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.
