Dear Sir. Letters in history and today.

Botany Bay Road in Winter, Edisto Island, SC

Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Briefly, in the dreams of the early South Carolina colony, a perfect little island south of Charleston, was picked by the Lords Proprietors, and a plantation was planned, to be managed by Lord Ashley’s relative, Andrew Percivall. The plantation never materialized, as the founders later picked land for Charles Towne that was more easily accessible, where Charleston lies today, just north; and John Locke, the great philosopher from England, never set foot on Edisto Island, which bore his name on early maps of Carolina.

Locke and Dr. Henry Woodward, explorer, interpreter, first English settler, wrote letters to one another. Locke, insatiably curious, longed to learn the religion and customs of the native American Indians. Quite the letter writer, John Locke left an astounding 3,637 surviving letters, written to him and by him. (The most famous letter-writers of the ancient world, Cicero and Augustine, left only a few hundred each) Correspondence in the form of letter writing, in mid 17th century, was a practice central to English culture. Letters were read out loud, and it ’served also to rescue people from intellectual and personal isolation’. It is what social utilities like Facebook, do, too, in today’s culture, attractive because we Americans have become self isolating, the result of our convenience filled, independent lifestyles. My own life on this remote island is enriched by my online connection and correspondence, and I wonder it is not an effort of our culture to renew our lost connections to one another, like letter writing did in the 17th century, something one writer called a “phenomenon”.

Just who was the man who dreamed of living on the eden isle, the paradise called Edisto Island?

Palms and dunes on Edisto Island

STOP TRAVELER. The epitaph of John Locke, the philosopher, at his burial place at High Laver, a village in the Epping Forest district of the County of Essex, England, begins: “Near this place lies JOHN LOCKE. If you are wondering what kind of man he was, he answers that he was contented with his modest lot. Bred a scholar, he made his learning subservient only to the cause of truth. You will learn this from his writings, which will show you everything about him more truthfully that the subject praises of an epitaph. His virtues, if indeed he had any, were too slight to be lauded by him or to be an example to you. Let his vices be buried with him. Of virtue, you have an example in the gospels, should you desire it; of vice would there were none for you; of mortality surely you have one here and everywhere, and may you learn from it.

That he was born on the 29th of August in the year of our Lord 1632

and that he died on the 28th of October in the year of our Lord 1704.

This tablet, which itself will soon perish, is a record.”

How intriguing is the man who also dreamed of this island, a place that still boasts so much of the natural beauty it had when Locke imagined it, thanks to many committed people, the preservation efforts of The Edisto Island Open Land Trust and The Lowcountry Open Land Trust who work to preserve and keep sacred these great open spaces of South Carolina.

South Carolina and the Red Bird. Now and then.

“Red bird came…firing up the landscape…as nothing else could.”

Painted Bunting

A poet friend sent me a book this week called Red Bird. It is a book of delectable poems by Mary Oliver, who also lives by the sea. On Edisto Island, we catch glimpses of red, blue and yellow feathers, in the quick sparrowed flight of the painted bunting, rare jewels of this jungle. But Red Bird also carries another, historical story of this place. It’s a story in our South Carolina history that talks of the Red Bird’s legendary role in Native American culture. In 1675, a letter went out from our eden shores to England, on a wooden ship like this one, from Dr. Henry Woodward, to John Locke, the philosopher, who was curious about the religion of the Native American or Amerindian. John Locke at the time was physician and secretary to Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, whose legend continues in Charleston to this day, for our two major rivers are named Ashley and Cooper. Dr. Henry Woodward had been left with the Amerindians in 1666 by Captain Robert Sandford when his expedition came from Barbados to Edisto Island. Woodward was to eager to learn the culture and language of the Port Royall Indians, the Cusabo, and establish trade for the colony.

Henry Woodward was my grandfather many generations ago, and because it was the habit of South Carolinians to know their family history by heart, I heard of him at an early age. His intriguing story includes priests and pirates, kings and Indians, and it fueled my early interest in South Carolina’s colonial history. He is considered the first English settler in South Carolina, and it is no small thing that I have come to live in near these old creeks that beckon me to tell these stories. The following letter about the Red Bird exists in the journals of John Locke.

John Locke (1632-1704)

Dr. Henry Woodward to John Locke, 12 November 1675

Sir,
I have made the best inquiry that I can concerneing the religion and worship. Originall, and customes of our natives. especeally among the Port Royall Indians amongst whom I am best accquainted. they worship the Sun and … acknowledge the sun to bee the immedeate cause of the groth and increse of all things whom likewise they suppose to be the cause of all deseases. to whom every year they have severall feast and dances particularly appointed. they have some notions of the deluge, and say that two onely were saved in a cave, who after the flood found a red bird dead: the which as the pulled of his feathers between their fingers they blew them from them of which came Indians. each time a severall tribe and of a severall speech. which they severally named as they still were formed. and they say these two knew the waters to bee dried up by the singing of the said red bird and to my knowledg let them bee in the woods at any distance from the river they can by the varying of the said birds note tell whether the water ebbeth or floweth.

Yours to command,
Henry Woodward

Hmmm. So the Red bird knows the ebb and flow of the tide. Surrounded by the lush green marsh of these curving tidal creeks, I think I will and listen more carefully to this red bird’s note as I drop my new cobalt blue kayak into the ancient tributary. One of my friends on this island swears he sees canoes at times, at dawn, paddling silently out in the marsh. Perhaps it is they. Listening for the song of the Red Bird.

Edisto Indians, religion and the natural world

“What we can know with any confidence derives from the experience of the senses.”
- John Locke (1632-1704) from “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”

Carolina's Natural Shore, State Park Edisto Island

I am an artist, not a formal historian, philosopher, or genealogist. My take on the world is primarily through my senses, those visual ones of color and value, but also those of taste, touch, smell, and spirit. But I love this history of the ancestors and like the great poet Robert Frost said, “yet knowing how way leads to way” it has led me to a fascination with the early days of Carolina’s written history.

Imagine my delight this morning, reading online (yay, googlebooks!) about what the English philosopher, John Locke (1632-1704) wrote in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). He argues that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. I can only imagine that this caused a stir in England at the time of its writing, but looking at this thought simply, as an artist, I think he may have been considering the perspective of the Native Americans, who were being described to him in letters from the new English colony of Carolina, by Dr. Henry Woodward. The Native Americans, who did not have the written histories that we have, had, instead, a deep understanding of the natural world in which they lived, one that depended on the rivers and forests and oceans, a dependence we are only beginning to take very seriously as Americans, now that the world\’s ice caps are melting.

A year or so ago, I received an enthusiastic email from Jim Farr, Chair of the department of Political Science of Northwestern University. He is a John Locke scholar who was writing a new paper, and he had stumbled upon my little family history web page about Henry Woodward and the native from Edisto Island, named Shadoo. He was the Native who served as the exchange when Woodward stayed onshore after the Robert Sandford Expedition from Barbados, in 1666. Apparently there is some written correspondence about two more Natives, simply called “Honest” and “Just” who visited England. Professor Farr graciously sent me a copy of a letter that my ancestor Henry Woodward wrote to John Locke, in 1675. From what I understand of John Locke, he was insatiably curious, about not only philosophy, but science, education, religion, medicine, and much else.

Excerpts from this letter are below. The Natives he found in Carolina are so attuned to the sensual world that they can tell the tides from the songs of birds. He reveals, too, that the Natives tell the story of “the deluge,” replacing the dove with a red bird, in the story we know as The Great Flood of Noah. It is an archetypal story that appears in many cultures from Gilgamesh to the Bible.

305. Dr. Henry Woodward to Locke, 12 November 1675
The letter is mentioned by Locke in his Journal, 7 June 1679 (p. 99). The writer was active as a surgeon and explorer between 1666 and 1686.

Sir, I have made the best inquiry that I can concerneing the religion and worship. Originall, and customes of our natives. especeally among the Port Royall Indians amongst whom I am best accquainted. they worship the Sun and say they have knowledge of Spirits who appeare often to them… they acknowledge the sun to bee the immedeate cause of the groth and increse of all things …every year they have severall feast and dances particularly appointed. they have some notions of the deluge, and say that two onely were saved in a cave, who after the flood found a red bird dead: the which as the pulled of his feathers between their fingers they blew them from them of which came Indians. each time a severall tribe and of a severall speech. which they severally named as they still were formed. and they say these two knew the waters to bee dried up by the singing of the said red bird. and to my knowledg let them bee in the woods at any distance from the river they can by the varying of the said birds note tell whether the water ebbeth or floweth…
Yours to command,
HENRY WOODWARD

Lowcountry Gumbo: Bluebloods, Natives, Pirates!

Mary Woodward Hutson (1717-1757) whose very proper portrait this is, hardly came from what some Charlestonians would call ‘proper’ stock. Her grandfather, and mine, many generations ago, was Henry Woodward, an Englishman who arrived near Edisto Island in 1666 with a group of wealthy men on expedition from Barbados. He was left on the Eden Isle to make friends with the natives and to rustle up some trade for the King. His is an heroic tale that involves being kidnapped by the Spanish, and rescued from St. Augustine, by the buccaneer Robert Searles (for more on this tale see the book Twenty Florida Pirates by Kevin M. McCarthy. Henry worked as ship’s surgeon, and subsequently charmed kings, pirates and priests, and no doubt, the ladies. His legacy is one of daring and mystery. He wrote letters back to John Locke, in England, about the culture and the religion of the Indians, which interested the great philosopher. I like the letter where he talks about the glitter of gold on the bottom of his Indian moccasin, mica no doubt, the stuff I played with, as a child, in the creeks of North Carolina and what we called ‘fool’s gold’. “The man that most students of South Carolina Indians would most like to interview would probably be Dr. Henry Woodward, an Englishman who … was left by the Robert Sandford Expedition (in 1666) in exchange for an Indian called “Shadoo” as a sort of early cultural exchange program. He was not left against his will, but remained voluntarily. He returned to England in 1682 and was something of a celebrity.” - from Chapman J. Milling, Red Carolinians, p 55.

Henry Woodward’s story is fascinating to me, just different from that of his grandaughter, the pious and devoted Christian that Mary’s diary reveals her to be, published in London after her death, by her husband, The Rev. William Hutson. The testament to their character is the survival, of not only her diary but his, here at the South Carolina Historical Society. Just steps down the street are their large, beautifully carved slate tombstones in the historic graveyard Circular Church on Meeting Street, stones that have miraculously survived wars and fires and earthquakes. Mary Woodward Hutson’s portrait, and that of the good pastor, William Hutson, were painted by Jeremiah Theus, the early colonial painter, who arrived in Charleston in 1740. Many of the portraits he painted hang across the street at the Gibbes Museum of Art. These paintings hang beside each other in history, secure in the tall pink hall of this grand and beautiful architectural wonder of a place. The Fireproof Building, at 100 Meeting Street, houses the collections of the South Carolina Historical Society. Inside is an oval stair hall, lit by a cupola, with stone stairs, cantilevered through three stories. The building, the architect, and more of the stories the society protects and preserves here, are deserving of another tale, on another day.