While walking about
James Island

Elder Pratt discovered
an old fort wall        of

Oistershells & earth

* 

To say nothing of the Soapwort we noticed
in Heyward’s Garden.

*

The Common drink
of the Countrey,

reports Thomas Newe,

is Molossus and Water.

*

Woodward remembers his encounter with the Mica at Silver Bluff:

The soales of my Indian shooes in which I traveled glistened         like sylver.

*

Later this same Woodward
mentions the natives’

Anticke fighting garbe

*

He proceeds with his account: I fired
my fowling peece

Quite different from some other accounts such as one

signed

Your Loving Friend,
                       Will Hilton

*

Bird specimens:

Catesby eviscerated them,
baked them,

and then covered them with tobacco dust.

*

Raisins, silk, oyl,
olives, almonds, currance,

geese, Widgeons,

lin-seed, English fruit,
Medlars, Mulbury-Trees.

*

Then the Baptists sidled over from newingland.

*

Storm sewers
cleaned with

certain instruments.

*

The toilet was
the Necessary.

__

This poem was written during a trip to South Carolina in 2005. I was reading a lot of colonial advertisements. My favorite was Thomas Ashe.

The original poem was stenciled onto strips of paper. Each strip of paper was a sentence. There were around thirty of them. I visited this map shop that bought up expensive old books and cut them up to sell the plates individually. They were making a lot of money off Marcus Catesby. So does John Derian.