Chapter IV

Out from the docks we shot
Into the screaming night;
We steered by lightning's light;
The paddles beat a mad tattoo;
The gridded walking-beam
Pumped up, pumped down,
Against the misty gleam;
Faster and faster jets the stand-pipes' steam.
And the white water whirls
Astern in phosphorescent whorls--
It swirls
And then leads backward green with light
Of streaming foam across the velvet night.

By the last lightning flare,
That must be Sumter, bare
Against a torn cloud like a rag;
But now the wind begins to flag,
And as it fails the engines lag;
Then comes a low hail from the mast
"Avast"--
Again the engines slow--
Then stop--
And we were drifting like a log
As silent as a drowned corpse
In the sea-set tide,
Muffled in dripping fog.

No word from all the ship--
She seemed asleep--
Only the cluck of water and the feel
Of grim Atlantic rollers at the keel,
Nuzzling two fathoms deep;
They made her heel.
The porpoise played about our copper lip.
It seemed as if they were
The only living things in all that blur,
And we--
The only ship upon an ancient sea.

When suddenly a laugh broke through the spell;
It was so near
Our pulses lapsed a heart-beat,
Struck with fear.
The curtains of the fog were blown apart;
Stark in the sallow moonlight's metal day,
The white decks of a Yankee frigate lay.
I saw the glint of moonlight on her bell;
She was not twenty fathoms length away.
A man's face leaped out in the cherry glow
Of match flame in the hands he cupped
About the pipe whose curling wreaths he supped.
"Clang!" like a fireman's gong
Our engine signals rang;
The paddles thrashed into a frothy song;
Five ship's lengths we had forged along
Before their bugles sang.

We had ten long lengths on them
Before their ship began to swerve.
The rabid screw was frothing at her stern;
But I could feel the verve
Of our blithe timbers tremble; every nerve
Of our good race-horse ship
For open water seemed to yearn.

That was a Titan's race;
The answering rockets snaked it down the coast,
Dying like scarlet worms
Among the fog-wreaths; but we gained,
And when her flaming cannon stabbed the mist
They thundered at our ghost.

So we were gone,
With cotton in our furnace,
Once the aft-stacks flared,
And then we plied pitch-pine
Dampened with turpentine,
Until the black sea glared--
But we had gone--
Over the world's round shoulder
Thrust the dawn,
Their ugly, black masts dipping it hull down.
Three days the paddles beat while we drove on!

And I had won;
For on the fourth day as I sat
In the black coffin-shadow of a boat,
The burning decks a-wash with lime-white sun,
I saw the graybeard lookout swell his throat
And utter forth a glad and bronze hurrah,
"_Land Ho_!" he cried--
We lined the windward side
To cheer the washing palm tops of Nassau.

H.A.

[11] See the note on the chimes at back of book.

BEYOND DEBATE

Out from the wrought-iron gate
Miss Perdee drives in state;
Miss Perdee wears the thin smile
And the sleeves of 1888.

Miss Perdee's face is stifled as a sonnet;
Upon her wire-tight hair a duck-shaped bonnet
Nests, nodding with a _cachepeigne_
Of violets on it.

East Bay, some tea and talk, them home by King.
The horses have an antiquated plod;
The team is old, but not too old to balk
If driven north of Broad.

Miss Perdee wears the sure air of a queen,
Which only queens and Perdees can achieve.
The Perdees had blue blood in Adam's veins
When Adam had the rib he gave to Eve.

Back through the wrought-iron gate
Miss Perdee drives in state.
Miss Perdee lives down on the Battery!
Beyond debate.

H.A.

MARSH TACKIES[12]

Browsing on the salty marsh grass,
Barrel-ribbed and blowsy-bellied,
With a neigh as shrill as whistles
And their mouths red-raw from thistles,
I have seen the brown _marsh tackies_,
Hiding in the swamps at Kiawah,
With the gray mosquito patches
Gory on their shaggy thatches.
Balky, vicious, and degenerates,
They are small as Spanish jennets,
But their sires were with El Tarab,
When he conquered Andalusia
For the Prophet and the Arab;
And they came with Ponce de Leon,
When the Spaniard made a _peon_
And a Christian of the Carib.
Peering from palmetto thickets
At some fort's coquina wickets,
Startled Indians saw them grazing,
Thunder-stamping and amazing
As the beasts from other stars,
When they galloped down savannas,
And their masters seemed centaurs
With the new white metal blazing.
Thus they came, these little beasts,
With the men-at-arms and priests,
In the west with Coronado
When he reached the Colorado,
In the east with bold De Soto
In the search for El Dorado,
And they packed the bells and toys
That the chieftains loved like boys;
Struggling through the swamps and briars
After dons and tonsured friars;
Dying in the forests dismal,
Till the shrill of silver clarion
Brought the buzzards to the carrion
Round the smoke of lonely fires
In a continent abysmal.

So De Soto left them dying,
Heedless of their human crying;
Here he turned them loose to die
Underneath a foreign sky;
But they lived on thicket dross,
On the leaves and Spanish moss--
And I wonder, and I wonder,
When I hear the startled thunder
Of their hoofs die down the reaches
Of these Carolina beaches.

H.A.

[12] See the note at the back of the book.

BACK RIVER

"MEDWAY PLANTATION"

Back River! What a name
For yesterdays come back again today,
Reborn to be tomorrows still the same--
A landgrave built it when the English came;
Then men made houses well
With cunning hands.
And service wore a nearer, feudal guise--
Witness the stone where "Rose,
A faithful servant," lies.

_Parnassus_ stretches east, beyond that
The plantation once called _Ararat_;
But they have gone,
Forgotten as an ancient drinking song;
And the old houses, dull and roofless,
Gape, with their doorways
Like a dumb mouth toothless,
With snake-engendering rooms that wall in fear,
Silent, down forest roadways loved by deer.

Sometimes at nights
These skeletons of houses flash with lights,
And shadow-horsemen ride,
Chasing wraith-deer
With eery cry of hounds
And shuddering cheer;
While the moon makes her rounds,
Glimmering through windows dead
As the dead eyes in a dead man's head;
And there is heard a misty horn--
Down in the woods,
Among the moss-draped solitudes,
The voodoo rooster crows,
While owls hoot on forlorn.

But _Back River_ wears a different face;
It has not changed;--
Time seems to love the place;
Though all about it he has ranged,
Here he has not
Touched with his wand of rot--
Something of its immortal live-oak sap suffuses
Its sturdy men and houses and transfuses
Change into state.
The sunny hours wait at strange behest.
Here restless Time himself has come to rest.

The golden ivory of primeval light
Dwells in its Spanish moss,
Falling in living cascades from the trees,
And who goes there in summer hears the bees
Booming among the Pride of India trees,
Dull grumbling tones,
A deaf man dreams,
Like far-off rumbling sound of boulder-stones
Washed down by headlong streams.
This is Time's temple;
Here he sleepy lies,
Watching the buzzards circle in the skies,
While shrubs slough off the pod,
Making a carpet delicate
Of petals strewn upon the sod,
Fit for the silver slippers of the moon
Upon the streets of Nod.

I saw him once asleep
Down by the dark ponds
Where alligators creep.
He had been fishing with a willow withe,
And by him lay his hourglass and scythe,
Resting upon the grass;
They lay there in the sun,
And through the glass the sands had ceased to run.

H.A.

DUSK

They tell me she is beautiful, my City,
That she is colorful and quaint, alone
Among the cities. But I, I who have known
Her tenderness, her courage, and her pity,
Have felt her forces mould me, mind and bone,
Life after life, up from her first beginning.
How can I think of her in wood and stone!
To others she has given of her beauty,
Her gardens, and her dim, old, faded ways,
Her laughter, and her happy, drifting hours,
Glad, spendthrift April, squandering her flowers,
The sharp, still wonder of her Autumn days;
Her chimes that shimmer from St. Michael's steeple
Across the deep maturity of June,
Like sunlight slanting over open water
Under a high, blue, listless afternoon.
But when the dusk is deep upon the harbor,
She finds _me_ where her rivers meet and speak,
And while the constellations ride the silence
High overhead, her cheek is on _my_ cheek.
I know her in the thrill behind the dark
When sleep brims all her silent thoroughfares.
She is the glamor in the quiet park
That kindles simple things like grass and trees.
Wistful and wanton as her sea-born airs,
Bringer of dim, rich, age-old memories.
Out on the gloom-deep water, when the nights
Are choked with fog, and perilous, and blind,
She is the faith that tends the calling lights.
Hers is the stifled voice of harbor bells
Muffled and broken by the mist and wind.
Hers are the eyes through which I look on life
And find it brave and splendid. And the stir
Of hidden music shaping all my songs,
And these my songs, my all, belong to her.

D.H.

NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

NOTE ON THE CHIMES

TO ACCOMPANY "SILENCES"

The bells of Charleston, like the bells of London Town, have a peculiar interest. St. Michael's bells and clock were brought from England in 1764. When the British evacuated Charleston in 1782 they took the bells with them. A Mr. Ryhineu bought them in England and returned them. They were rehung in November, 1783. During the Civil War, St. Michael's steeple was the target for Federal artillery and fleet guns. In 1861 the bells were taken to Columbia, S.C., where two of them were stolen, and the rest injured by fire when the city was burned. Those left were again sent to England, and recast in the original moulds. In March, 1867, they once again rang out from the spire.

St. Phillip's Church stands in the old part of the town. During the Civil War its bells were cast into cannon. For a long time its steeple was used as a lighthouse. It is the center of forgotten things.

The bells of St. Matthew's are modern and speak of a new order, but all the bells are the voice of the town. They speak for her silences, which are eloquent.

NOTE ON "THE PIRATES"

The many inlets and sheltering coves of the Carolina coasts very early made the "low country" seaboard a rendezvous for pirates and a shelter to refit, and to bury their treasure.

As early as 1565 the French from Ribault's settlement succumbed to the temptation to plunder their rich Spanish neighbors; and in the century before the coming of the English, the lonely bays and estuaries saw strange ships from time to time. There was a pirate settlement by 1664 at Cape Fear River, where Governor Sayle did not arrive until 1670 to take formal possession for the Lords Proprietors of the colony.

The Peace of Utrecht turned many privateers into pirates, ships which had been habitually preying upon Spanish commerce since Blake's victory at Santa Cruz in 1657, and these gentlemen of fortune were at first welcome in the Carolinas. Nearly all the coin in circulation then was at first brought by such doubtful adventurers, and they were regarded as the natural protectors of the Carolinas against their powerful enemy, the Spaniard, to the south.

Gradually, however, this cordial attitude changed. It was a small step from attacking Spanish to plundering English commerce, and with the cultivation and export of rice and indigo, the demand for a safe sea passage grew overwhelming, while the coasts continued to be ravaged. The royal government was slow to act. In 1684 we learn that "the governor will not in all probability always reside in Charles Town, which is so near the sea as to be in danger of sudden attack by pirates;" nor was this an idle thought, for the town was blockaded by pirate ships at the harbor's mouth, and medicines and supplies demanded while citizens were held as hostages.

In 1718 Governor Spotswood of Virginia sent an expedition to North Carolina, which succeeded in surprising, capturing, and beheading the notorious "Black Beard," who in company with one Stede Bonnet, had long ravaged the coast with impunity.

In August of the same year word was brought to Charlestown that Bonnet with his ship the _Royal James_ was refitting in the Cape Fear River. Colonel William Rhett volunteered to attack him. With two sloops of eight guns each, the _Henry_ and the _Nymph_, and about 130 men in all, he set sail, and found Bonnet at anchor in the Cape Fear River. In making the attack, and during the encounter, all three ships ran aground. The fight raged desperately all day between the _Henry_ and the _Royal James_, the _Nymph_ being unable to get off the shoal and come to the help of her companion ship. Bonnet finally surrendered and was taken prisoner to Charlestown. It is this adventure which the poem celebrates.

Bonnet escaped, but was afterwards recaptured by Colonel Rhett on Sullivan's Island. He and about thirty of his crew were hanged about the corner of Meeting and Water Streets. Bonnet, himself, was hanged later than his crew, after a masterpiece of invective by the judge, who painted hell vividly. This pirate leader was dragged fainting to the gallows, and there was much sympathy for him, as it was said, "His humor of going a-pirating proceeded from a disorder of the mind ... occasioned by some discomforts he found in the married state."

NOTE ON "THE SEEWEES OF SEEWEE BAY"

The Seewee Indians, who lived on the shores of what is now known as Bull's Bay, S.C., but was formerly called Seewee Bay, became discontented with the small prices obtained from the white traders for pelts. Seeing the ships constantly coming into the Bay from England, they conceived the idea of building large canoes and reaching England over the ocean. Several huge canoes, larger than any heretofore built by Indians, were accordingly constructed; these were loaded with the proceeds of a season's hunting, and, manned by all the braves of the tribe, set out in the direction from which the ships came. A gale came up and the braves were never seen again. Their squaws gradually wandered off to other tribes. This event took place about 1696.

NOTE ON LA FAYETTE

TO ACCOMPANY "LA FAYETTE LANDS"

The Marquis de la Fayette, under the name of Gilbert du Motier, sailed from Bordeaux on the 26th of March, 1777, accompanied by the Baron Kalb and several French Army Officers. On the 14th of June, 1777, he first landed in America on North Island in Winyah Bay, near Georgetown, S.C., and was received at the house of Major Huger. In a letter to his wife, written soon after his landing, La Fayette says, "I first saw and judged of the life of the country at the house of a Major Huger." Detailed accounts of La Fayette's landing and reception still exist.

NOTE ON THEODOSIA BURR

TO ACCOMPANY "THE PRIEST AND THE PIRATE"

In 1801 Theodosia, daughter of Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States, married Joseph Alston of "The Oaks," Hobcaw Barony, S.C. They had one son, Aaron Burr Alston, who died in 1812, the same year that Joseph Alston was elected Governor of the State. On December 30th, 1812, at the urgent solicitation of her father, who had just returned from Europe, and who awaited her eagerly in New York, Theodosia set sail from Georgetown, S.C., in the pilot-boat schooner, "Patriot." Those on board were never seen again.

The vessel, which was being fitted out as a privateer, was carrying dismounted guns under her deck, and may have foundered in the severe gale of January 1st, 1813.

In 1869, however, a Dr. W.C. Pool attended a fisher family at Naggs Head, Kittyhawk, N.C. In the fisherman's hut hung an oil painting of a beautiful woman, which had been taken from an abandoned pilot-built schooner that drifted onto the North Carolina coast in that vicinity in January, 1813. No one was aboard and the vessel had evidently been looted. Ladies' clothes were found in great disorder in the cabin.

There was also a story told by a dying sailor who confessed that he had seen the crew of such a boat walk the plank, and that among them was a beautiful woman who walked into the sea with a Bible or prayer-book in her hand.

The painting is in the possession of the Burr-Alston connection, and is thought by them, on account of its striking family resemblance, to be a picture of Theodosia Burr. The painting story has often been scouted, but there is too much circumstantial evidence to ignore it in treating the legend.

NOTE TO "THE LAST CREW"

The "Fish-Boat" of the Confederate Navy, which exhaustive research indicates to have been the first submarine vessel to sink an enemy ship in time of war, was designed by Horace L. Hundley in 1863. This boat was twenty feet long, three and one-half feet wide, and five feet deep. Her motive power consisted of eight men whose duty it was to turn the crank of the propeller shaft by hand until the target had been reached. When this primitive craft was closed for diving there was only sufficient air to support life for half an hour. Since the torpedo was attached to the boat itself there was no chance of escape. The only hope was to reach and destroy the enemy vessel before the crew were suffocated or drowned.

Five successive volunteer crews died without reaching their objectives. But the sixth crew was successful in sinking the Federal blockading ship "Housatonic," their own craft being caught and crushed beneath the foundering vessel. These crews went to certain death in the night time, in such secrecy that it was often months before their own families knew the names of the men. And now, with the lapse of scarcely more than half a century, it has been possible to find the names of only sixteen of those who paid the price.

Because no nation of any time can point to a more inspiring example of self-sacrifice, and because now, in a country reunited and indissoluble, the traditions of both the North and the South are a common, glorious heritage, the poem, which presents the final episode in the drama, is written as a memorial to all who gave their lives in the venture.

D.H.

NOTE ON POE

TO ACCOMPANY "EDGAR ALLAN POE" AND "ALCHEMY"

In May, 1828, Poe enlisted in the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, and was assigned to Battery "H" of the First Artillery at Fort Independence. In October his battery was ordered to Fort Moultrie, Charleston, S.C. Poe spent a whole year on Sullivan's Island. Professor C. Alphonso Smith, the well-known Poe authority, says, "So far as I know, this was the only tropical background that Poe had ever seen." That the susceptible nature of the young poet was vastly impressed by the weirdness and melancholy scenery of the Carolina coast country, there can be very little doubt. The dank tarns and funereal woodlands of his landscapes, or at least the strong suggestion of them, may all be found here, and the scene of _The Goldbug_ is definitely laid on Sullivan's Island. Here are dim family vaults, and tracts of country in which the House of Usher might well stand.

"Dim vales and shadowy floods
And cloudy-looking woods
Whose forms we can't discover,
From the tears that drip all over"

was written while Poe was in the army at Fort Moultrie, and appeared in his second volume in 1829. There are later echoes.

"Around by lifting winds forgot
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie."

H.A.

"MARSH TACKIES"

"Marsh Tackies" is the name given by the negroes to the little, wild horses of the Carolina coast country's swamps and sea islands. Early traditions say that these horses were found by the English when they first came and that they are the descendants of runaways from the Spanish settlements to the South about St. Augustine, or horses turned loose by DeSoto upon his ill-fated march to the Mississippi. These horses pick up a precarious living in out-of-the-way sections along the coast, and are occasionally taken and broken in by the negroes. They are the "poor horse trash" of the section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alstons and Allstons of South Carolina S.C. GRAVES Annual Report of the Am. Hist. Ass. 1913 Aaron Burr, Memoirs, Life, and Letters Charleston Courier OLD FILES Charleston Mercury OLD FILES Charleston the Place and the People RAVENEL Colonial History of South Carolina LAWSON Defense of Charleston Harbor JOHNSON Diary from Dixie CHESTNUT Edgar Allan Poe WOODBURY Edgar Allan Poe, How to Know Him SMITH Edgar Allen Poe HARRISON Mobile Mercury OLD FILES Proceedings of the American Philos. Soc. VOL. XXVI Pirates, The Carolina HUGHSON, JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS PAMPHLET Submarines PAMPHLET, SMYTHE, A.T., JR. South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine VOL. XIV Theodosia PIDGIN