stapled. The great valley of the Mississippi and large tracts of country extending of late years far and wide into the Texas, form the grand area of plantations which in their luxuriant fertility yield an annual crop of more than 30,000,000 lbs., in weight. The Sea Island variety above referred to as the most valuable, is of the long-stapled class. Its wool is slightly yellow, very silky, and of unusual length. Its seed black. The islands upon which it is grown—hence its name—are situated along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. One cause of its superiority is to be found in the nature of sea air, which varied experience has taught the planter is indispensable to the perfection of the cotton shrub. Indeed so great an affinity exists between this plant and the saline principle, that sea mud is actually applied as manure to the ground preparing for its reception. Dr. Ure in his work on the “Cotton Manufacture,” records the following somewhat important fact:
“Dr. Wallich brought home several samples of cotton from the coast of Martaban to the India House, which were grown near the sea. They were not exceeded by the cotton of any other country in the quality of the staple * * * There is a village in the Mangrole in Kattywar, which produces a small quantity of very fine cotton. It is cultivated by natives, and grows only on one particular spot of small extent near the sea coast.”
In corroboration of this partiality for a marine situation, I may further quote the result of an experiment tried in India; namely, though cotton grown from seed sown in localities near the sea (the experiment was made with Bourbon seed), may be found to thrive to an extent in every way satisfactory, transplanted to an inland spot (for the cotton tested was removed to Benares), it will probably prove—as in the case in question it did prove—a total failure.
The multifarious kinds of the plant from which the cotton wools are gathered present much dissimilarity of size and appearance. Sometimes it assumes the character of a shrub six or seven feet high, and at others it raises itself above the earth only three, or even two feet. The foliage, too, of these varieties takes very distinctive forms,—the vine-leaved, palmate, and many more. The flowers, the seeds, and the filamentous down investing them, which is the wool of commerce, are of different tints. As regards this last, the fact may be seen in the material called Nankeen, the peculiar colour of which proceeds from that of the natural filaments of which its texture consists. Neither is there any very rigid resemblance of constitution among them, for all undergo so many modifications when acted upon by the influences of soil, climate, and mode of husbandry, that both in the field and in the market their characteristics are widely separate. In some places the plant is an annual, but is sown on the same land only every third year; whilst we have in others shrubs which flourish and yield wool during the whole of that period. At Pernambuco, Brazil, and in the Leeward Islands, the shrub is triennial: a small quantity of wool is borne the first year, more during the second, and after the third it is abandoned. But all the plants of the Southern States of the American Union are annuals. It seems to be an ascertained fact, however, pervading every region in which cotton has been cultivated, that it exhausts to a very alarming degree the generative and nutritious virtues of the soil upon which it is grown; so much so, that the produce of the same fields which when first brought under cultivation was immense, has in many instances dwindled away in the course of a few years to comparative insignificance. In such parts of colonies as abound in cheap and plentiful land, it has often been the habit, as the soil gets drained of its fertilising properties, to remove the culture from spot to spot, in preference to adopting any of the less salutary and more precarious expedients of manuring, dressing, and shifting crops. The old lands in Guinea are, for the purpose of renovation, frequently inundated with sea-water.
The low, sandy islands scattered along the coast common to South Carolina and Georgia, appear, when viewed from a distance, or by superficial inspection, to be territories as diminutive in value as they are in dimension. But here it is that the universally celebrated cotton which has contributed so essentially to the marvellous achievements of Lancashire, is reared in all the honour and glory of what is seemingly an indestructible monopoly. Most of these yellow little islets, merging, as it were, thus shyly from the shallow waters of the shore, were formerly covered with extensive pine barrens. Where we now hear the imperious voice of man, and behold the fruits of his transforming labour, a hundred years ago the silence of nature was unbroken except by the cry of the lone sea-bird, whose wild music chimed harmoniously with the surge, or melted away in unaccompanied melody over the broad sea, sleeping calmly round about. To the poet, the painter, the goddess Nature’s devotee, their beauty, their worth, their moral, was then infinitely more precious than now; but the planter, the spinner, the political economist,—with slavery on their shores, I cannot add the philanthropist,—view the verdure of the cotton leaves and the hoary crop of its blossoms in relation to another class of beauty, another code of sentiments, another school of teaching. This sort of agricultural industry was not unknown in South Carolina so early as the very commencement of the last century, when Governor Smith introduced it for the first time. The idea was a happy one, and circumstances proving auspicious, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and other contiguous states gradually took it up, and together they eventually became the gigantic cotton garden of the world. Of comparatively recent date, however, is the distinction gained by Texas. There are warm advocates for enlarging the sphere of operations which this country affords. Its natural advantages are said to be almost unlimited in regard both to the quantity and variety of the cotton it is capable of producing. Besides these recommendations, the salubrity of the climate, and general productiveness of the soil, have had their effect in inducing enterprise to urge forward a work which is likely to prove successful.
