24 Charleston

A gracious, grey haired lady with a straight back, Charleston old stock you would guess, conducted the tour of the Nathaniel Russell historic home.

“On your rar-et is the office where Nathaniel conducted his shipping business in 1808.”
“The portrait over they-a, was painted by Samuel Morse the inventor of the Morse code”.
She refastened her hands in front of her.
“Have any of you any questions about this room?”


It is a pleasure to explore Charleston. The old town is on such a friendly scale. No building exceeds three stories. Many are on narrow lots with the side of the house facing the road and the verandah looking at the back of the house next door. (It was a tax thing). If you live in the old town you can’t alter your home and must repair it using the original materials. All the homes are lived in and seem well kept.

We peered through wrought iron gates at the narrow gardens. In this one, a brick path, furred with moss lit by the slanting sun, leads to a stone cherub standing in a bunch of ferns. Here, a waterfall of wisteria almost hides the greenery beyond. I think we found the place where they get all those photos for ‘House and Garden’. Once a year, the garden club runs tours of select Charleston gardens. You have to get tickets months in advance.

We had to see Fort Sumter. Exuberant southerners, who felt their values threatened, bombarded the union garrison in this fort: the first shots of the War Between the States. The war left 650,000 dead, Charleston in rubble, and the life style they fought to preserve utterly destroyed.

23 Beaufort, South Carolina

Through Georgia, and now South Carolina, the ICW wanders through salt marshes behind the ‘Sea Islands’. These islands have tall forests and we look for one to snug up to when we anchor at night for shelter from the wind. The islands seem wild and uncultivated. Once they were cotton plantations.


From about 1790 to 1860, if you had enough slaves, you could get very rich growing ‘Sea Island Cotton’. The wealthy planters built themselves summer homes on the slight rise that received cool breezes at the place known as Beaufort (‘Bew-fort’).


The houses are similar. The design is both graceful and practical. The main floor is elevated on arches and reached by a grand staircase that spills down into the garden widening as it descends. Both the main and upper floors have wide verandahs. The whole family could sit in armchairs in a refreshing breeze (or even in pouring rain).

White plantation homes in movies of the Deep South stand alone out in the open (ready for that crane shot of a carriage coming up the long driveway). That is how I always imagined them to be. In Beaufort they are hidden deep in cool shade practically embraced by those long limbed oaks; oaks that have seen Indians, Spaniards and planters come and go.

22. Savannah

Savannah is at its best.

Banks of azaleas blaze on Oglethorpe Avenue. The wiry twigs of redbud trees are papered with hot-pink popcorn. Baby blue grapes of wisteria dangle over doorways. It is a beautiful crisp day and we are walking around the town admiring the old homes that surround the shady squares.

We can thank Oglethorpe for the squares. He came here in 1733 with a bunch of guys for debtor’s prison and was welcomed as a cushion between South Carolina and the Spaniards in Florida. When he planned the town he insisted that the streets be interrupted by refreshing squares. Later rich cotton planters built beautiful homes around them.

We can thank seven horrified old ladies for the refurbished houses. They bought a house scheduled for demolition and did it up. This triggered the avalanche of restoration which finally engulfed the whole town. Now every vista is a glossy from a coffee table book.

So this pretty town draws in the tourists. Trolleys, one behind the other, pause at select addresses spouting dates and anecdotes in amplified guide speak.


And then, as if this was not enough, came “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’.

Now you have to see Mercer House (the red house in the photo above) where Jim Williams shot Danny. You have to breakfast at Clary’s drugstore at the table where Luther Draggers left his breakfast untouched. You can meet Joe Odun’s blowsy Mandy who is doing historic house tours. Chablis will be in town next week for another outrageous show.

You are here in the book with the characters; part of the cast.

21 Cumberland Island.

It was quite unconcerned by our presence and continued to trot about snuffling through the leaves with its nose; a piglet in chain mail. Armadillos are common on Cumberland Island and appear to have full confidence in their armor. The famous wild horses are here too. They look just like regular horses.

Behind the sand dunes the island is more lush than you expect. There is a dark forest of live oaks whose writhing limbs are hung with Spanish moss and Tarzan vines. It is the sort of sinister forest Hansel and Gretel had to deal with.

Cumberland used to be Carnegie’s private island. He built a castle to entertain his friends. The family abandoned it in the nineteen twenties. The castle is now a romantic gothic ruin. The only guests are rattle snakes.

19 Georgia

Mangroves: they have been a familiar sight all the way from Grenada to Florida; a welcome sight too. Those red claws grasping at the water are the sign of a quiet anchorage.

We saw the last one at Daytona. A sad specimen it was. Red mangroves can handle salt water and fresh, flood tide and desiccation, hurricanes and calms. They draw the line at frost.


All at once we are in a new zone: salt marsh.

This afternoon we are anchored up a creek off the ICW somewhere in Georgia. Fields of cord grass, like prairie wheat, extend as far as you can see. When the tide is in, they are awash; when the tide is out (and it drops seven feet here) they are above the cockpit on a bank of mud. This is when tiny birds appear (just a ball of fluff with a pin for a beak - more like a Christmas tree decoration than a real bird) and peck about in the ooze.


The golden cord grass turns lilac in the evening, and aerial plankton (no see ums and mosquitoes) appear. We have been reading that the salt marsh, like the mangrove swamp, is the basis of a complex food web. Tonight this may include us.


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19 Saint Augustine

You probably know all the east coast towns we are going to pass through but they are new to us.

We walked along the narrow streets of the old Spanish town up to the Castillo de San Marco and looked out over the anchorage.

The Spaniards sent Menendez here in 1564 to stake out the northern extreme of their American holdings. What a posting! He had only fifty soldiers to keep the English and French at bay. Supplies had to come from Havana. That very year, the French fleet got wrecked on the coast. Menendez learned that 300 French soldiers were starving on the shore. He persuaded them to surrender, gave them a meal, and killed them all. You had to do that out here in the boonies if you were outnumbered.

The town he created was easy meat for raiders. Drake burst in in 1586. We watched this event reenacted by an enthusiastic group of pirates and defenders. Their authentic weapons made a great deal of noise and smoke but took for ever to reload. It was a slow motion battle. The pirates won. In the original version, Drake’s rabble looted everything and burned the wooden fort.


The new fort was made of ‘coquina’ (stones composed of beach shells that had been compressed and hardened over a quarter of a million years). It was just finished when Jonathan Dickinson arrived with his decimated party in 1696. The governor of the time gave them food and clothes and helped them on to Charleston. This was pretty gracious of him considering that the colonies were hostile. Only a few years later the brits were attacking the fort. Coquina turned out to have a remarkable ability to absorb cannon balls. The attack failed.

The fort is still good shape after 300 years.

Of course we had to see Flagler’s splendid Spanish-Gothic monster piece: the Hotel Ponce de Leon. Edison did the wiring Tiffany did the windows. It was a bit difficult for the guests to get to it 1885. No problem, Flagler built a railway.

18 Pelicans

We were having breakfast in the cockpit this morning and this pelican comes over the trees, drops fifty feet, and with the gained momentum, slides across the water on frictionless rails right by the boat its wing tips a mere centimeter above the surface.
Here come four more practicing formation flying. They bank and drop one behind the other like a ski patrol coming down a mountain.

You would think that they really enjoy flying.

We have been watching pelicans diving for fish. You see this big splash and, when the spray clears, the pelican is facing the other way. It took a while to figure out how it is done. The pelican dives downwind. At the last second, it inverts. As it hits the water upside down, it somersaults over its own beak and ends up facing upwind ready for take off.

17 Cape Canaveral

An angry cold front has come. It is blistering the Indian River and hurling fistfuls of rain at us at 35 knots. We scurried for cover in Titusville.

Good time to visit the Kennedy Space center.



It is amazing to see these things with your own eyes.

That cone in which Alan Shepard was shot (not even into orbit) is so tiny. It only just contains a seated man with an inch or two to spare all around.
Then there is the sheer size of the Saturn rocket that reminds you of the thundering forces needed to counteract the earth’s gravity.
And there is the breath holding precision that enabled the ‘Eagle’ to dock again with the lunar orbiter and return to earth after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.

They show you a movie taken recently on the space station. The astronauts are floating about happily doing experiments or crawling about like white aphids on the outside of the cylinders as the earth spins below. Afterwards you can walk though replicas of those very modules and see how they sleep and shower. And you can see them preparing the new research modules that will be attached in May.

Out there in the distance are the launch pads empty as station platforms waiting for the next regular departure. This really is a space station.

I ever you are disgusted by human agression; if religious fanatics have caused you to despair; come here. Here are the really exciting things that human apes can do!


Returned to the boat inspired.

The gale has shredded our United States courtesy flag.
We went right out and got a bright new one.

16. Indian River

We are sailing up the long lagoon they call the ‘Indian River’. It runs from Jupiter through Vero Beach to past Cape Canaveral. There is a warm east wind; the water is flat; over there white pelicans are herding fish. (Did you know they summer in Manitoba?).

It is a gorgeous day.

But we have been reading about a much different trip.


In the morning, they salvaged what they could from the wreck but were immediately discovered by a rabble of Indians who attacked ‘foaming at the mouth.’ The Indians snatched everything, ripped off their clothes and shoes and were about to kill them. Being Quakers, the shipwrecked party sat calmly ‘… giving themselves to the Will of God…’ Nonplussed by this behavior the Indians held their knives and instead drove the strangers barefoot and naked back to their village.

Jonathan Dickenson with his wife, baby, and eleven slaves had chartered a barkentine (probably about the size of the Playfair) to take them from Jamaica to the Quaker colony of Philadelphia. In those days you sailed up the coast of North America, keeping it in sight, until the pole star was at the right elevation. In the night of the 23rd of September, a gale drove them onto the beach five miles north of Jupiter (near Hobe Sound). The boat broke up.

At that time, and this was 1696, the Spaniards claimed the lower half of North America but there were no European settlements in Florida except for the Spanish army post at St Augustine. The Indians in the peninsular lived in small, mutually hostile, villages at a Paleolithic level eating berries and fish.

Jonathan’s party pretended to be Spaniards (whom the Indians feared) not Englishmen (who could be killed with impunity). After several days they were allowed to leave and they set off without clothes, shoes, food or water for St Augustine 230 miles to the north. You have to see this country to imagine how difficult this trek would be. Inland there are lagoons lined with mangroves thickets, neither water nor land; at the coast, barrier islands covered in prickly palmettos and interrupted by fast tidal inlets.

And this was an early brutal winter.

Jonathan’s vivid journal has survived. In it he describes the cold and starvation, the deaths of the first five, but also, with cool objectivity, the behavior of the Indians and the nature of their villages.

We are following the same route but with, we hope, a sheltered anchorage and a hot meal every night and a cozy, dry V berth!