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Bales from this estate were never "sampled." The Sea-Island cotton that took the prize at the World's Fair in London was raised on this island. East of the garden, stretching toward the ocean-beach, is the olive-grove. Seventy years ago the first olive trees were imported from Italy and the south of France. They grew and flourished, and years ago this grove yielded a profit to its owners.
While we sat round the table at supper, the relative values of sea-island cotton and upland cotton, and the best modes of manufacturing sugar and tobacco, were the general subjects of conversation; but as I knew no more about these articles than I did of the cultivation of cloves and nutmegs, I could only sit and listen: though I was able to note the remarks of others, and tried to gain some idea of the character of the speakers.
I do not know whether the labourer's habitation bespeaks the alteration in the present relative importance of the crops, but certainly the cultivators of the once far-famed long staple sea-island cotton of St. Simon's are far more miserably housed than the rice-raisers of the other plantation.
Looking down the bay on the right, was James Island, an irregular triangle of about seven miles, the whole island in cultivation with sea-island cotton. At the lower end was Fort Johnson, then simply the station of Captain Bowman, United States Engineers, engaged in building Fort Sumter. As the rock reached the surface it was levelled, and made the foundation of Fort Sumter.
Auctioneers were here busily engaged in the disposal of their merchandise, which comprised every variety of produce and manufacture, home and foreign, from a yard of linsey-woolsey, "hum spun" as they termed it, to a bale of Manchester long cloth, or their own Sea-Island cotton. The auctioneer in America is a curious specimen of the biped creation.
Indigo and sea-island cotton fields had no ditches dividing them permanently into task units; but the fact that each of these in its day was often combined with rice on the same plantations, and that the separate estates devoted to them respectively lay in the region dominated by the rice régime, led to the prevalence of the task system in their culture also.
The exports of the sea-island staple rose by 1805 to nearly nine million pounds, but no further expansion occurred until 1819 when an increase carried the exports for a decade to about eleven million pounds a year. In the course of the twenties Kinsey Burden and Hugh Wilson, both of St.
The gross cotton output, in which the upland crop greatly and increasingly outweighed that of the sea-island staple, rapidly advanced from about forty-eight million pounds in 1801 to about eighty million in 1806; then it was kept stationary by the embargo and the war of 1812, until the return of peace and open trade sent it up by leaps and bounds again.
Crossing the bar at daybreak with a fair breeze, we ran along outside the line of islands which fringe the coast of Georgia, and which are devoted to the cultivation of "sea-island cotton." The water teemed with fish, and birds innumerable came flying round us.
Many important experiments have been undertaken by the Station, of particular interest being those relating to soil building, the hybridization of sea-island cotton with some of the common short-staple varieties, fertilizer tests with potatoes, by which it has been shown that it is possible to raise as much as 266 bushels per acre on light, sandy soil such as that comprising the school-lands, while the average yield in the same part of Alabama is not more than 40 bushels to the acre.
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