A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz

Author:Tony Horwitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312428327
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

SPEEDING DOWN THE Strom Thurmond Freeway into South Carolina, I phoned an archaeologist who had excavated an Indian settlement believed to have been Cofitachequi. The archaeologist gave me directions to the site, near Camden, S.C., but said there wasn’t much to see. “It’s just a bump in a field.” Also, the site was on private land, owned by a family that didn’t welcome visitors. “If you ask the supervisor of the plantation, he might let you have a look,” she said, ringing off to go teach a class.

By now, I’d seen enough archaeological sites to know they rarely amounted to much. But the mention of a plantation intrigued me. It also seemed a pity to bypass one of the pleasantest stops on De Soto’s route. So I followed the archaeologist’s directions, exiting the interstate by the Wateree River and navigating a small road until I reached a tree-lined avenue leading into a plantation.

Finding the supervisor’s house empty, I drove on to a brick cottage, set fifty yards in front of a columned mansion. A handsome middle-aged woman appeared at the door of the cottage and inquired, rather coolly, “Can I help you?”

Caught by surprise, I burbled something about following De Soto’s route and being entranced by the story of Cofitachequi.

“Which part of the story?” she asked.

“The lady with the pearls going in a canoe to meet De Soto.”

A smile crept across the woman’s face, as if I’d guessed the secret password. “Well, then,” she said, “perhaps I can show you around.”

Marty Daniels belonged to the extended family that owned Mulberry Plantation. Her forebears had been drawn there by the rich soil and river access that Indians, centuries earlier, had recognized as well suited to settlement. Where natives sowed beans and corn, Marty’s ancestors had planted indigo and cotton, seeding a plantation that grew to twenty thousand acres, worked by hundreds of slaves.

Climbing into Marty’s four-wheel drive, we drove through a pine grove to a cleared bluff overlooking the Wateree, a slow brown river about a hundred yards across. At the center of the clearing rose a grassy knoll, no more than six feet high. “That’s Cofitachequi, or what’s left of it,” Marty said.

Excavations of the surrounding land had revealed a large settlement dating back to the thirteenth century, including a workshop for mica, the shiny, thinly layered white rock that natives showed De Soto when he asked about silver. English travelers, arriving in 1670, described Cofitachequi as a still-powerful province, ruled by “an emperor.” But by the early 1700s, its people had mysteriously vanished, possibly having moved west and melded with other tribes.

They left behind a dozen mounds, which incoming planters used as perches for their buildings. In the nineteenth century, an overseer’s cottage crowned the tallest mound; slave quarters covered the others. The mounds had since been leveled for landfill and eroded by floods, exposing bones, pottery, and other artifacts, which Marty had enjoyed collecting as a child. But what she’d loved best was hearing relatives’ stories about the Indian “queen” who greeted De Soto wearing nothing but pearls.

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