October 28th: Charleston

Charleston old town is very elegant, the lovely buildings in the historic part having been built on the profitability of the not-so-lovely slave trade and the plantations. One of the slave markets is still standing and has, predictably, been turned into a museum. As well as the usual interesting historical information and artefacts, they had actual recordings made in the 1930’s by old Negroes who had been slaves in their younger days, i.e. pre 1865. These accounts were truly fascinating and brought to life the reality and inhumanity of it all. I shouldn’t from now on complain about anything!

The streets are lined with palm trees, the palmetto palm, which is the main component of the flag of the State of South Carolina. The photo below is of the old market (not a slave one) framed by an avenue of these palms. The palmetto’s alternative name is the cabbage palm, which doesn’t sound anything like so romantic.

Charleston is a thriving container port today, located upriver of the old town. The modern bridge under which the container ships pass seems very much in harmony with the town’s elegant character, although from this distance it looks more like something an old sailor had made out of matchsticks and put in a bottle.

The harbour has other areas of interest. At the mouth is Fort Sumter where the first shots in the Civil War were fired. In early 1861 it was a Union military fort and the southern states had just formally withdrawn from the Union. The fort garrison declined to hand it over to the new Southern Confederacy, so the southerners decided to take it by force, on April 12th 1861, and in which they succeeded. It’s a National Monument, but there’s nothing much left of the original structure as it was battered extensively by the Union forces for a year before being abandoned by the Confederacy near the end of the war. It was never actually retaken.
Still on a military theme, anchored in the harbour is the floating museum USS Yorktown. This aircraft carrier was in active service from 1943 to 1970, serving in the Pacific in WW2, then Korea and finally Vietnam, but also picked up some Apollo astronauts in 1968. It looks kind of sad, as if waiting and wishing for another Japanese kamikaze attack to fend off rather than the daily Japanese tourist camera attack.

Crossing the harbour in the water taxi we saw lots of dolphins, some even leaping out of the water, but no good pictures, or of the many pelicans, except for this one which obligingly sat still on a pole to be photographed.