From C. P. W.
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.