrah for Collins." 

I left Mr. Risley's comfortable home before noon the next day, and 
followed the shores of Winyah Bay towards the sea. Near Battery White, on 
the right shore, in the pine forests, was the birth-place of Marion, the 
brave patriot of the American revolution, whose bugle's call summoned the 
youth of those days to arms. 

When near the inlet, the rice-plantation marshes skirted the shore for 
some distance. Out of these wet lands flowed a little stream, called 
Mosquito Creek, which once connected the North Santee River with Winyah 
Bay, and served as a boundary to South Island. The creek was very crooked, 
and the ebb-tide strong. When more than halfway to Santee River I was 
forced to leave the stream, as it had become closed by tidal deposits and 
rank vegetation. 

The ditches of rice plantations emptied their drainage of the lowlands 
into Mosquito Creek. Following a wide ditch to the right, through fields 
of rich alluvial soil, which had been wrested by severe toil from nature, 
the boat soon reached the rice-mill of Commodore Richard Lowndes. A little 
further on, and situated in a noble grove of live-oaks, which were draped 
in the weird festoons of Spanish moss, on the upland arose the stately 
home of the planter, who still kept his plantation in cultivation, though 
on a scale of less magnitude than formerly. It was, indeed, a pleasant 
evening that I passed in the company of the refined members of the old 
commodore's household, and with a pang of regret the next day I paddled 
along the main canal of the lowlands, casting backward glances at the old 
house, with its grand old trees. The canal ended at North Santee Bay. 

While I was preparing to ascend the river a tempest arose, which kept me a 
weary prisoner among the reeds of the rice marsh. The hollow reeds made 
poor fuel for cooking, and when the dark, stormy night shut down upon me, 
the damp soil grew damper as the tide arose, until it threatened to 
overflow the land. For hours I lay in my narrow canoe waiting for the 
tidal flood to do its worst, but it receded, and left me without any means 
of building a fire, as the reeds were wet by the storm. The next 
afternoon, being tired of this sort of prison-life, and cramped for lack 
of exercise, I launched the canoe into the rough water, and crossing to 
Crow Island found a lee under its shores, which permitted me to ascend the 
river to the mouth of Atchison Creek, through which I passed, two miles, 
to the South Santee River. 

All these rivers are bordered by rice plantations, many of them having 
been abandoned to the care of the freedmen. I saw no white men upon them. 
Buildings and dikes are falling into ruins, and the river freshets 
frequently inundate the land. Many of the owners of these once valuable 
estates are too much reduced in wealth to attempt their proper 
cultivation. It is in any case difficult to get the freedmen to work 
through an entire season, even when well paid for their services, and they 
flock to the towns whenever opportunity permits. 

The North and South Santee rivers empty into the Atlantic, but their 
entrances are so shallow that Georgetown Entrance is the inlet through 
which most of the produce of the country - pitch, tar, turpentine, rice, 
and lumber -- finds exit to the sea. As I left the canal, which, with the 
creek, makes a complete thoroughfare for lighters and small coasters from 
one Santee River to the other, a renewal of the tempest made me seek 
shelter in an old cabin in a negro settlement, each house of which was 
built upon piles driven into the marshes. The old negro overseer of the 
plantation hinted to me that his "hands were berry spicious of ebbry 
stranger," and advised me to row to some other locality. I told him I was 
from the north, and would not hurt even one of the fleas which in 
multitudes infested his negroes' quarters; but the old fellow shook his 
head, and would not be responsible for me if I staid there all night. A 
tall darkey, who had listened to the conversation, broke in with, "Now, 
uncle, ye knows dat if dis gemmum is from de norf he is one of wees, and 
ye must du fur him jis dis time." But "Uncle Overseer" kept repeating, 
"Some niggers here is mity spicious. Du not no who white man is anyhow." 
"Well, uncle," replied the tall black, "ef dis man is a Yankeemans, Ise 
will see him froo." 

Then he questioned me, while the fleas, having telegraphed to each other 
that a stranger had arrived, made sad havoc of me and my patience. 

"My name's Jacob Gilleu; what's yourn?" I gave it. "Whar's your home?" 
came next. "I am a citizen of the United States," I replied. "De 'Nited 
States -- whar's dat? neber hurd him afore," said Jacob Gilleu. Having 
informed him it was the land which General Grant governed, he exclaimed: 
"O, you's a Grant man; all rite den; you is one of wees -- all de same as 
wees. Den look a-here, boss. I send you to one good place on Alligator 
Creek, whar Seba Gillings libs. He black man, but he treat you jes like 
white man." 

Jacob helped me launch my boat through the soft mud, which nearly stalled 
us; and following his directions I paddled across the South Santee and 
coasted down to Alligator Creek, where extensive marshes, covered by tall 
reeds, hid the landscape from my view. About half a mile from the mouth of 
the creek, which watercourse was on my direct route to Bull's Bay, a large 
tide-gate was found at the mouth of a canal. This being wide open, I 
pushed up the canal to a low point of land which rose like an island out 
of the rushes. Here was a negro hamlet of a dozen houses, or shanties, and 
the ruins of a rice-mill. The majority of the negroes were absent working 
within the diked enclosures of this large estate, which before the war had 
produced forty thousand bushels of rice annually. Now the place was leased 
by a former slave, and but little work was accomplished under the present 
management. 

Seba Gillings, a powerfully built negro, came to the dike upon which I had 
landed the canoe. I quickly told him my story, and how I had been forced 
to leave the last negro quarters. I used Jacob Gilleu's name as authority 
for seeking shelter with him from the damps of the half-submerged lands. 
The dignified black man bade me "fear nuffing, stay here all de night, 
long's you please; treat you like white man. I'se mity poor, but gib you 
de berry best I hab." He locked my boat in a rickety old storehouse, and 
gave me to understand "dat niggers will steal de berry breff from a man's 
mouff." 

He took me to his home, and soon showed me how he managed "de niggers." 
His wife sat silently by the fire. He ordered her to "pound de rice;" and 
she threw a quantity of unhulled rice into a wooden mortar three feet high 
planted in the ground in front of the shanty. Then, with an enormous 
pestle, the black woman pounded the grains until the hulls were removed, 
when, seating herself upon the floor of the dark, smoky cabin, she 
winnowed the rice with her breath, while her long, slim fingers caught and 
removed all the specks of dirt from the mass. It was cooked as the Chinese 
cook it -- not to a glutinous mass, as we of the north prepare it- but 
each grain was dry and entire. Then eggs and bacon were prepared; not by 
the woman, but by the son, a lad of fourteen years. 

All these movements were superintended by old Seba, who sat looking as 
dark and as solemn and as learned as an associate judge on the bench of a 
New Jersey county court. On the blackest of tables, minus a cloth, the 
well-cooked food was placed for the stranger. As soon as my meal was 
finished, every member of the family made a dash for the fragments, and 
the board was cleared in a wonderfully short space of time. 

Then we gathered round the great, black-mouthed fireplace, and while the 
bright coals of live-oak spread a streak of light through the darkness, 
black men and black women stole into the room until everything from floor 
to ceiling, from door to chimney-place, seemed to be growing blacker and 
blacker, and I felt as black as my surroundings. The scant clothing of the 
men only half covered their shiny, ebony skins. The whole company 
preserved a dignified silence, which was occasionally broken by deep sighs 
coming from the women in reply to a half-whispered "All de way from de 
norf in a paper canno -- bless de Lord! bless de Lord!" 

This dull monotony was broken by the entrance of a young negro who, having 
made a passage in a sloop to Charleston through Bull's Bay, was looked 
upon as a great traveller, and to him were referred disputes upon nautical 
matters. He had not yet seen the boat, but he proceeded to tell the 
negroes present all about it. He first bowed to me with a "How'dy, how'dy, 
cap'n," and then struck an attitude in the middle of the floor. Upon this 
natural orator Seba Gillings' dignity had no effect -- was he not a 
travelled man? 

His exordium was: "How fur you cum, sar?" I replied, about fourteen 
hundred miles. " Fourteen hundred miles!" he roared; "duz you knows how 
much dat is, honnies? it's jes one thousand four hundred miles." All the 
women groaned out, "Bless de Lord! bless de Lord!" and clapped their 
shrivelled hands in ecstasy. 

The little black tried to run his fingers through his short, woolly hair 
as he continued: "What is dis yere world a-coming to? Now, yous ere folks, 
did ye's eber hear de likes o' dis -- a paper boat?" To which the crones 
replied, clapping their hands, "Bless de Lord! bless de Lord! Only the 
Yankee-mens up norf can make de paper boats. Bless de Lord!" 

"And what," continued the orator, "and what will the Yankee-mens do next? 
Dey duz ebery ting. Can dey bring a man back agen? Can dey bring a man 
back to bref?" "No! no!" howled the women; "only de Lord can bring a man 
back agen -- no Yankee-mens can do dat. Bless de Lord! bless de Lord!" 
"And what sent dis Yankee-man one tousand four hundred miles in his paper 
boat?" "De Lord! de Lord! bless de Lord!" shouted the now highly excited 
women, violently striking the palms of their hands together. 

"And why," went on this categorical negro, "did de Lord send him down souf 
in de paper boat?" "Kase he couldn't hab cum in de paper boat ef de Lord 
hadn't a-sent him. O, bless de Lord! bless de Lord!" "And what duz he call 
his paper boat?" "Maria Theresa," I replied. "Maria Truss Her," cried the 
orator. "He calls her Maria Truss Her. Berry good, berry good name; kase 
he truss his life in her ebry day, and dat's why he calls his little boat 
Truss Her. Yes, de Yankee-mans makes de gunboats and de paper boats. Has 
de gemmin from de norf any bacca for dis yere chile?" 

As the women had become very piously inclined, and were in just the state 
of nervous excitement to commence "de shoutings," old Uncle Seba rudely 
informed them that "de Yankee-mans wants sleep," and cleared the room of 
the crowd, to my great relief, for the state of the atmosphere was beyond 
description. Seba had a closet where he kept onions, muskrat skins, and 
other pieces of personal property. He now set his wife to sweeping it out, 
and I spread my clean blankets with a sigh upon the black floor, knowing I 
should carry away in the morning more than I had brought into Seba's 
dwelling. 

I will not now expatiate upon the small annoyances of travel; but to the 
canoeist who may follow the southern watercourses traversed by the paper 
canoe, I would quietly say, "Keep away from cabins of all kinds, and you 
will by so doing travel with a light heart and even temper." 

When I cast up my account with old Seba the next morning, he said that by 
trading the rice he raised he could obtain "bout ebbry ting he wanted, 
'cept rum." Rum was his medicine. So long as he kept a little stowed away, 
he admitted he was often sick. Having been destitute of cash, and 
consequently of rum for some time, he acknowledged his state of health 
remarkable; and he was a model of strength and manly development. All the 
other negroes were dwarfish-looking specimens, while their hair was so 
very short that it gave them the appearance of being bald. 

When the canoe was taken out of the storehouse to be put into the canal, 
these half-naked, ebony-skinned creatures swarmed about it like bees. Not 
a trace of white blood could be detected in them. Each tried to put a 
finger upon the boat. They seemed to regard it as a Fetich; and, I 
believe, had it been placed upon an end they would have bowed down and 
paid their African devotions to it. Only the oldest ones could speak 
English well enough to be understood. The youths chattered in African 
tongue, and wore talismans about their necks. They were, to say the least, 
verging on barbarism. The experience gathered among the blacks of other 
lands impressed me with the well-founded belief, that in more than one 
place in the south would the African Fetich be set up and worshipped 
before long, unless the church bestirs herself to look well to her home 
missions. 

In all my travels, outside of the cities, in the south it has not been my 
good fortune to find an educated white man preaching to negroes, yet 
everywhere the poor blacks gather in the log-cabin, or rudely constructed 
church, to listen to ignorant preachers of their own color. The blind 
leading the blind. 

A few men of negro extraction, with white blood in their veins, not any 
more negro than white man, consequently not negroes in the true sense of 
the word, are sent from the negro colleges of the south to lecture 
northern congregations upon the needs of their race; and these one-
quarter, or perhaps three-quarters, white men are, with their 
intelligence, and sometimes brilliant oratory, held up as true types of 
the negro race by northerners; while there is, in fact, as much difference 
between the pureblooded negro of the rice-field and this false 
representative of "his needs," as can well be imagined. 

An Irishman, just from the old country, listened one evening to the 
fascinating eloquence of a mulatto freedman. The good Irishman had never 
seen a pure-blooded black man. The orator said, "I am only half a black 
man. My mother was a slave, my father a white planter." "Be jabbers," 
shouted the excited Irishman, who was charmed with the lecturer, "if you 
are only half a nigger, what must a whole one be like!" 

The blacks were kind and civil, as they usually are when fairly treated. 
They stood upon the dike and shouted unintelligible farewells as I 
descended the canal to Alligator Creek. This thoroughfare soon carried me 
on its salt-water current to the sea; for I missed a narrow entrance to 
the marshes, called the Eye of the Needle (a steamboat thoroughfare), and 
found myself upon the calm sea, which pulsated in long swells. To the 
south was the low island of Cape Roman, which, like a protecting arm, 
guarded the quiet bay behind it. The marshes extended from the main almost 
to the cape, while upon the edge of the rushy meadows, upon an island just 
inside of the cape, rose the tower of Roman Light. 

This was the first time my tiny shell had floated upon the ocean. I 
coasted the sandy beach of the muddy lowlands, towards the lighthouse, 
until I found a creek debouching from the marsh, which I entered, and from 
one watercourse to another, without a chart, found my way at dusk into 
Bull's Bay. The sea was rolling in and breaking upon the ashore, which I 
was forced to hug closely, as the old disturbers of my peace, the 
porpoises were visible; fishing in numbers. To escape the dangerous 
raccoon oyster reefs of the shoal water the canoe was forced into a deeper 
channel, when the lively porpoises chased the boat and drove me back again 
on to the sharp-lipped shells. It was fast growing dark, and no place of 
refuge nearer than the upland, a long distance across the soft marsh, 
which was even now wet with them. 

The rough water of the sound, the oyster reefs which threatened to pierce 
my boat, and a coast which would be submerged by the next floodtide, all 
seemed to conspire against me. Suddenly my anxiety was relieved, and 
gratitude filled my heart, as the tall masts of a schooner rose out of the 
marshes not far from the upland, telling me that a friendly creek was near 
at hand. Its wide mouth soon opened invitingly before me, and I rowed 
towards the beautiful craft anchored in its current, the trim rig of which 
plainly said -- the property of the United States. An officer stood on the 
quarterdeck watching my approach through his glass; and, as I was passing 
the vessel, a sailor remarked to his mates, "That is the paper canoe. I 
was in Norfolk, last December, when it reached the Elizabeth River." 

The officer kindly hailed me, and offered me the hospitality of the Coast-
Survey schooner "Caswell." In the cosiest of cabins, Mr. W. H. Dennis, 
with his co-laborers Messrs. Ogden and Bond, with their interesting 
conversation soon made me forget the discomforts of the last three days 
spent in the muddy flats among the lowland negroes. From poor, kind Seba 
Gillings' black cabin-floor, to the neat state-room, with its snowy sheets 
and clean towels, where fresh, pure water could be used without stint, was 
indeed a transition. The party expected to complete their work as far as 
Charleston harbor before the season closed. 

The Sunday spent on the "Caswell" greatly refreshed me. On Saturday 
evening Mr. Dennis traced upon a sheet of paper my route through the 
interior coast watercourses to Charleston harbor; and I left the pretty 
schooner on Monday, fully posted for my voyage. The tide commenced 
flooding at eleven A. M., and the flats soon afforded me water for their 
passage in the vicinity of the shore. Heavy forests covered the uplands, 
where a few houses were visible. Bull's Island, with pines and a few 
cabbage palms, was on my left as I reached the entrance of the southern 
thoroughfare at the end of the bay. Here, in the intricacies of creeks and 
passages through the islands, and made careless by the possession of Mr. 
Dennis' chart, I several times blundered into the wrong course; and got no 
further that afternoon than Price's Inlet, though I rowed more than twenty 
miles. Some eight miles of the distance rowed was lost by ascending and 
descending creeks by mistake. 

After a weary day's work shelter was found in a house close by the sea, on 
the shores of Price's Inlet; where, in company with a young fisherman, who 
was in the employ of Mr. Magwood, of Charleston, I slept upon the floor in 
my blankets. Charles Hucks, the fisherman, asserted that three albino deer 
were killed on Caper's Island the previous winter. Two were shot by a 
negro while he killed the third. Messrs. Magwood, Terry, and Noland, of 
Charleston, one summer penned beside the water one thousand old terrapin, 
to hold them over for the winter season. These "diamond-backs" would 
consume five bushels of shrimps in one hour when fed. A tide of unusual 
height washed out the terrapins from their "crawl," and with them 
disappeared all anticipated results of the experiment. 

The next day, Caper's Island and Inlet, Dewees' Inlet, Long Island, and 
Breach Inlet were successively passed, on strong tidal currents. 
Sullivan's Island is separated from Long Island by Breach Inlet. While 
following the creeks in the marshes back of Sullivan's Island, the compact 
mass of buildings of Moultrieville, at its western end, at the entrance of 
Charleston harbor, rose imposingly to view. 

The gloomy mantle of darkness was settling over the harbor as the paper 
canoe stole quietly into its historic waters. Before me lay the quiet bay, 
with old Fort Sumter rising from the watery plain like a spectral giant, 
as though to remind one that this had been the scene of mighty struggles. 
The tranquil waters softly rippled a response to the touch of my oars; all 
was peace and quiet here, where, only a few short years before, the 
thunder of cannon woke a thousand echoes, and the waves were stained with 
the lifeblood of America, -- where war, with her iron throat, poured out 
destruction, and God's creatures, men, made after his own image, destroyed 
each other ruthlessly, having never, in all that civilization had done for 
them, discovered any other way of settling their difficulties than by this 
wholesale murder. 

The actors In this scene were scattered now; they had returned to the 
farm, the workshop, the desk, and the pulpit. The old flag again floated 
upon the ramparts of Sumter, and a government was trying to reconstruct 
itself, so that the Great Republic should become more thoroughly a 
government of the people, founded upon equal rights to all men. 

A sharp, scraping sound under my boat roused me from my revery, for I had 
leaned upon my oars while the tide had carried me slowly but surely upon 
the oyster-reefs, from which I escaped with some slight damage to my paper 
shell. Newspaper reading had impressed upon me a belief that the citizens 
of the city which played so important a part in the late civil war might 
not treat kindly a Massachusetts man. I therefore decided to go up to the 
city upon the ferry-boat for the large mail which awaited my arrival at 
the Charleston post-office, after receiving which I intended to return to 
Mount Pleasant, and cross the bay to the entrance of the southern 
watercourses, leaving the city as quietly as I entered it. 

My curiosity was, however, aroused to see how, under the new 
reconstruction rule, things were conducted in the once proud city of 
Charleston. As I stood at the window of the post-office delivery, and 
inquired through the narrow window for my letters, a heavy shadow seemed 
to fall upon me as the head of a negro appeared. The black post-office 
official's features underwent a sudden change as I pronounced my name, 
and, while a warm glow of affection lighted up his dark face, he thrust 
his whole arm through the window, and grasped my hand with a vigorous 
shake in the most friendly manner, as though upon his shoulders rested the 
good name of the people. 

"Welcome to Charleston, Mr. B____, welcome to our beautiful city," he 
exclaimed. So this was Charleston under reconstruction. 

After handing me my mail, the postmaster graciously remarked, "Our rule is 
to close the office at five o'clock P. M., but if you are belated any day, 
tap at the door, and I will attend you." 

This was my first welcome to Charleston; but before I could return to my 
quarters at Mount Pleasant, members of the Chamber of Commerce, the 
Carolina Club, and others, pressed upon me kind attentions and 
hospitalities, while Mr. James L. Frazer, of the South Carolina Regatta 
Association, sent for the Maria Theresa, and placed it in charge of the 
wharfinger of the Southern Wharf, where many ladies and gentlemen visited 
it. 

When I left the old city, a few days later, I blushed to think how I had 
doubted these people, whose reputation for hospitality to strangers had 
been world-wide for more than half a century. 

While here I was the guest of Rev. G. R. Brackett, the well-loved pastor 
of one of Charleston's churches. It was with feelings of regret I turned 
my tiny craft towards untried waters, leaving behind me the beautiful city 
of Charleston, and the friends who had so kindly cared for the lonely 
canoeist.