REVIEWS Charleston's Maritime Heritage, 1670-1865, an Illustrated History, by P. C. Coker, III (Cokercraft Press, PO 176, Charleston SC 29402, 1987, 314 pp, illus , $40) This lively and informative narrative takes us in good, robust, story-telling style from the arrival of the first small square riggers on the Carolina coast, through the development of Charleston as one of the British Empire's most luminous cities, and into the slowerpaced evolution of the nineteenth century seaport, seen at the end spending its genius to prolong the resistance of the Confederacy probably by at least a year. P. C. Coker is well known to aficionados of Charleston 's proud past as art collector and model maker as well as maritime historian. It is appropriate that he burst upon our national scene with this deeply studied and deeply fe lt his-
tory. Clearly, this book has found the utterly right author, and a needed story is now open to casual readers and historians less versed than they should be in the rich heritage of the Southern states. In Colonial times, Charleston was in a class with Philadelphia as a leading city ofBritain 's North Atlantic empirean imperium that has left rich legacies in the seaport towns on both sides of the stormy Western Ocean. Coker reckons, however, that its true golden age came with American Independence, in the era that led up to the War of 1812, roughly a generation. After that, accumulated wealth, a sophisticated leadership class, and the skills of its shipwrights and sea captains did not suffice to keep Charleston in the front rank of the brawling North American seaports. New York snaffled off the cream of the cotton business, with its famous triangular trade
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across the Atlantic-Carolina planters, increasingly in debt to northern merchants, simply provided the aggressive New Yorkers the return cargo they needed to make their rich transatlantic traffic pay in both directions. And New Orleans drained the developing trade of the deep South-and indeed the trading watershed of thi s giant among seaports reached far inland to Ohio in the east, Missouri in the west. Charleston's cultural eminence remained , as well as the organizing and leadership abilities of the city's ruling class. It was here, after all, that the Civil War started (as the Revolution may have been said to have started in Boston), and here its outcome was most brilliantly and doggedly contested by sea. As noted in an earlier review of the artistic aspects ofthis fine, deeply rooted story of a seaport city (SH 47, Marine Art Notes, p39), photographs of ship models and dioramas bring a breathtaking quality of immediacy to the vanished scenes of maritime activity Coker records. Brilliantly detailed models show men at work building ships, outfitting them and loading them for sea on the city's foreshore, giving a strong impression of the physical processes by which Charleston maintained contact with the Atlantic world while it was building up a brilliant center of commerce and culture am id the sands and swamps that surround the little neck of land between the slow-moving Ashley and Cooper rivers, with the booming Atlantic just outside the sheltering outer beaches. Coker writes from a deep-rooted fee ling for his city, and he is in fact a descendent of one of its shipbuilding families. He brings to life the feel and very look of the town as it weathered the centuries, and has assembled a constellation of marine artists to paint the scenes that ii 1ustrate this book, interleaving fresh interpretations with the work of the old artists. It is truly wonderful to see history visualized this way, through the changing face of a seaport city. To this reviewer, who first encountered Charleston with its pale seafront buildings blushing like a sea bride in the face of an early morning sun, while he drifted into its harbor on a breeze stirred up at dawn, Coker's visual love affair with his city is both attractive and true. He notes the role of hi story in shaping the face the city wears today, qbserving: "While the northern coastal cities changed, Charleston retained its colonial character and to this day more resembles southern Europe than America." PETER STA FORD
SEA HISTORY, SPRING 1989