a private venture; not until 1828, with the enlarging of the channel between Georgia’s Cumberland Sound and the St. Johns River in Florida, did the federal government become involved.

After the final portion had been completed in 1936, between Little River and Winyah Bay in South Carolina, the Federal Writers Project celebrated with a book, which remains the only historical look at the waterway from end to end. ”… here were enacted many of the most important early scenes in one of the most amazing adventures of all time, that of the expropriation of a continent,” the anonymous author writes, with what might appear to us today as unseemly glee. “These are the lands first sighted by many of those hardy scouts of empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whose knowledge of the earth was so sketchy that they imagined they were here seeing the shores of India or China.”

The people who run Clipper are well aware of the lure of that history, and they allow time to sample it in a number of ways. There is the simple pleasure of waking, after a nighttime departure from Jacksonville, to the waters at the marshy fringe of St. Simons Island in Georgia. The naturalist on board, Charlie Rouse, already dubbed by passengers “the bird guy,” has discovered two boat-tailed grackles engaging in a courtship display, and he insists that a speck in a tree is a crested flycatcher. Later, on a morning walk through the village at St. Simons, Rouse listens to a rather raucous birdsong and identifies it as that of the Carolina wren: “It goes teakettle, teakettle, teakettle .” The botanist William Bartram came this way in 1776 and wrote of Georgia’s “marvellous scenes of primitive nature, as yet unmodified by the hand of man.”

There is time also at St. Simons to stroll on a generous swath of public beach and to join a bus tour to learn more about the hand of man on the island, from its early days as a prize of empire sought by the Spanish, British, and French to the full flowering of its plantation culture, wrapped around the products of indigo and sea-island cotton. The tour also reveals St. Simons’s later incarnation as a resort, with a drive past the Addison Mizner-designed Cloister Hotel and its immaculate, oak-alleyed grounds. The enormous, outreaching live oak, with its generous gray-green fringe of Spanish moss, remains as much the emblem of the Georgia landscape as it was when seen by a traveler in 1745: “… the lofty Oak, with all his kindred tribe clad in Robes of antique Moss seems by its venerable Appearance, to be the real Monarch of the Woods …”

Clipper invites guest lecturers aboard at most stops and salts bigger city destinations among the small ones. It’s probably easier to get a real feel for places like Savannah and Charleston on a land-based trip of several

days, but the small towns can be more readily absorbed in the space of a day. One of these was Beaufort, South Carolina, the setting of several major movies: The Great Santini , The Big Chill , and, most recently, The Prince of Tides .

Beaufort certainly is a pretty town, with an amazing collection of houses lining a few ancient streets. The Beaufort house, one expert wrote, “more nearly resembles the plantation house brought to town.” In the Castle, an enormous porticoed house on Craven Street, one writer finds “an air of somber mystery,” and the author of Georgia’s WPA Guide talks of “handsome old houses [that] … seem to brood over their memories.” Perhaps because of the gray, damp threat of an approaching storm, perhaps because of the cheerfully chiding tour guide who gave no quarter when it came to refighting the Civil War, I found a sense of brooding here too. On an hour-long bus ride I heard enough of “the War between the States” and “If I like someone, I call him a Northerner, if I don’t, he’s a Yankee” and how unmannerly Yankee occupying troops had scratched their names in the fine woods of Beaufort’s walls and furniture to last me a very long time. “Oh, well,” the guide remarked, at the end of her litany, “we’ll get it straightened out someday.” One wonders.

Later, away from chatter and in the absolute velvet dark of a small town asleep, Beaufort came closer to me. I walked In totally deserted streets, barely Illuminated by porch lights and the very occasional streetlamp, as I never would have in a large city. After the rainstorm a small crescent moon sat horizontally in a black sky, a breeze caused the moss to swing on its armature of trees, and Beaufort’s ghosts seemed to find some peace at last.

In the end it’s the waterway itself that belongs to the traveler when the trip is finished. From Norfolk south to Miami, dredged to a twelvefoot depth, the Intracoastal is the domain of pleasure craft, small fishing vessels, and, from time to time, a barge. It is the master of quick change: at one moment a narrow, banked channel with cottages barely visible among the trees and spidery docks reflected in the water and at the next turn a broad, hazy inland sea, bounded by marsh grasses in the subtlest shades of golden green and brown. One week after peak migration the birds are still flying north in great numbers. A cormorant stops to perch on buoy marker 125, and a pelican spears its supper—a small, silvery fish flapping in hopeless protest. Near Port Royal Sound, where the first Spanish galleons arrived in 1521, four dolphins arc out of the water.

The channel shifts and silts up here beyond any skipper’s ability to plan for it. Running aground is a common occurrence, and the boat usually takes about ten minutes to wriggle free. “There’s a formerly undiscovered sandbar,” a passenger remarked at breakfast one day during such a grounding. “We call the water the ditch,” said Joe Slowey, the Nantucket Clipper ’s first officer. “When we do this trip, we’re running the ditch.”

—Carla Davidson
TO PLAN A TRIP