Charleston

Right now we’re sitting on an inexpensive mooring at the City Dock in Beaufort, South Carolina. There’s also a Beaufort in North Carolina, which we passed on our way down here. They are pronounced differently, and a friend in Oriental set us straight on how to remember which is which: “South has the letter “U” in it, so you pronounce it “Byew-fert, SC”, whereas North has the “O” sound in it, so up there it’s “Bo-fert, NC”. You are now well armed for trivia night at the local bar.

From Oriental, we motored a little further south in the ICW, just to get further along without going offshore, because the weather wasn’t cooperating. We got as far as Wrightsville Beach, near Wilmington, and saw a weather window coming, so we rested up for a BIG hop the next day: 170 miles around Cape Fear and on to Charleston. If everything goes well, it can be done in 24 hrs.

The wind was great, and no rain, but a big storm all the way up in New England was generating some serious wave action, and it was like sailing in a washing machine. We pulled into Charleston thirty hours later, and we both felt like we’d been put in a barrel and rolled down a hill. We were exhausted- took us two days to recover. We have made the decision to only do daysails unless we have extra crew. Those overnighters take too much out of us, especially if the sailing is difficult.

I’d never thought about visiting Charleston before, and now I wonder how that could be. What a great place, and exceptionally beautiful. This old blacksmith loved that they are proud of and celebrate all the outstanding wrought iron work to be seen around town. Kate was impressed with the architecture- she pointed out to me that many of the old homes were only one room wide, built perpendicular to the street, with a full length side porch that was accessed by the front door facing the street, like this:

She did a bit of research and discovered that this is a style unique to Charleston, and is called “Single House”. Many of these homes had beautiful gardens or fountains in the side yard, much like the central courtyards in New Orleans architecture. It was lovely.

And if you are a history buff, you could spend a lifetime in Charleston exploring. We passed Fort Sumter on our way into the harbor, where the first shots of the Civil War broke out. We walked along the Battery, the public waterfron park facing Fort Sumter, where the wealthy Southern elites came down to applaud and cheer as the new Confederate Army shelled the Union troops stationed in Ft. Sumter. All over town were plaques and monuments to various historical events, and there was one in particular that really got to me.

We had opted to tie up to a dock rather than anchor out- we were tired and didn’t want to have to mess with the dinghy to go ashore. There was a major marina on one side of the city, and a smaller one on the other- I picked the smaller one (cost had a lot to do with it), and as we checked in with the office, they handed us a packet of tourist info. I was skimming through some of it, and this jumped out at me: the dock we were tied up at, where were living for the next day or so, was once known as Gadsden’s Wharf. It was the disembarkation point, and storage warehouses, for 90% of the enslaved Africans brought into this country during the time of the African Slave Trade.

For some reason, it really hit me hard that we were occupying the same physical space where so much human misery had been perpetrated only a few generations ago. The next day as we walked the city, and came across The Exchange Building and Auction Yard where these human beings were put on the block and sold like cattle, it hit me again. I thought about all that we had been seeing, the wonderful architecture, the gardens and fountains, and realized that all that beauty has a cost built into it that is still being amortized to this day.

And so to quote Forrest Gump, “That’s all I’m gonna say about that.” We left Charleston the next day.