and ancient forts on the islands.
One of these last, it is said, can be traced on Paris Island, and is
claimed by some antiquaries to be the Charles Fort built by Ribault.
There are the well-preserved walls of one upon the plantation of John J.
Smith on Port Royal Island, a few miles south of Beaufort, now called
Camp Saxton, and recently occupied by Colonel Higginson's regiment. It
is built of cemented oyster-shells. Common remark refers to it as a
Spanish fort, but it is likely to be of English construction. The site
of Charles Fort is claimed for Beaufort, Lemon Island, Paris Island, and
other points.

The Sea Islands are formed by the intersection of the creeks and arms of
the sea. They have a uniform level, are without any stones, and present
a rather monotonous and uninteresting scenery, spite of the raptures of
French explorers. The creeks run up into the islands at numerous points,
affording facilities for transportation by flats and boats to the
buildings which are usually near them. The soil is of a light, sandy
mould, and yields in the best seasons a very moderate crop, say fifteen
bushels of corn and one hundred or one hundred and thirty pounds of
ginned cotton to the acre,--quite different from the plantations in
Mississippi and Texas, where an acre produces five or six hundred
pounds. The soil is not rich enough for the cultivated grasses, and one
finds but little turf. The coarse saline grasses, gathered in stacks,
furnish the chief material for manure. The long-fibred cotton peculiar
to the region is the result of the climate, which is affected by the
action of the salt water upon the atmosphere by means of the creeks
which permeate the land in all directions. The seed of this cotton,
planted on the upland, will produce in a few years the cotton of coarser
texture; and the seed of the latter, planted on the islands, will in a
like period produce the finer staple. The Treasury Department secured
eleven hundred thousand pounds from the islands occupied by our forces,
including Edisto, being the crop, mostly unginned, and gathered in
storehouses, when our military occupation began.

The characteristic trees are the live-oak, its wood almost as heavy as
lignum-vitae, the trunk not high, but sometimes five or six feet in
diameter, and extending its crooked branches far over the land, with the
long, pendulous, funereal moss adhering to them,--and the palmetto,
shooting up its long, spongy stem thirty or forty