Tidecraft: The boats of South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida, 1550-1950 - Hardcover

Fleetwood, Rusty; Fleetwood Jr., William C.

9780964251908: Tidecraft: The boats of South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida, 1550-1950

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0964251906 ISBN 13: 9780964251908

Publisher: WBG Marine Press, 1995

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The following is taken from page 223, in the concluding chapter of Tidecraft.

It is tempting to wrap up all this research by making assumptions, formulating hypothesis, and drawing conclusions. But the fabric of the past resists being sewn up so neatly. There are always a few loose threads forming further connections, and you soon find that everything is tied together. We have found that there existed in the Southeast unique types of small craft that built the area. The periagua, the Petersburg boat, the skipjack, the oyster sloop and the Florida shrimper, along with a host of others, provided much of the transport that built America. Products of a time and a people moved by events of the moment, they cannot be studied separately from the social, economic, and physical environment of the times in which they were built. Taken out of context, they are only interesting sculptures of wood and iron.

The only way to comprehend the enormity of human undertaking and small craft experience in the Southeast is to use this text as a guide. Go stand on US 17 where it crosses the Combahee, or the Waccamaw or the Altamaha, and you begin to know what an enormous job it was to grow rice. Stare down the length of a 60-foot cypress log three feet in diameter and ponder how to move it, much less cut it, by hand. Watch the Savannah River above Augusta charging over falls and around rocks and sense what it must have been like to bring cargo downriver in the 1800s. Take a good canoe or rowing craft and head upstream from any town or city, and let your own muscles feel the job of taking goods upstream to the settlements. Under sail, work a boat out of Wassaw or Sapelo Sound on the tide, and back again in a rising wind and sea. Envision doing this at night, with a loaded vessel and no range lights. Head up a dead-end low tide bight in the heat of August amid the mosquito whine and an oven-like humid stillness. Imagine life without window screens, air conditioning, insecticide and antibiotics. Watch a shrimp boat at work in a cold Fall northeaster, rolling its outrigger under with men working on deck in fish slime and hanging on with numb fingers and toes.

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Named Best Book on American Maritime History for 1995 by the North American Society for Oceanic History, Tidecraft outlines 400 years of southeastern maritime heritage.

Sponsored by the Coastal Heritage Society of Savannah, Georgia, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, researchers Rusty Fleetwood and Antoinette Goodrich set out in the winter of 1979 to find a missing part of Americana. With all the study of Southern culture, the maritime aspects of that culture had been ignored.

What they found was a unique segment of maritime America, one comprised of coastal and riverine craft of every description and the people that built and sailed them. Covering the area from Georgetown, South Carolina, south to New Smyrna, Florida, their work took in boats and watercraft built or used in the area between 1550 and 1950, up to 60 feet in length.

For the first time, the long gone oyster sloops, racing dugouts, Indian trade boats, and slim-hulled pilot schooners saw the light of day, and in 1982, the first, paperback edition of Tidecraft was published and quickly became a collector's item.

Long out of print, Tidecraft returns in this hardcover, expanded edition. Over 350 pages, updated with new findings and recent archival and archaeological research, more photographs, and fully annotated and indexed, Tidecraft is an essential reference for any mariner. In this edition, detailed appendices by Christopher Amer, Fredrick Hocker, Gilbert Maggioni and Mark Newell add in-depth insight into a nearly forgotten part of maritime America so well researched and described by William Fleetwood.

Review:

The depth and breadth of this 356-page volume is refreshing to say the least. Many books about history fall short in their ability to get their point across. But not this book. . . . chapter after chapter captures the "feel" and "spirit" of watercraft. . . . the life of the boat indeed comes to life in these pages. -- Nautical Collector, June 1996

This is a superbly crafted and rich account of the social, political, economic, and technological history of the region. . . . an exemplary and well-written reference and it should be in every historian's and maritime archaeologist's library. -- Robyn Woodward, Historical Archaeology, 1996, Vol. 30, No. 2

This remarkable book . . . well written, amply illustrated . . . is as useful, as spritely a job of historical rediscovery as I have read for a long time. -- Dr. Louis Rubin, The South Carolina Historical Magazine, January 1996

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