Coastal nature coastal culture environmental histories of the georgia coast environmental history an
Coastal
Nature Coastal Culture Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast Environmental History and the American South 1st Edition Paul S. Sutter
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Remaking Wormsloe Plantation The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape Environmental History and the American South 24 1st Edition Drew A. Swanson
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isbn 9780820351872 (hardcover: alk. paper)
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To the late Mark Finlay, professor of history at Armstrong Atlantic State University (now Georgia Southern University–Armstrong Campus), a passionate scholar and devoted teacher whose leadership guided the first steps toward this book
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List of Illustrations xi
L ist of Sidebars xiii
Acknowledgments xv
Preface : Paul M. Pressly xvii
Introduction : Paul S. Sutter
The History of Conservation and the Conservation of History along the Georgia Coast 1
Chapt er 1: Mart A. Stewart Islands, Edges, and Globe: The Environmental History of the Georgia Coast 23
Ch apter 2: David Hurst Thomas Deep History of the Georgia Coast: A View from St. Catherines Island 57
Ch apter 3: S. Max Edelson
Visualizing the Southern Frontier: Cartography and Colonization in Eighteenth-Century Georgia 91
Ch apter 4: Edda L. Fields-Black Lowcountry Creoles: Coastal Georgia and South Carolina Environments and the Making of the Gullah Geechee 123
Chapter 5: Tiya Miles Haunted Waters: Stories of Slavery, Coastal Ghosts, and Environmental Consciousness 149
Chapter 6: Drew A. Swanson A Rhetoric of Ruin: Imagining and Reimagining the Georgia Coast 175
Chapter 7: Albert G. Way
Longleaf Pine, from Forest to Fiber: Production, Consumption, and the Cutover on Georgia’s Coastal Plain, 1865–1900 209
Chapter 8: William Boyd
Water Is for Fighting Over: Papermaking and the Struggle over Groundwater in Coastal Georgia, 1930s–2000s 243
Chapter 9: Christopher J. Manganiello
The Gold Standard: Sunbelt Environmentalism and Coastal Protection 279
Chapter 10: Janisse Ray
“The Majestic Scene East-ward”: Sense of Place in the Literature of the Georgia Coast 309
Contributors 331
Index 335
Figures
Int. 1 Charles Fraser, developer of Sea Pines and Amelia Island Plantations 3
Int. 2 African American protesters marching in favor of a proposed BASF plant 8
1.1 “The Abduction,” from F. R. Goulding, Robert and Harold (1853) 33
1.2 Local tidal flooding during a king tide event on Tybee Island 47
2.1 Aerial photograph of the central compound at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale 73
2.2 Bishop Gregory Hartmayer celebrating a Mass at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale 77
2.3 Gold and silver pietà from Mission Santa Catalina de Guale 80
3.1 Perspective of Savannah in 1733 by colonist Peter Gordon 98
3.2 “Map of the Inhabited Part of Georgia” 108
3.3 “A Map of the Lands Ceded to His Majesty by the Creek and Cherokee Indians,” 1773 116
5.1 Flying Home, by Ruth Showalter 153
5.2 Dunbar Creek bathed in light and shadow, St. Simons Island 162
5.3 Dunbar Creek, St. Simons Island 169
6.1 The ruins of Retreat Plantation on St. Simons Island, late 1930s 176
6.2 Ashantilly Plantation, McIntosh County, 1936 197
7.1 Brooklyn-side caisson for the Brooklyn Bridge 210
7.2 Loading schooner with lumber, Darien, Georgia, 1908 218
8.1 The new Union Bag and Paper Mill at Savannah in 1937 250
8.2 Diffusers at Union Bag’s Savannah mill 254
9.1 Marco Island, Florida, in the 1970s 292
9.2 Tidal salt marsh on the Georgia coast 300
10.1 William Bartram 317
10.2 Sidney Lanier 323
Tabl es
4.1 Herskovits’s “Scale of Intensity of New World Africanisms” 124
Maps
Int.1 The Georgia Coast 11
4.1 The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor 127
7.1 Central Georgia Timber Holdings of the Dodge Land and Lumber Company 229
8.1 The Floridan Aquifer 244
8.2 Discharge from and Recharge into the Floridan Aquifer prior to Development 245
8.3 Cones of Depression Formed in the Floridan Aquifer 257
A Georgia Salt Marsh Primer, by Charles Seabrook 44
The Earliest Residents of the Georgia Coast, by Matthew C. Sanger 64
The Guale People of Mission Santa Catalina, by Elliot H. Blair 78
Rice, Georgia’s First Staple Crop, by Paul M. Pressly 104
Indigo and the Atlantic World, by Dorinda G. Dallmeyer 112
Pin Point:
A Traditional African American Community, by Barbara Fertig 138
Noble Jones’s Wormsloe, by Sarah Ross 180
Georgia’s Naval Stores Industry, by Robert B. Outland III 214
Live Oaking, by Virginia Steele Wood 222
Charles Herty and the Savannah Pulp and Paper Laboratory, adapted from Germaine Reed 252
The Collapse of the Twentieth-Century Georgia Oyster Industry, by Randal L. Walker 282
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Many individuals deserve recognition for their efforts in bringing about Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast. First are members of the group of people who came together in 2014 to envision a symposium and lay the groundwork for a book. The committee, which first met at historic Wormsloe, included the late Mark Finlay, Armstrong Atlantic State University; John Inscoe, University of Georgia; Paul Sutter, University of Colorado Boulder; Dorinda Dallmeyer, University of Georgia; Sarah Ross, Wormsloe Institute; Chris Curtis, Armstrong Atlantic State University; Stan Deaton, Georgia Historical Society; Elizabeth DuBose, Ossabaw Island Foundation; and me, Paul Pressly.
The Ossabaw Island Foundation played a critical role in putting the many pieces together. A different planning committee, chaired by Lisa White and drawn from the trustees of the foundation, raised the necessary funds to underwrite the cost of both the symposium and the book. Elizabeth DuBose, executive director, and Robin Gunn, program coordinator, handled the logistics. It would be easy to underestimate their considerable efforts over two years unless one had the opportunity of watching it unfold as I did. Robin tirelessly worked to ensure that each step along the way lived up to her high standards of excellence. Throughout the project, I served as director of the Ossabaw Island Education Alliance, a partnership between the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and the foundation. That position offered me the running room to create the framework for this extended effort.
Paul Sutter provided the critical vision that pulled the many chapters together around common themes. His insistence on originality and big ideas as well as his attention to detail ensured the quality of the final manuscript. Without his investment of time and creative energy, our project would never have come to fruition in its present form. Tremendous credit also goes to the authors of the main essays in this volume, who not only produced excellent papers for the symposium but also worked diligently on revising them for publication. Caroline Grego provided critical support at the manuscript preparation stage.
I would like to thank the contributors of the sidebars for their selfless spirit. Many of them are historians in their own right or professional naturalists who
stopped to take the time to help our project. I also thank the many photographers and artists who willingly shared their images for this publication in the spirit of promoting the unique qualities of the Georgia coast.
The Georgia Humanities Council made a generous contribution to the publication of this book. The council deserves special thanks for its continuing efforts to realize its mission of “sharing stories that move us and make us.”
Finally, the enthusiasm, encouragement, and remarkable patience of the staff at the University of Georgia Press made this publication possible. Thanks go to the press’s Lisa Bayer, director; Mick Gusinde-Duffy, executive editor for scholarly and digital publishing; Bethany Snead, assistant acquisitions editor; the remarkable design and production staff; and Jim Giesen, editor for the Environmental History and the American South book series; as well as the anonymous reviewers.
Paul M. Pressly Coeditor
Director emeritus, Ossabaw Island Education Alliance
Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture had its origins in a well-received symposium on the environmental history of the Georgia coast that took place in Savannah during 2016. Scholars from around the United States made presentations on topics that ranged from Native Americans on barrier islands to the struggle over groundwater in the twentieth century. The organizers of the event were expecting a solid turnout but were surprised when over four hundred people showed up for the first presentation on a Thursday afternoon. It was an even greater surprise when most stayed until the closing at noon on Saturday.
Georgians are fascinated by a coast where nine of the thirteen barrier islands are undeveloped and five unconnected to the mainland by bridge. In the whole of the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Miami, the Georgia coast stands out today as atypical, a stretch where relatively few lights interrupt the blackness of night. However, that appearance can be deceptive. Over the centuries, the human presence has led to successive transformations of land and landscape in ways that raise multiple questions. The assumption that nature’s course is a progression from pristine to despoiled proves to be simplistic.
The symposium took aim at building a bridge between current scholarship on the history of the American South and the booming field of environmental history. The first comprehensive environmental history study of the Georgia coast came at a relatively late date—the publication of Mart Stewart’s “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (University of Georgia Press, 1996). Today Stewart’s volume remains the foundation for all subsequent studies. The chapters in Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture continue his work of exploring how successive communities of Native Americans, British imperialists, planters and enslaved people, lumbermen, wage-earning freedmen, vacationing industrialists, truck farmers, and river engineers developed distinctive relationships with the environment and produced distinctive coastal landscapes.
It took two years of effort to bring the conference about. The original idea lay with Mark Finlay, an environmental historian at Armstrong Atlantic State University, who secured the backing of the Ossabaw Island Foundation, Armstrong Atlantic State, and the Wormsloe Institute of Environmental History. After the first meeting, Dr. Finlay was killed in an automobile accident while
returning from a history conference. The symposium was dedicated to his memory.
The sponsors of the symposium and of this book represent important forces in the preservation and conservation of the coast. The Ossabaw Island Foundation promotes and manages educational, cultural, and scientific programs on Ossabaw, the third largest island off the coast of Georgia. It does so in partnership with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. Armstrong State University, renamed Georgia Southern University–Armstrong Campus, located in Savannah, has created a growing role for itself in environmental matters. The Wormsloe Institute, located at the site of one of Georgia’s oldest land grants and now a part of the University of Georgia, conducts interdisciplinary research across a wide range of fields, including ecology, geography, archaeology, and history.
Standing behind this project were Lisa Bayer, director of the University of Georgia Press, and Mick Gusinde-Duffy, senior editor of the press. It is fortunate that Paul Sutter, a major figure in environmental history, agreed to be the editor of this volume. He served as the founding editor of the University of Georgia Press’s Environmental History and the American South book series while on the faculty at the University of Georgia and is now in the middle of a productive and busy career teaching and publishing at the University of Colorado Boulder. I had the pleasure of a ringside seat watching his careful editing of the chapters as they came from the authors, and I appreciate his remarkable skill at shaping themes.
Our hope is that Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture will provide a fresh perspective on the history of the Georgia coast and a meaningful framework for discussion about its future.
Paul M. Pressly Coeditor
COASTAL NATURE, COASTAL CULTURE
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The History of Conservation and the Conservation of History along the Georgia Coast
Paul S. Sutter
In the March 27, 1971, issue of the New Yorker, John McPhee published the second in a triptych of essays on postwar conservation icon David Brower. Brower was the John Muir of his time, an unyielding champion of the American wilderness and a leading voice in the then-cresting environmental movement. As the executive director of the Sierra Club from 1952 to 1969, Brower had led the battle against the construction of a dam at Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument and then fought for almost a decade to secure passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. In the process, he built the Sierra Club into a formidable political force. After the club’s board ousted him in 1969, for financial mismanagement and general defiance, Brower immediately founded Friends of the Earth, and a year later he founded the League of Conservation Voters. By 1971 Brower was one of the leading voices of the modern environmental movement as well as one of its great institution builders. Hence McPhee’s interest in him.
Rather than writing a conventional profile of Brower, McPhee used each of his three essays to situate Brower with an ostensible adversary in a place of environmental controversy and to report the ensuing conversation. A week earlier, on March 20, McPhee’s first installment had featured Brower and a mining geologist named Charles Park on a backpacking trip into the Glacier Peak Wilderness in Washington’s North Cascade Mountains. Beneath Glacier Peak sat a lode of copper that the Kennecott Copper Company hoped to exploit by using the mining exception to the Wilderness Act. The third and most memorable installment in the series, which appeared on April 3, recounted a float trip down the Colorado River with legendary commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation and arch dam builder Floyd Dominy, with whom Brower had repeatedly clashed during his conservation career. Sandwiched between these
stories about the fate of two majestic western wilderness landscapes—a mountain and a river—was the shortest and least assuming of the three pieces, which featured Brower in conversation with a real estate developer named Charles E. Fraser over the fate of an island—Georgia’s Cumberland Island. Fraser considered himself a conservationist too, but he likened strict preservationists such as Brower to modern “druids” for their apparent preference for unspoiled nature over the needs of people. McPhee adapted and amplified this epithet as the title for his series and for the book that followed, Encounters with the Archdruid.1
Today Charles Fraser is best known for two signature resort developments that bookend and set off the Georgia coast—Sea Pines Plantation on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina and Amelia Island Plantation on Amelia Island in Florida. As large-scale residential and recreational developments go, they have their virtues. Both have been lauded as models for design in harmony with nature. Fraser clustered homes to minimize the footprint of his communities, and he kept them away from beaches and other fragile habitats, which allowed him to preserve large portions of these properties in their natural states. Fraser also blended his architectural and landscape designs with the local environment, and he made aggressive use of restrictive deeds and covenants to achieve conservation goals and aesthetic uniformity within his planned communities. He hoped most of all to avoid the crass commercialism that had come to define so much coastal development. In 1968, Fraser purchased three thousand acres on Cumberland Island, the largest and southernmost of Georgia’s barrier islands, and he was planning a similar resort development there, to be called Cumberland Oaks, when McPhee arranged for he and Brower to meet. 2
At the time of the Fraser-Brower encounter, Cumberland Island had only eleven permanent residents and the East Coast’s longest undeveloped beach, which made it attractive to both preservationists and developers. (Cumberland had also attracted the federal government’s attention; it had been the runner-up to Cape Canaveral as the site for a major NASA launch facility for the U.S. space program in the early 1960s.) As significantly, the almost centurylong reign of the Carnegie family as the primary stewards of the island was beginning to fray. Fraser had acquired his Cumberland Island real estate from three descendants of Andrew Carnegie’s brother Thomas, who, with his wife, Lucy, had purchased most of the island in the early 1880s. By the late 1960s, the financially stressed Carnegie heirs, freed from a restrictive trust that Lucy had put on the property, were divided over how, and even whether, to main-
tain the island as a family retreat. It was a familiar dynamic that had played out and would play out on many of Georgia’s other barrier islands.3
The Carnegie heirs and some of Charles Fraser’s other opponents viewed him as an arriviste threat to the patrician conservation regime that had prevailed on Cumberland Island since the end of Reconstruction, but the Fraser family had deep Georgia roots. The first Frasers had landed in New England with the Puritans, but they soon drifted south, and by the early nineteenth century they were one of Georgia’s largest slaveholding families. According to McPhee, Fraser liked to remind the critics of his proposed Cumberland development that his family had been substantial landowners in the state well before the Carnegies had even migrated to the Americas. Charles was himself a product of coastal Georgia, even though his most important work would be done at its edges. He was born in 1929 in Hinesville, the seat of Liberty County, which sat in the piney woods just back of the coast. The Hinesville of Fraser’s childhood was a quiet town, although that changed in 1940 when the U.S. military purchased 280,000 adjacent acres and turned it into Fort Stew-
Figure Int.1. Charles Fraser, the developer of Sea Pines and Amelia Island Plantations, circa 1962. Courtesy of the Charles Fraser Estate.
art, which quickly became a vibrant mustering ground for the American invasion of Europe. This was but one example of the strong role that the military— and military considerations—would continue to play in coastal Georgia’s environmental history. Fraser’s father, General Joseph B. Fraser, was himself a military man, but he was also a successful lumber merchant, timber being another industry that had a profound impact on the region. From the end of Reconstruction until about World War I, the timber industry cut the region’s longleaf pine forest in a fit of activity that remade an entire bioregion. And thanks in part to the pioneering work of Savannah resident Charles Herty, the young Charles Fraser witnessed a new chapter in the region’s forest history: the rise of the pulp and paper industry that would again transform the region’s environment after World War II.4
Charles Fraser would make his mark by taking his father’s timber business in an entirely different direction. Joseph Fraser and several Hinesville partners had formed the Hilton Head Company in 1949 and soon purchased most of Hilton Head Island, just across the state line from Savannah, with plans to cut its timber, much of it second-growth. At the time, the island had several hundred residents, most of them African American descendants of former slaves who had either worked the island’s antebellum Sea Island cotton plantations or had fled to the island during the Civil War.5 Hilton Head was a key site for the Port Royal Experiment, an ambitious but short-lived program that the historian Willie Lee Rose famously called a “rehearsal for Reconstruction.” The Port Royal Experiment involved the Union Army and northern philanthropists resettling freedpeople on former plantation lands, restoring plantation production with wage labor, and creating schools, churches, hospitals, and even housing for freedpeople. In fact, Union general Ormsby Mitchel oversaw the creation of an entire town for resettled freedpeople on Hilton Head, called Mitchelville in his honor. It came complete with rectilinear streets, quarter-acre lots, modest wooden homes, civil and religious institutions, rules about community behavior and sanitation, and democratic self-governance. While the Port Royal Experiment did not survive the end of the war, and Mitchelville suffered when the Union Army left a few years later, the town lasted until the late nineteenth century, and a remnant settlement lingered into the early twentieth century.6 By the time that Charles Fraser encountered Hilton Head and first began to imagine a different kind of planned community for the southern end of the island, Mitchelville had ceased to exist, but it deserves a place of primacy in the history of Hilton Head real estate development. Charles Fraser, in other words, was not working with a blank slate. Fraser knew that Hilton Head had a history, but he also saw a region poised
on the edge of substantial change, and he was ready to push the island in a new direction. Fraser’s father and the other Hilton Head Company partners soon divided their holdings, with Joseph getting the southern portion of the island. Meanwhile, after he finished an undergraduate degree at the University of Georgia, Charles Fraser headed to Yale Law School, where he mastered the legal tactics that he later used to shape and control his resort developments. Fraser then purchased his father’s portion of the island, and beginning in 1957 he set about developing Sea Pines Plantation. In its mixture of golf and other active recreation with residential real estate, Sea Pines spawned numerous imitators along the southern coast during the postwar years. More importantly, it was but one example of how postwar coastal development overwrote landscapes with deep and complex environmental histories.7
Sea Pines emerged at a moment of reckoning for many of the Lowcountry’s barrier islands and their residents, when the heirs of wealthy industrial families and the descendants of slaves were both struggling to retain their legal, historical, and cultural claims to the islands, and when new economic forces like the postwar timber boom, the industrialization of the South, the incipient Sunbelt migration, the rise of automobility, the growth of southern tourism, and new forms of residential development threatened to transform landscapes that had slowly re-naturalized over the previous three-fourths of a century.
By the time Charles Fraser purchased his Cumberland Island acreage a decade later, an additional force had entered the mix—the modern environmental movement, embodied by David Brower. In building Sea Pines, Fraser had operated largely unencumbered by organized environmental opposition, but he would not be so lucky on Cumberland Island. Brower, it turns out, was the least of his problems. In McPhee’s profile, Brower seemed at once immune to Fraser’s provocations and amenable to his vision for a contained and responsible resort. If a portion of the island was inevitably going to be developed, then Brower agreed that Fraser was the person to do it. McPhee had to throw in an additional character—Sam Candler, scion of the Coca-Cola founders, whose family owned the northern tenth of Cumberland Island—to give voice to the strict preservationist position to which Candler and a number of the Carnegie heirs still adhered. It was a position that, in the absence of sustaining family wealth, had come to rest on the prospect of National Park Service stewardship for the island. As McPhee made clear, vast industrial profits had made possible the “beautiful and fragile anachronism” that was Cumberland Island at the beginning of the 1970s. It was a place whose private seclusion and rustic comforts he enjoyed guiltily, knowing that, no matter who prevailed in the battle over the island’s future, Cumberland was going to change.8
Charles Fraser never developed Cumberland Oaks. Environmentalists, including the local chapter of the Sierra Club, and Carnegie heirs, whose cooperation was essential to Fraser’s development plan, offered so much opposition that Fraser eventually sold his property to the National Park Foundation, which then transferred the land to the federal government. Most of the island’s other residents agreed to sell out as well, though they retained certain exclusive property rights for several generations into the future. In 1972 Congress created Cumberland Island National Seashore from these consolidated properties, a decidedly happy ending for the archdruid and his followers. Ten years later Congress designated almost ten thousand acres of Cumberland Island National Seashore as wilderness.9
Cumberland Island’s public protection came amid a punctuated flurry of environmental activism and state and federal environmental legislation that birthed the modern environmental movement. The environmental movement, in turn, gave new meaning to the Georgia coast. At the state level, the Coastal Marshlands Protection Act of 1970 limited development in the hundreds of thousands of acres of marsh that sat between Georgia’s barrier islands and its mainland, an achievement made possible in part by the research of ecologists such as the University of Georgia’s Eugene Odum. While the poet Sidney Lanier had sung the praises of the aesthetics of Georgia’s coastal marshes almost a century earlier, it took the insights of modern ecosystem ecology to create an ironclad case for their economic and environmental value. In the process, the Georgia coast became a vital center for research in coastal ecology and oceanography. The many federal environmental achievements of this period, from the Wilderness Act of 1964 through the Endangered Species Act of 1973, also shaped the Georgia coast. To give just one example, the Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970, banned DDT in 1972, assuring that coastal visitors for generations to come would enjoy the aerial grace of brown pelicans gliding in formation above the strand. (Despite their current ubiquity, it is worth remembering that the Fish and Wildlife Service removed brown pelicans from the Endangered Species List only in 2009.) The late 1960s and early 1970s were thus pivotal years in the protection of Georgia’s coastal nature, and nothing better symbolized that than national park status for Georgia’s largest barrier island. More than that, though, John McPhee’s choice to include the Cumberland story in his profile of David Brower reminds us of the Georgia coast’s quiet but important place in the rise of the larger environmental movement.10
The story of Cumberland Island National Seashore’s creation is only one among many such stories—each unique but all of a sort—that help to explain
a distinctive and defining feature of Georgia’s barrier islands: most of them, to this day, remain undeveloped, and many of them enjoy formal conservation status of one sort or another. Blackbeard, Wolf, and Wassaw Islands are all national wildlife refuges managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. All of Ossabaw Island and most of Sapelo Island is owned by the State of Georgia and managed by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. Ossabaw is a heritage preserve, the first of its kind in the state, and public use is limited to scientific, cultural, and educational activities. Much of Sapelo is protected as a national estuarine research reserve, a designation overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Jekyll Island is a state park, owned by the State of Georgia but managed by an independent authority—the Jekyll Island Authority—that oversees the island and provides a mix of preserved and developed tourist landscapes. A few of Georgia’s other barrier islands, including St. Catherines and Little St. Simons, are protected in private ownership, with almost no development. Aside from portions of Jekyll, only Tybee Island, St. Simons Island, and Sea Island are substantially developed. Surely this happy state of affairs, this distinctive conservation patchwork, can be classed as a victory for environmentalists.
Environmentalism, however, is always more complicated than it seems. At the very moment that John McPhee was chaperoning the encounter between David Brower and Charles Fraser and listening in on their conversations about the future of Cumberland Island, Fraser was deeply embroiled in another environmental controversy—one that McPhee only briefly mentioned in his profile. In 1969 the German chemical company BASF, lured by the state of South Carolina’s aggressive recruiting efforts, announced plans to locate a major manufacturing facility on Victoria Bluff, overlooking Port Royal Sound, just inland from Hilton Head Island. Strong opposition to the plan emerged quickly, and the fight against the BASF facility soon gained considerable national attention. It helped that the controversy reached its peak just as millions of Americans celebrated the first Earth Day in April 1970. Barry Commoner, the man who Time magazine had just called the “Paul Revere of Ecology,” was enlisted in the fight. But anchoring the opposition to BASF’s plans were residents of Hilton Head’s exclusive resort communities, including Sea Pines, and Charles Fraser emerged as one of their most vocal leaders. While Fraser and many of the other well-connected Hilton Head residents who organized and bankrolled the campaign against BASF resisted calling themselves “environmentalists,” and while some professed environmentalists involved in the campaign felt uneasy about their alliance with wealthy resort developers and privileged homeowners, the advocacy of Fraser and his allies nonetheless illustrated the role that
Figure Int.2. African American protesters marching in favor of the proposed BASF plant that would have been built near Hilton Head Island and to which Charles Fraser led the opposition. The photo was published May 7, 1970, in the Beaufort Gazette (Bluffton, SC). Photo by Bessie Hookstra/Beaufort Gazette.
these new coastal residents, most of whom had moved to the region for its environmental amenities, would play in defining the importance of coastal environmental protection and even what counted as environmental protection. By pitting Fraser against Brower and preservation against development, McPhee’s piece had missed how vital Fraser and his constituents were to setting the modern coastal environmental agenda. Environmental protection and real estate development had a more complicated relationship than McPhee let on, and the BASF controversy made that plain.11
The BASF controversy also illustrated some of the racial complexities involved in the environmental politics of coastal protection circa 1970. For their part, BASF and its allies in the state’s political and business communities insisted that the plant would play a major role in alleviating the region’s poverty, particularly in providing employment to African Americans, and they portrayed Fraser and his allies not as selfless protectors of coastal nature but privileged defenders of their wealthy enclaves. How African Americans felt about
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Project Gutenberg eBook of Travels and discoveries in North and Central Africa
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Travels and discoveries in North and Central Africa Including accounts of Tripoli, the Sahara, the remarkable kingdom of Bornu, and the countries around Lake Chad
Author: Heinrich Barth
Editor: G. T. Bettany
Release date: March 11, 2024 [eBook #73138]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Ward, Lock, and Co, 1890
Credits: Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAVELS AND DISCOVERIES IN NORTH AND CENTRAL AFRICA ***
BARTH’S TRAVELS
IN NORTH AND CENTRAL AFRICA
The Minerva Library OF FAMOUS BOOKS.
Edited by G. T. BETTANY, M.A.
1. CHARLES DARWIN’S JOURNAL during a Voyage in the ‘Beagle.’
2. THE INGOLDSBY LEGENDS.
3. BORROW’S BIBLE IN SPAIN.
4. EMERSON’S PROSE WORKS.
5. GALTON’S TROPICAL SOUTH AFRICA.
6. MANZONI’S THE BETROTHED LOVERS.
7. GOETHE’S FAUST (Complete). Bayard Taylor.
8. WALLACE’S TRAVELS ON THE AMAZON.
9. DEAN STANLEY’S LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD.
10. POE’S TALES OF ADVENTURE, MYSTERY, AND IMAGINATION.
11. COMEDIES BY MOLIÈRE.
12. FORSTER’S LIFE OF GOLDSMITH.
13. LANE’S MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE MODERN EGYPTIANS.
14. TORRENS’ LIFE OF MELBOURNE.
15. THACKERAY’S VANITY FAIR.
16. BARTH’S TRAVELS IN NORTH AND CENTRAL AFRICA.
London: W , L C
KANEMBU CHIEF.
THE MINERVA LIBRARY OF FAMOUS BOOKS.
Edited by G. T. BETTANY, M.A., B.Sc.
TRAVELS AND DISCOVERIES IN NORTH
AND CENTRAL AFRICA.
INCLUDING ACCOUNTS OF TRIPOLI, THE SAHARA, THE REMARKABLE KINGDOM OF BORNU, AND THE COUNTRIES AROUND LAKE CHAD.
BY HENRY BARTH, P .D., D.C.L.
With Full-page Illustrations and the Original Woodcut Illustrations, and a Memoir of the Author. WARD, LOCK, AND CO., LONDON, NEW YORK, AND MELBOURNE. 1890.
[All rights reserved ]
INTRODUCTION.
The travels of Dr. Barth in Northern and Central Africa rank among the foremost of the enterprises which have illuminated our ignorance about Central Africa. They have an especial value, too, as being almost the sole record of a state of things which has considerably changed since his time, and will no doubt rapidly change still further.
Henry Barth was born in Hamburg on February 16th, 1821. During his education at the Johanneum he showed a special taste for languages and history. In the autumn of 1839 he entered at the University of Berlin, studying philology under Böckh. While attending Carl Ritter’s geographical lectures, he displayed a predilection for the countries surrounding the Mediterranean, which he continued to manifest throughout his whole life. In August 1840 he went to Italy, travelling from Venice as far as Sicily In 1841, after many fluctuations of mind, he fixed his attention definitely on the classical Mediterranean basin, and especially the history and influence of the Greek colonies. He took his degree in the summer of 1844 with an essay on the commercial history of the Corinthians, and in January 1845 started for three years’ travels in the Mediterranean. He traversed France, Spain, the northern coast of Africa, the peninsula of Sinai, Palestine, Syria, Cyprus, Asia Minor, and thence returned through Greece to Berlin just before the events of March 1848. Notwithstanding the political troubles, he gained the right of giving public lectures; and in the summer of 1849 he gave a course “On the Topography of Some of the Most Renowned Nations of Antiquity.” Then followed the message from Baron Bunsen which is detailed in the author’s preface, and the great journey which is here described. In it he travelled from Tripoli to Bórnu, then through Ádamáwa, Baghirmi, Sókoto, etc., to Timbúktu, finally returning to Tripoli in August 1855, after nearly six years’ absence. His great book, published in 1857 in German and English in five volumes, is the most important work ever written on the districts of which it treats.
We here present the first half, with the original wood engravings and reproductions of some of the lithographic plates. Barth not being a naturalist, his work differs considerably from those of Darwin and Wallace; but to make up for this he is extremely rich in topographical, historical, and anthropological details.
On his return Barth found plenty of work to do. From 1863 he was Professor of Geography in the University. He founded the Carl Ritter Institute, and was President of the Geographical Society. On completing his book on Africa, he carried his researches farther among the Mediterranean lands. In the autumn of 1858 he travelled over the northern half of Asia Minor, from Trebizond through Cæsarea to Scutari. In 1861 he visited Spain; in 1862, the interior of Turkey in Europe; 1863, the Alps; 1864, Italy; 1865, Turkey again. In that year he died (November 25) after two days’ illness, in the midst of most zealous work. He wrote, beside the present work, “Travels, in the Coasts Bordering the Mediterranean,” vol. i., 1849; “Journey from Trebizond to Scutari,” 1860; “Journey through the Interior of Turkey in Europe,” 1864. His great philological work on the vocabularies of Central Africa was left incomplete, only two parts having been published, 1862-63.
G. T. B.
PREFACE.
On the 5th of October, 1849, at Berlin, Professor Carl Ritter informed me that the British Government was about to send Mr. Richardson on a mission to Central Africa, and that they had offered, through the Chevalier Bunsen, to allow a German traveller to join the mission, provided he was willing to contribute two hundred pounds for his own personal travelling expenses.
I had commenced lecturing at the University of Berlin on comparative geography and the colonial commerce of antiquity, and had just at that time published the first volume of my “Wanderings Round the Mediterranean,” which comprised my journey through Barbary. Having undertaken this journey quite alone, I spent nearly my whole time with the Arabs, and familiarized myself with that state of human society where the camel is man’s daily companion, and the culture of the date-tree his chief occupation. I made long journeys through desert tracts; I travelled all round the Great Syrtis, and, passing through the picturesque little tract of Cyrenaica, traversed the whole country towards Egypt; I wandered about for above a month in the desert valleys between Aswán and Kosér, and afterwards pursued my journey by land all the way through Syria and Asia Minor to Constantinople.
While traversing these extensive tracts, where European comfort is never altogether out of reach, where lost supplies may be easily replaced, and where the protection of European powers is not quite without avail, I had often cast a wistful look towards those unknown or little-known regions in the interior, which stand in frequent, though irregular, connection with the coast. As a lover of ancient history, I had been led towards those regions rather through the commerce of ancient Carthage, than by the thread of modern discovery; and the desire to know something more about them acted on me like a charm. In the course of a conversation I once held with a Háusa slave in Káf, in the regency of Tunis, he, seeing the interest I took in
his native country, made use of these simple but impressive words: “Please God, you shall go and visit Kanó.” These words were constantly ringing in my ears; and though overpowered for a time by the vivid impressions of interesting and picturesque countries, they echoed with renewed intensity as soon as I was restored to the tranquillity of European life.
During my three years’ travelling I had ample opportunity of testing the efficacy of British protection; I experienced the kindness of all Her Britannic Majesty’s consuls from Tangiers to Brúsa, and often enjoyed their hospitality. It was solely their protection which enabled me to traverse with some degree of security those more desert tracts through which I wandered. Colonel Warrington, Her Majesty’s consul in Tripoli, who seems to have had some presentiment of my capabilities as an African explorer, even promised me his full assistance if I should try to penetrate into the interior. Besides this, my admiration of the wide extension of the British over the globe, their influence, their language, and their government, was such that I felt a strong inclination to become the humble means of carrying out their philanthropic views for the progressive civilization of the neglected races of Central Africa.
Under these circumstances, I volunteered cheerfully to accompany Mr. Richardson, on the sole condition, however, that the exploration of Central Africa should be made the principal object of the mission, instead of a secondary one, as had been originally contemplated.
In the meantime, while letters were interchanged between Berlin, London, and Paris (where Mr. Richardson at that time resided), my father, whom I had informed of my design, entreated me to desist from my perilous undertaking, with an earnestness which my filial duty did not allow me to resist; and giving way to Dr. Overweg, who in youthful enthusiasm came immediately forward to volunteer, I receded from my engagement. But it was too late, my offer having been officially accepted in London; and I therefore allayed my father’s anxiety, and joined the expedition.
It was a generous act of Lord Palmerston, who organized the expedition, to allow two foreign gentlemen to join it instead of one. A
sailor was besides attached to it; and a boat was also provided, in order to give full scope to the object of exploration. The choice of the sailor was unfortunate, and Mr. Richardson thought it best to send him back from Múrzuk; but the boat, which was carried throughout the difficult and circuitous road by Múrzuk, Ghát, Aïr, and Zínder, exciting the wonder and astonishment of all the tribes in the interior, ultimately reached its destination, though the director of the expedition himself had in the meanwhile unfortunately succumbed.
Government also allowed us to take out arms. At first it had been thought that the expedition ought to go unarmed, inasmuch as Mr. Richardson had made his first journey to Ghát without arms. But on that occasion he had gone as a private individual, without instruments, without presents, without anything; and we were to unite with the character of an expedition that of a mission,—that is to say, we were to explore the country while endeavouring at the same time to establish friendship with the chiefs and rulers of the different territories. It may be taken for granted that we should never have crossed the frontier of Aïr had we been unarmed; and when I entered upon my journey alone, it would have been impossible for me to proceed without arms through countries which are in a constant state of war, where no chief or ruler can protect a traveller except with a large escort, which is sure to run away as soon as there is any real danger.
It may be possible to travel without arms in some parts of Southern Africa; but there is this wide difference, that the natives of the latter are exclusively Pagans, while, along all those tracts which I have been exploring, Islamism and Paganism are constantly arrayed against each other in open or secret warfare, even if we leave out of view the unsafe state of the roads through large states consisting, though loosely connected together, of almost independent provinces. The traveller in such countries must carry arms; yet he must exercise the utmost discretion in using them. As for myself, I avoided giving offence to the men with whom I had to deal in peaceful intercourse, endeavouring to attach them to me by esteem and friendship. I have never proceeded onwards without leaving a sincere friend behind
me, and thus being sure that, if obliged to retrace my steps, I might do so with safety.
But I have more particular reason to be grateful for the opinion entertained of me by the British Government; for after Mr. Richardson had, in March 1851, fallen a victim to the noble enterprise to which he had devoted his life, Her Majesty’s Government honoured me with their confidence, and, in authorizing me to carry out the objects of the expedition, placed sufficient means at my disposal for the purpose. The position in which I was thus placed must be my excuse for undertaking, after the successful accomplishment of my labours, the difficult task of relating them in a language not my own.
In matters of science and humanity all nations ought to be united by one common interest, each contributing its share in proportion to its own peculiar disposition and calling. If I have been able to achieve something in geographical discovery, it is difficult to say how much of it is due to English, how much to German influence; for science, is built up of the materials collected by almost every nation, and, beyond all doubt, in geographical enterprise in general none has done more than the English, while, in Central Africa in particular, very little has been achieved by any but English travellers. Let it not, therefore, be attributed to an undue feeling of nationality if I correct any error of those who preceded me. It would be unpardonable if a traveller failed to penetrate further, or to obtain a clearer insight into the customs and the polity of the nations visited by him, or if he were unable to delineate the country with greater accuracy and precision, than those who went before him.
Every succeeding traveller is largely indebted to the labours of his predecessor. Thus our expedition would never have been able to achieve what it did, if Oudney, Denham, and Clapperton had not gone before us; nor would these travellers have succeeded so far, had Lyon and Ritchie not opened the road to Fezzán; nor would Lyon have been able to reach Tejérri, if Captain (now Rear-Admiral) Smyth had not shown the way to Ghírza. To Smyth, seconded by Colonel Warrington, is due the merit of having attracted the attention of the British Government to the favourable situation of Tripoli for
facilitating intercourse with Central Africa; and if at present the rivercommunication along the Tsádda or Bénuwé seems to hold out a prospect of an easier approach to those regions, the importance of Tripoli must not be underrated, for it may long remain the most available port from which a steady communication with many parts of that continent can be kept up.
I had the good fortune to see my discoveries placed on a stable basis before they were brought to a close, by the astronomical observations of Dr. Vogel, who was sent out by Her Britannic Majesty’s Government for the purpose of joining the expedition; and I have only to regret that this gentleman was not my companion from the beginning of my journey, as exact astronomical observations, such as he has made, are of the utmost importance in any geographical exploration. By moving the generally-accepted position of Kúkawa more than a degree to the westward, the whole map of the interior has been changed very considerably. The position assigned by Dr. Vogel to Zínder gives to the whole western route, from Ghát through the country of Ásben, a well-fixed terminating point, while at the same it serves to check my route to Timbúktu. If, however, this topic be left out of consideration, it will be found that the maps made by me on the journey, under many privations, were a close approximation to the truth. But now all that pertains to physical features and geographical position has been laid down, and executed with artistic skill and scientific precision, by Dr. Petermann.
The principal merit which I claim for myself in this respect is that of having noted the whole configuration of the country; and my chief object has been to represent the tribes and nations with whom I came in contact, in their historical and ethnographical relation to the rest of mankind, as well as in their physical relation to that tract of country in which they live. If, in this respect, I have succeeded in placing before the eyes of the public a new and animated picture, and connected those apparently savage and degraded tribes more intimately with the history of races placed on a higher level of civilization, I shall be amply recompensed for the toils and dangers I have gone through.
My companion, Dr Overweg, was a clever and active young geologist; but, unfortunately, he was deficient in that general knowledge of natural science which is required for comprehending all the various phenomena occurring on a journey into unknown regions. Having never before risked his life on a dangerous expedition, he never for a moment doubted that it might not be his good fortune to return home in safety; and he therefore did not always bestow that care upon his journal which is so desirable in such an enterprise. Nevertheless, almost all his observations of latitude have been found correct, while his memoranda, if deciphered at leisure, might still yield a rich harvest.
One of the principal objects which Her Britannic Majesty’s Government had always in view in these African expeditions was the abolition of the slave-trade. This, too, was zealously advocated by the late Mr. Richardson, and, I trust, has been as zealously carried out by myself whenever it was in my power to do so, although, as an explorer on a journey of discovery, I was induced, after mature reflection, to place myself under the protection of an expeditionary army, whose object it was to subdue another tribe, and eventually to carry away a large proportion of the conquered into slavery. Now, it should always be borne in mind that there is a broad distinction between the slave-trade and domestic slavery. The foreign slavetrade may, comparatively speaking, be easily abolished, though the difficulties of watching over contraband attempts have been shown sufficiently by many years’ experience. With the abolition of the slave-trade all along the northern and south-western coast of Africa, slaves will cease to be brought down to the coast; and in this way a great deal of the mischief and misery necessarily resulting from this inhuman traffic will be cut off. But this, unfortunately, forms only a small part of the evil.
There can be no doubt that the most horrible topic connected with slavery is slave-hunting; and this is carried on not only for the purpose of supplying the foreign market, but, in a far more extensive degree, for supplying the wants of domestic slavery. Hence it was necessary that I should become acquainted with the real state of these most important features of African society, in order to speak
clearly about them; for with what authority could I expatiate on the horrors and the destruction accompanying such an expedition, if I were not speaking as an eye-witness? But having myself accompanied such a host on a grand scale, I shall be able to lay before the public a picture of the cheerful comfort, as well as the domestic happiness, of a considerable portion of the human race, which, though in a low, is not at all in a degraded state of civilization, as well as the wanton and cruel manner in which this happiness is destroyed, and its peaceful abodes changed into desolation. Moreover, this very expedition afforded me the best opportunity of convincing the rulers of Bórnu of the injury which such a perverse system entails upon themselves.
But besides this, it was of the utmost importance to visit the country of the Músgu; for while that region had been represented by the last expedition as an almost inaccessible mountain-chain, attached to that group which Major Denham observed on his enterprising but unfortunate expedition with Bú-Khalúm, I convinced myself on my journey to Ádamáwa, from the information which I gathered from the natives, that the mountains of Mándará are entirely insulated towards the east. I considered it, therefore, a matter of great geographical importance to visit that country, which, being situated between the rivers Shárí and Bénuwé, could alone afford the proof whether there was any connection between these two rivers.
I shall have frequent occasion to refer, in my journal, to conversations which I had with the natives on religious subjects. I may say that I have always avowed my religion, and defended the pure principles of Christianity against those of Islám; only once was I obliged, for about a month, in order to carry out my project of reaching Timbúktu, to assume the character of a Moslem. Had I not resorted to this expedient, it would have been absolutely impossible to achieve such a project, since I was then under the protection of no chief whatever, and had to pass through the country of the fanatic and barbarous hordes of the Tuarek. But though, with this sole exception, I have never denied my character of a Christian, I thought it prudent to conform to the innocent prejudices of the people around
me, adopting a dress which is at once better adapted to the climate and more decorous in the eyes of the natives. One great cause of my popularity was the custom of alms-giving. By this means I won the esteem of the natives, who took such a lively interest in my wellbeing that, even when I was extremely ill, they used to say, “ʿAbd el Kerím[1] shall not die.”
I have given a full description of my preparatory excursion through the mountainous region round Tripoli; for though this is not altogether a new country, any one who compares my map with that of Lyon or Denham, will see how little the very interesting physical features of this tract had been known before, while, at a time when the whole Turkish empire is about to undergo a great transformation, it seems well worth while to lay also the state of this part of its vast dominions in a more complete manner before the European public.
Of the first part of our expedition there has already appeared the Narrative of the late Mr. Richardson, published from his manuscript journals, which I was fortunately able to send home from Kúkawa. It is full of minute incidents of travelling life, so very instructive to the general reader. But from my point of view, I had to look very differently at the objects which presented themselves; and Mr. Richardson, if he had lived to work out his memoranda himself, would not have failed to give to his Journal a more lasting interest. Moreover, my stay in Ágades afforded me quite a different insight into the life, the history, and geography of those regions, and brought me into contact with Timbúktu.
Extending over a tract of country of twenty-four degrees from north to south, and twenty degrees from east to west, in the broadest part of the continent of Africa, my travels necessarily comprise subjects of great interest and diversity.
After having traversed vast deserts of the most barren soil, and scenes of the most frightful desolation, I met with fertile lands irrigated by large navigable rivers and extensive central lakes, ornamented with the finest timber, and producing various species of grain, rice, sesamum, ground-nuts, in unlimited abundance, the sugar-cane, etc., together with cotton and indigo, the most valuable
commodities of trade. The whole of Central Africa, from Bagírmi to the east as far as Timbúktu to the west (as will be seen in my narrative), abounds in these products. The natives of these regions not only weave their own cotton, but dye their home-made shirts with their own indigo. The river, the far-famed Niger, which gives access to these regions by means of its eastern branch, the Bénuwé, which I discovered, affords an uninterrupted navigable sheet of water for more than six hundred miles into the very heart of the country. Its western branch is obstructed by rapids at the distance of about three hundred and fifty miles from the coast; but even at that point it is probably not impassable in the present state of navigation, while, higher up, the river opens an immense highroad for nearly one thousand miles into the very heart of Western Africa, so rich in every kind of produce.
The same diversity of soil and produce which the regions traversed by me exhibit is also observed with respect to man. Starting from Tripoli in the north, we proceed from the settlements of the Arab and the Berber, the poor remnants of the vast empires of the middle ages, into a country dotted with splendid ruins from the period of the Roman dominion, through the wild roving hordes of the Tuarek, to the Negro and half-Negro tribes, and to the very border of the South African nations. In the regions of Central Africa there exists not one and the same stock, as in South Africa; but the greatest diversity of tribes, or rather nations, prevails, with idioms entirely distinct. The great and momentous struggle between Islamism and Paganism is here continually going on, causing every day the most painful and affecting results, while the miseries arising from slavery and the slave-trade are here revealed in their most repulsive features. We find Mohammedan learning engrafted on the ignorance and simplicity of the black races, and the gaudy magnificence and strict ceremonial of large empires side by side with the barbarous simplicity of naked and half-naked tribes. We here trace a historical thread which guides us through this labyrinth of tribes and overthrown kingdoms; and a lively interest is awakened by reflecting on their possible progress and restoration, through the intercourse with more civilized parts of the world. Finally, we find here commerce in every direction radiating from Kanó, the great
emporium of Central Africa, and spreading the manufactures of that industrious region over the whole of Western Africa.
I cannot conclude these prefatory remarks without expressing my sincere thanks for the great interest shown in my proceedings by so many eminent men in this country, as well as for the distinction of the Victoria medal awarded to me by the Royal Geographical Society. As I may flatter myself that, by the success which attended my efforts, I have encouraged further undertakings in these as well as in other quarters of Africa, so it will be my greatest satisfaction, if this narrative should give a fresh impulse to the endeavours to open the fertile regions of Central Africa to European commerce and civilization.
Whatever may be the value of this work, the Author believes that it has been enhanced by the views and illustrations with which it is embellished. These have been executed with artistical skill and the strictest fidelity, from my sketches, by Mr. Bernatz, the well-known author of the beautiful “Scenes in Æthiopia.”
I will only add a few words relative to the spelling of native names, —rather a difficult subject in a conflux of languages of very different organization and unsettled orthography. I have constantly endeavoured to express the sounds as correctly as possible, but in the simplest way, assigning to the vowels always the same intonation which they have in Italian, and keeping as closely as possible to the principles adopted by the Asiatic Society. The greatest difficulty related to the “g” sound, which is written in various ways by the Africans, and puzzled even the Arabic writers of the middle ages. While the “k” in North Africa approaches the g in “give,” it takes the sound of it entirely in the Central African languages. On this ground, although I preferred writing “Azkár,” while the name might have been almost as well written “Azgár;” yet further into the interior the application of the g, as in “Ágades,” “Góber,” and so on, was more correct. The ع of the Arabs has been expressed, in conformity with the various sounds which it adopts, by ʿa, ʿo and ʿu; the غ by gh, although it sounds in many words like an r; ج by j; the چ, which is frequent in the African languages, by ch.
