History Lesson

Charleston

I got up late this morning after a few very cheap beers last night in a nearby ale house. There's a surprisingly large student population here so that sort of place is fairly thick on the ground. The girl who works at the hostel told me to go and see a free museum of historical documents just round the corner and I was glad I did. There are a few dotted around the country run by some rich history buff who goes around buying up old bits of paper of importance and putting them on show. At the moment the museum here has an exhibit about Napoleon with lots of the great man's letters and orders. The romantic novel he wrote about himself in his early life looked pretty funny to me, even though it was all in his absurdly ornate French handwriting and I could barely understand it. He obviously had delusions of grandeur from an early age, superseded by the actual grandeur he achieved later on.

Having been all round the South I've just about had enough of hearing about the Civil War, but I decided to visit one last site about it. Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour was where the first shot of the war was fired in April 1861 and it was just about worth the half hour boat trip out to take a look around what's left. The rebel sentiment isn't quite as strong here in South Carolina as it is in Georgia. Down there I'm fairly sure most people are still fighting the war, a legacy I suspect of too many nights on the sour mash dreaming of Confederate glory.