_Beaufort, July 7._ We got our luggage into the Mayflower and started
for this place [from Hilton Head] about six o'clock. It was droll
enough to find a party of Boston men taking a sail in the old Hingham
boat up Beaufort River under United States passes, to superintend
South Carolina plantations.
_July 15. Coffin's Point._ The nearest of my five plantations is three
miles distant, along the shore road, and the four on that road extend
about two miles; my fifth is on the upper road, to Beaufort, about
four and a half miles from the Point. The roads are mere tracks worn
in the fields, sometimes through woods, like our wood roads, only more
sandy. In front of my plantations there are bushes on the right-hand
side, for some distance, the field being bounded on the other side by
woods. Fields usually very long, sometimes three quarters of a mile,
divided across the road by fences, gates occurring at every passage
from one to another; the plantation houses and quarters at an average
of one third of a mile from the road, paths through cotton-fields
leading to them. Imagine a perfectly flat country, relieved by belts
of trees, and intersected by rows of brush, single trees standing here
and there in the bare, hot fields. Very little fresh water either in
brooks or pools. Salt-water creeks are to be crossed on the shore
roads; the richest lands in the adjoining meadows. A cotton-field
looks not unlike a potato-field, the rows higher and more distinct,
the plants further apart, usually two feet; the rows five feet. Corn
planted on rows like cotton. You would be surprised to see the soil in
which these flourish; beach sand, in many places, is the principal
ingredient. The fields are very much the colour of the sea-beach.
We live on the fat of the land. We are allowed $5.24 per month for
rations, but I do not use even that. Rice, sugar, and molasses are our
principal draughts from the Commissary.
The colonists referred to at the beginning of the next
letter were a thousand blacks from the island of Edisto,
which the United States Government, after taking, had
evacuated, as too troublesome to hold. The place where they
were quartered, as described in the first sentence, was St.
Helena Village.