| Travels of Dursmirg Vol. 2 |
| Chapters 7-9 |
VOL 2, CHAPTERS 7-9
CHAPTER 7 Daufuskie Island
Bob Burn; (a re-cap of Bob Burn and our first meeting in the fall of 1972).
Jane and I were docked at the Savannah Inn and Country Club while we were regrouping after I had a debilitating
accident that left me with a shoulder injury. We were invited to listen to a presentation. The guest speaker was Bob
Burn and this is a short summarization of his story and our first meeting;
On his first sailing experience with his new “Great Dane” 28-foot sloop rig sailboat in Denmark, he was caught in a
storm and tried to anchor at night. He was driven up on the rocks high and dry at high tide and was alone along the
Danish coast. When he asked for help he was sent a six-pack of beer and told that he was a rich American and that
he should just buy another boat. Well, he worked long and hard, determined to launch the boat and he managed to
do it with materials he found on the beach and then sailed off to America.
I had written previously about meeting Bob first on Thanksgiving evening in 1972 while anchoring our boat Dursmirg
off of Daufuskie Island. Later in Savannah where Bob was a guest speaker at the Geechee Sailing Club relating his
single-handed Trans-Atlantic race experience where he came in second, and at a party afterwards aboard our boat
the Dursmirg. Bob then told Jane and I that we must come to visit at Daufuskie Island and he would give us a tour.
Bob Burn; spring of 1973
Well, in the spring of 1973 Jane and I along with our visitor Jim Muller returned to Daufuskie on our way north up the
east coast of the US with a possible destination of Chesapeake Bay.
We anchored our boat about a mile north of the Burn home on Daufuskie in the New River and I took our dinghy to
look for our friend Bob.
I was impressed by the stately oak trees hung heavy with Spanish moss as I tied our dinghy to the rickety but
serviceable old dock that was grayed with age and seemed to have been built of any lumber that might have drifted
by over the years.
I wasn’t even to the shoreline when a very distinguished and neatly dressed man with gray hair and determined blue
eyes confronted me. He had the appearance of just stepping out of a barbers chair and was very businesslike and
directly to the point. I will never forget his first words to me, “Who are you looking for Bubba?” It seemed strange to
be addressed as “Bubba”, but that is a local thing to do when a persons name is not known.
I was told that my message would be relayed to Bob and that was the end of the conversation. It turned out the
person I had just met was Bob’s dad, A. Lance Burn.
That evening a big flashy and very polished sport fishing boat pulled along side and someone hollered over to our
boat Dursmirg.
It was our friend Bob (Lancy) Burn and it turned out that he had a job running this sport fishing boat that happened
to belong to the developer of Hilton Head Island, Mr. Fraser.
(Hilton Head Island was the next island north of Daufuskie Island along the South Carolina coast and had the
dubious distinction or at least made the claim of having more millionaires per square mile than any other place in the
country.)
Bob had lots of stories to tell as usual because he forever was involved in a life of perpetual adventures.
Bob presented us with some of his homemade plum wine. It was a gallon bottle, which we considered to be very
generous.
Bob also gave us directions to a very secluded anchorage in a place called Mongin Creek at Papy’s Landing on the
south side of Daufuskie Island. This was a local knowledge only spot because of the many sand bars and oyster
banks to navigate past. With nearly a nine foot daily tidal range, this took some creative boat handling but it was well
worth it and we found out that this was going to be one of our very favorite anchoring spots that we would return to
many times over the coming years.
A strange thing the following evening Bob made a return visit to our boat and we poured him a glass of wine that he
exclaimed was just wonderful and asked where we had gotten such a lovely wine as this. Well, this was some of the
very same wine that he had given us just the night before. Bob couldn’t help his honesty in relating the story of his
wine production and how after this particular batch of wine had finished kicking that it had a strange and wild
“whang” taste that was not to his liking so parting with it wasn’t a hardship. Well, it did age well and quickly because
Bob had last sampled and bottled it was just the month before!
(At this point Jane and I made our first cruising trip north to Charleston and back to Daufuskie in 1973. Read about
that trip in volume 2 chapter 2.)
Billie Burn
(Our first meeting)
A couple of nights after Jane and I returned from our trip to Charleston in the spring of 1973 we again anchored
back in Mongin Creek at Papy’s Landing on the south side of Daufuskie island.
We had an invitation to visit at the home of Bob Burn’s parents. We eagerly looked forward to the experience.
We figured that anyone as adventuresome as our friend Bob just had to have some different and very eccentric
parents and our hunch proved to be correct.
A. Lance Burn, a brief history of his life
A. Lance was the son of a former lighthouse keeper on the island named Papy Burn who sent his son Lance off to
live with some neighbors named the “Fripps” when Papy married his fourth wife. In his youth A. Lance also spent
over seven years in an orphanage in Savannah, Georgia.
A. Lance went off to fight in World War II and one story that he related to me was of when he was in boot camp
training and developed an abscessed tooth that got so bad that one of the officers took note when A. Lance couldn’t
hold his gun up to his face on the target range. The officer sent A. Lance off to the dentist who without hesitation
hastily yanked a tooth out of A. Lance’s mouth and it turned out to be the wrong one so the dentist merely reached
in and pulled one more…this time it was the right one!
A. Lance was stationed in Europe during the war and didn’t mention his front line action much except to say that he
managed to blast those “damn blond haired Nazis”.
He had landed at Normandy then fought his way on foot every inch of the way across France and Germany to
Czechoslovakia.
After the war he was happy to discover that the government found it in its heart to give all of the veterans free
drivers licenses for life. Then he cynically said that if he lived to be a hundred years old it wouldn’t be worth a
hundred dollars.
Over the years I had the good fortune to spend many a fascinating hour listening to A. Lance’s stories as I rode to
Savannah and back aboard his mail boat. He made the trip five times a week, in all seasons and in all types of
weather. A. Lance was a marvelous boat handler that seemed naturally at ease as he guided his boat deftly around
sand bars and oyster banks taking advantage of the tidal currents. Passing various types of boats, barges, yachts
and speed boats he would read their wakes and then precisely guide his boat over and through like a professional
dancer gliding with a talented partner flawlessly executing the maneuver and make it look so very easy; trust me, he
was talented.
Each time we made that very interesting trip and we walked down their rickety old dock to leave the island A. Lance
always stopped for a brief moment to peer down along side the dock at the few remains of an old boat named the
Dandy; many years abandoned to the elements, the Dandy had been his original freight boat when he returned to
Daufuskie after the War. The Dandy had a fascinating history having been in the movie African Queen and Mr. Burn
bought it in Florida and brought it to Daufuskie Island; its final resting place. He used to shake his head and say,
“one of these days I’ll just have to get down there and change the oil!”
A. Lance Burn on his rickety old dock with the New River in the background, 1974.
Another comment he often made as he witnessed some large yacht that went flying past the billboard size sign on
the island cautioning to, “Slow Down, No Wake Zone” was, “if they were animals you could train them”.
Upon returning from town his usual comment was, “well, I spent a week in town today!”
Billie and her husband A. Lance both had spent a good deal of their lives on Daufuskie and even had a small fish
camp business with several rental rooms that proved to be not sufficiently lucrative to sustain their growing family so
they followed the rush to south Florida where A. Lance made a living plastering the new homes that were being put
up on a production line basis. When sheetrock wall construction became the vogue in the 50s, that was enough for
A. Lance and the move back to Daufuskie was the right thing at the right time.
All didn’t go smoothly at first back on Daufuskie until A. Lance put the bottle down and became righteous. That was
a turning point in the life of the entire family but their three kids by this time had all gone their separate ways in the
world.
I can only imagine the demons that must have haunted A. Lance’s mind with his detached home life as a child, he
didn’t even inherit a piece of land like his half brother Frank, his horrendous military experiences from his Omaha
beach landing in Europe to fighting his way across every inch of France and Germany all the way to Czechoslovakia.
A. Lance and Billie were dedicated to the island and its people and relentlessly filled jobs that held this population of
85 souls together. I found it amazing that there could ever be any criticism of the jobs A. Lancy and Billie filled.
I definitely noticed that these fine public spirited people now spoke with very measured and conservatively thought
out words because of the verbal flack that they had received at the hands of a person that they had befriended and
confided in. The book, The Water is Wide, had only been out a year and was a number one best seller. Though the
names had been changed there was absolutely no mistake that this book was about Daufuskie Island”. In the book
the Burn family was referred to as the Stones and A. Lance always used to say to us, “we are the Stones but you
are the stone boat people”. (The previous fall a newspaper story in Savannah referred to our boat as the “stone
boat).
Billie Burn was the Postmistress of Daufuskie Island. The post office was neatly kept and dependably met the hours
of opening, the mail was picked up five days each week by A. Lance Burn and dependably brought to the island, the
school bus punctually made the rounds, the grader regularly leveled the roads and A. Lance as magistrate settled
many an explosive situation.
A. Lance and Billie didn’t inherit the land or home they lived in on the island but bought it from the Fripp family that
had taken A. Lance in when he was a child and put out by his father.
The Burn home as seen from the river side on the west. (Formerly the Fripp Place)
Daufuskie Island at the Burn home. Billie and A. Lance Burn in front of the post office in the summer of
1973. (This was under the same roof as their home and was situated to the left hand side as seen in the
photo above taken from the dock.)
These two fine dedicated people came under what I consider very unjust criticism by the author of the book, The
Water is Wide. Though they did hold down many important jobs on the island I found it very interesting that when
they one by one surrendered these jobs not a single soul stepped forward to fill their shoes.
Jane and I were some of the very few people that could fully understand the reasoning behind the Burn family living
on this island, and loving it. Though it was a paradise for A. Lance and his wife Billie, their children didn’t all have the
same prospective.
These were independent people that cherished their privacy and loved nature without living in town or having close
neighbors. A. Lance used to say about people living in town locked up in their homes with barred windows and
burglar alarms, “those people lock themselves in their own jail”.
We had seen this same disposition at a small remote fishing village at Whitefish Point in eastern Lake Superior.
There the few residents didn’t engage in conversation because they loved their solitude and went to great lengths to
achieve it. I think the same was true of Jane and I when we were cruising aboard our boat the Dursmirg and after a
long days sail would find some desolate little anchorage to enjoy our privacy in and drop our anchor only to find that
after some time a boat would go far out of its way to come and anchor next to us, usually with a barking dog. We
would then do the only sane thing to do and move on. Privacy in this day and time is a very scarce thing that is
almost impossible to achieve; we have experienced it and cherish it.
A. Lance had full days starting before the sun when he would speed off in his boat as part of the “Mosquito fleet” to
be the first one out on the shrimping grounds. He came down Mongin Creek past our boat at Papy’s Landing on the
way to Bloody Point and then out to the shrimping grounds on the ocean side. We didn’t need an alarm clock
because
A. Lance was so reliable and could be counted on to be punctual. Then after fishing all morning he would sort the
shrimp, crabs and clean his catch that usually included several bushels of live crabs to get them ready for market. A.
Lance always used to say about the blue crabs, “they are the friendliest things in the sea; they all want to shake
hands with you”. He did show me how to handle them with only a stick to hold down their claws as you grab them
close to their body by one of their swim flippers… “Don’t be timid or they will take a piece of your flesh”!
Another story he told about the crabs was that if you put one in a bucket it would crawl right out. Well, if you put a
half dozen in the bucket they couldn’t escape because every time one reached for the rim of the bucket his
comrades would reach over and pull him right back. This was A. Lance’s collective mind theory and it applied to
people too.
One morning I saw A. Lance come in after 2 hours of shrimping with 175 pounds of shrimp. He had to quit because it
takes one pound of ice for one pound of shrimp and he only had 175 pounds of ice. If the shrimp season had gone
all year long they would have been millionaires.
If there was time before lunch in the morning he and Billie would take a few minutes to
sit in a swing suspended from a giant oak tree in their front yard and converse with whoever happened by. A. Lance
loved to point out a huge oak tree situated down adjacent to the river that had a white porcelain bathroom sink
attached to it with running water. A. Lance would always ask newcomers if they knew what kind of oak that was, and
then jokingly reply… “A water oak”.
A. Lance Burn and a friend Jon Moin in the front yard swing on a summer morning.
A. Lance headed to Savannah with the mail. I was riding with in the summer of 73.
At an exact time in the afternoon A. Lance would be down in his boat, this time with the mail headed to Savannah. It
was common for him to be carrying some one along and often it was an island person in a rush to get medical
attention.
Something I found interesting was that everything that these people used in their everyday lives on the island was
carried to the island by someone. Lance had a list of things that were shopped for, carried to the boat, loaded,
transported to the island and unloaded then carried up the rickety old boarding ramp to a wheel cart that was then
pushed up the hill to their home. Something for the freezer, the kitchen, the workshop, fuel, lubricant and parts for
the many motors were among the various items that Lance handled several times before they reached their final
destination.
Every year A. Lance purchased a brand new engine for his boat and I happened to notice that when he added the
lubricating oil to his gas mixture for his outboard he always stretched the measure a little.
After this busy day he usually found some time to do some garden work in his beloved garden. When it rained his
comment was, “somebody loves us”, and on Daufuskie, “when you run out, you do without”.
This garden seemed like much more than a hobby because of its size. Lance always wanted to make sure that he
raised enough and always wound up sharing his bountiful crops with someone.
I remember a number of times that Jane and helped with his harvest and he made sure we had plenty to take home.
His biggest claim to fame I think was his peanut crop. In all my life I have never seen anything like it and I can’t
imagine where he got the seeds for his giant peanuts, but they were not only huge but they were gigantic. When the
peanuts were harvested it was boiled peanut time at the Burn family home and that became a favorite of Jane and I.
This was the first place we had ever seen this done.
Burn backyard with Billie’s school bus and pecan trees.
The pecan trees provided a sizeable crop if A. Lance kept his vigilance up with the squirrels. With a Browning
automatic .22 caliber rifle, Lance was cunning, crafty and deadly accurate. The squirrels didn’t get many pecans
around the Burn home and when I saw Lance in action with a gun in his hand I was glad that he wasn’t after me
because he was in a class by himself when it came to the shooting department.
He loved to raise different birds around the homestead and couldn’t resist the temptation when he went to the feed
store in Savannah to buy Guinea hens, baby chicks, and even geese that he put into a movable hutch in order to
keep the lawn grass trimmed.
Over the years several dogs were kept and my favorite was a little dog named “Fuskie”. This skinny little dog with an
oversized head couldn’t be classed with a particular breed because he was such a “dukes” mixture. Well, little
“Fuskie” would take on any size foe that happened to trespass on the premises and I remember the little critter
climbing in a drainpipe after some snake that promptly got “Fuskie” on the end of the nose. For several days we all
thought that this was the end of the road for “Fuskie”, but miraculously he pulled through and still didn’t shy away
from pursuit of any class of trespassers.
A. Lance’s birthday was in the first week of September on the 5th, Jane on the 2nd and mine was on the 4th. A.
Lance’s comment about his birthday was that Julius Caesar, Jessie James and A. Lance Burn all had the same
birthday.
Back to the Burn family; It had been less than a year since the book The Water is Wide had come out casting a
not so lovely light on the Burn family, so we definitely understood their gun shy attitude toward newcomers to the
island.
Back to our first visit in the Burn home;
Our visit was an exchange of stories as we tried to glean the others reason for being here. We were definitely on the
island for just about the same reasons and we all loved nature, fishing, reading, craft projects and the time to enjoy
them.
This night we discovered that these people were real doers as Billie and Bob showed us project after project that
they had turned out with the simplest of materials. Bob was a first rate mechanic who had just returned from several
years in Vietnam where he had been a helicopter mechanic for Air America. A large elegantly crafted hunting knife
that he had just handcrafted attested to his creative and artistic abilities.
Bob Burn and his mother Billie in their front yard. Note the well-worn path up from their dock to their
home. Everything that came home came up this path from the river.
Bob’s mother Billie loved to create works of art from the native things of the island using
the original materials and had displayed many items that would catch your eye in their living room that resembled a
museum. It was a museum in many ways because of the variety of island artifacts that were proudly displayed there.
Many things from the beach like Indian arrowheads and pottery, civil war musket balls and clay pipes from the Civil
War soldiers and even artifacts from the plantation era adorned this special museum that also doubled as their
family living room and office.
As the years went by Jane and I were able to contribute to this collection as we wandered the island and recovered
some of those treasures of bygone days.
Something of special interest was Billie’s collection of hand crafted baskets and bowls completely fabricated from the
pine needles of the long leaf pine trees native to the island; neatly bundled together into a type of rope and then
coiled and laced to form the different containers that were replicas of the ones used by the island natives in years
gone by.
Billie was so resourceful and could dig up a catalog that sold and shipped every conceivable item you could ever
want or need. From seeds for planting to fishing gear to the strangest types of gadgets, Billie could always be relied
upon to put her hand on just the right catalog and she was always eager to help anyone that needed something
from the outside world, which we many times did.
Even with all of her busy island activities she managed to always have something cooking that gave their home a
very inviting aroma. Jane was many times at Billie’s elbow to learn some interesting cooking techniques such as
picking crabs. Billie was an expert and had mastered the talent with just the right equipment. She had a shrimp
deveiner, pecan sheller and many other gadgets that made kitchen tasks go smoothly. Besides all the gadgets she
was expert in their use and eager to share her knowledge with others. Jane still has the shrimp deveiner that Billie
gave her so many years ago.
Here are a couple of recipes that Billie gave to Jane that we still keep in our collection of favorites that brings back
many fond memories of a very special person;
Pineapple-Upside Down Cake (from Billie Burn August 1973)
½ stick of butter
½ cup brown sugar
4 or 5 slices of pineapple
5 tablespoons pineapple juice
1 cup of sugar
1 cup of self rising flour
3 eggs
1. Light and adjust oven to 350 degrees
2. Melt butter and brown sugar slowly
3. Beat the sugar and egg yokes until light
4. Blend alternately the juice and flour with the beaten yokes and sugar. Beat the egg whites and fold in.
5. Place the pineapple slices in the melted sugar and butter. Pour batter over this and bake 30 minutes.
Chicken ADO-BO; this recipe originally came from Billie’s daughter June.
1 fryer (cover/water)
1 teaspoon of vinegar
1 clove of garlic
1 large onion
Soy-sauce to taste
1 or 2 bay leaves
Salt (very little)
Pepper
Cook on high heat until the meat is tender. If you want lots of liquid add more water, soy and vinegar.
***
Before this memorable evening was over we were shown how to knit or tie a shrimp cast net. Bob and his mother got
us started and more or less challenged us to build our own net. To make this net completely authentic Bob gave us
an island cow horn to make the swivel and throat of the net from. He even lent us his mold for net weights, which was
an antique and gave us the lead to cast the weights with. We then dove into this project. I even made my own
needles to stitch the net together that I handmade from a hickory tree on the island.
These ten-inch long needles and the spacer above I handmade from hickory wood from Daufuskie
Island and still use them to this day.
We were dedicated net builders because we had been lent our friend Jim Muller’s shrimp cast net along with many
lessons and could see what a wonderful food provider it was.
Jane and I switched off tying all of the knots that it took to build this net that was to be ten feet in diameter when
completed. For two weeks we diligently tied the thousands of knots required to complete the net and as the project
drew to completion, Jim Muller and I went to the beach and built a really hot fire to melt the leads to cast the weights
to finish the net. Surprise! Some of the lead turned out to be zinc and we almost couldn’t extract the weights from the
mold because the alloy we created was not soft and malleable lead but some non-yielding metal alloy instead. The
net result was that we had all of the weights we needed in the end but the temperature at which this concoction of
metals melted at was so high that we could have used a smelting furnace
That net was a real prize that landed many a shrimp, fish and crab and an accomplishment that always conjured up
sweet memories of those wonderful times and incredible people that took the special interest to pass along that bit
of real island tradition to us…so Bob and Billie, thank you so very much!
Live shrimp
Jane on the deck of the Dursmirg with freshly caught flounder and a cast net we purchased. We mail-
ordered this Spanish cast net with its chain for a lead line and tucks instead of draw strings. It proved to
be worth its weight in gold for providing us with a constant supply of fresh fish. This type of net was
standard fishing equipment for the Burn family.
Five pounds of live shrimp; the result of my cast netting from the dinghy at Daufuskie Island.
CHAPTER 8
SHORTY AND BEN SMITH
Shorty and Ben Smith:
1974 Shorty; “Get your gun John!” “Get your gun John!” Shorty and Ben were living in a small cottage at Papy’s
Landing at the time. I was on our boat the Dursmirg anchored in Mongin Creek less than a hundred yards away with
my wife Jane.
By the third time that Shorty screamed at the top of her lungs, “Get your gun John!” This third time I could detect the
panicky urgency in her voice.
I had absolutely no idea what Shorty could have confronted to provoke such a passionate scream so I just grabbed
my Winchester model 12 pump shot gun, Jane got me some shells and I made a hasty trip to shore in our dinghy.
As I approached their little cabin at Papy’s Landing, Shorty was there pointing to the little screened porch and
exclaiming that a huge snake had just crawled underneath.
I ducked down with my gun loaded to confront a rattlesnake about three feet long coiled there more or less standing
its ground. A stick would have dispatched the critter but Shorty was so excited and insistent that I blow that serpent
out of existence that I did as she wished. A blast at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun immediately converted the
snake into so much bloody mush.
It took me some time to calm Shorty down and then I wondered how she could possibly live on the Island that was
literally slithering with a variety of snakes.
The week before Jane had helped Shorty’s sister in-law, Billie Burn clean a 6 foot 4 inch rattlesnake that Billie had
killed with a stick as she was making her rounds with the school bus. I was very impressed not only with Billie’s guts
to pursue a snake of that size with only a stick but to actually run it down in the woods and dispatch it. When I
arrived at the Burn home, I was amazed that this snake coiled into a bushel basket filled it to overflowing. That
trophy was fastened to a board and dried and prominently displayed in their home. Oh, by the way that wasn’t the
largest snakeskin on display there.
Yet another Daufuskie snake story; One day Jane and I were rowing in our dinghy near Bloody Point on the
southeast end of Daufuskie Island when we encountered a relatively large rattlesnake. This one was in the salty
seawater and swimming. It took a notion to board our little dinghy and I have never seen Jane row as fast as she did
that particular day. I had heard stories of shrimp boats getting rattlesnakes in their nets offshore but this was the
first and only time I had ever seen one in the briny sea waters…we were definitely believers now!
I liked what one of the colorful old locals, Hinson White, used to say about snakes on the island as he spoke with his
broken Gullah accent. He said, “John, when you go a walking in the woods you are forever tripping over sticks until
you spot a big snake, then you can’t find a stick to save your life”.
Shorty and Ben Smith; (Good food)
These two people were made for each other. Of all of the people on the island these two undoubtedly had more fun
than all the rest combined. Laughing, joking and happy to just be together, they welcomed all comers and made a
place at their dinner table no matter how large the group happened to get. The living room was usually their front
yard and their first year on the island they lived in a small shack at Papy’s Landing owned by Ben’s brother-in-law,
Frank Burn.
Shorty’s cooking specialty was fried everything; they had a huge deep fryer powered by an LP gas flame that roared
and was made to be used outdoors and it might not have even been safe there.
Shorty couldn’t resist giving a demonstration of one of her favorite cooking specialties. Hush-puppies made her
laugh and she just couldn’t contain herself as she would ball up a bit of dough and drop it into the smoking hot
grease and point out that it would quickly sink to the bottom. Then like magic in a few seconds it would miraculously
come bobbing to the surface and cook in the boiling grease. Then yet another miracle would transpire and that little
wad of dough that had become golden brown on one side would rollover and cook on the other side all by itself.
Shorty was absolutely delighted that she could give a demonstration of this seemingly trained ball of dough that
went through the paces of cooking and even let the cook know when it was finished with its final rollover. Then the
best of all came as Shorty laughingly explained that the name hushpuppy came because the dog barking to the
cook wanted a treat and as this little tidbit was tossed to the waiting dog the cook always said, “hush puppy”. Shorty’
s little Chihuahua was ironically named “Killer”.
Jane and I always thought that Shorty had a secret ingredient in her delicious cooking…Portland cement, because
we inevitability would come away from a meal at Shorty and Ben’s house with stomach cramps because everything
was “greased to kill”, and of course we also stuffed ourselves.
Fried fish, fried shrimp, crab cakes, fried okra, fried eggplant, fried oysters, and if that wasn’t enough grease when
the greens were cooked a piece of “white meat” or “pork belly” was always added to impart that special down south
“cookin flavor”
Boiled peanuts, boiled shrimp, corn bread and muffins made with Martha White’s self- rising flour were the
exceptions to the fried stuff. If you ever had the chance to have the real thing when it came to southern cooking you
could surely find it here on Daufuskie Island.
A recipe that Shorty gave to Jane:
5 cups of whole cooked onions (3 ½ pounds)
4 cups of cheddar cheese (grated ¾ pound)
1 cup self rising flour
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons butter
Mix all the ingredients;
Pour into a 1 quart casserole.
Sprinkle one cup of grated cheese on top.
Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
It is always a treat to find in our collection of old favorite recipes something like this that takes us back in time to
some of our fondest memories of our special friends from that time and place so long ago and gone.
Ben Smith, home-brew experience:
We became home brewers because of the inspiration Bob Burn instilled in us as he got us “kicking” plum,
persimmon, elderberry, and sassafras wines. All of these wines were made from things that we were able to harvest
from the wild woods of Daufuskie.
Our interest was perked by our successes with the wine production and soon the idea of making our own beer
became an appealing idea.
Jane and I received a beer-making recipe from some friends we had met down in south Florida at the Dinner Key
anchorage in Miami.
This “home-brew” was made using Blue Ribbon Malt Extract that could be purchased at most grocery stores back in
those days and came in a one-quart can. The thick syrup that resembled molasses was very tasty on its own and
was intended as an additive for making homemade bread. The extract came in a variety of different flavors, light,
medium, dark, hop flavored and several combinations of the above.
The only other ingredients needed were water, sugar and yeast. The amount of these ingredients determined the
body and alcohol content of the finished product. Cleanliness was very important or “skunkie” beer would result.
Timing was another important factor because if the beer was bottled too soon it would taste yeasty like doughy
bread because this product used exactly the same ingredients as in the making of bread.
That reminds me of what our dear old friend Armando used to say about beer, “the bread is in the bottle”.
The quantity and proportion of the ingredients gave the beer the special taste and determined how heavy it would
be. To us good beer should be able to be drunk at room temperature and still taste good. Only bad beer has to be
refrigerated to the point of freezing to disguise the “ersatz” ingredients. We always used to joke that you could buy
only two kinds of beer in Georgia, hot and cold.
In our first year of producing our own beer aboard our boat the Dursmirg we were actually refining the process to
the point that the people that sampled our home-brew raved about it.
Here is where Ben Smith comes into the story; Ben remembered that back in the Prohibition days in his childhood
that his family had resorted to making home-brew with malt extract and he thought that he would now like to make
his own here on the island because it was a long way to town and it would be a big savings to make his own.
Jane gave Ben the recipe and some helpful hints to make his brewing experience a good one.
Well, Ben was the type of person that thought that he could improve on everything and so as he went into
production he added extra sugar and doubled the yeast.
His beer kicked out in record time in the heat of the South Carolina summer time temperatures.
Ben was anticipating the bottling of his beer and had rounded up many of the old time Coca-Cola returnable bottles
that were discarded on the island. These were the type that dated back to the World War II era and were so tough
that you could back over them with a Caterpillar tractor without breaking them. He borrowed our capper and caps
and was ready the minute he thought it was time to bottle.
Next came the big surprise after a couple of days as the naturally fermenting extra sugar built the pressure in the
bottles to the point of transforming these little Coca-Cola bottles into small hand grenades.
The first explosion came in the middle of the night and almost gave Ben and Shorty cardiac arrest. The explosion
sent shrapnel of glass and a spray of freshly fermented beer through their tiny shack. This had to be contained and
Ben got a large heavy piece of canvas to cover the bottles of his prized “home-brew”. The explosions continued and
next Ben got large galvanized tubs to put the beer in and again covered the whole works with canvas, this time
several times doubled over.
The explosions continued and tore the canvas cover to shreds.
Ben then came to Jane for advice and counseling. As he related his alterations to his recipe to us it became clear
what the problem was. Ben had used enough sugar to make 25 gallons of home-brew and it was now bottled in a
five-gallon batch.
I then confidently told Ben that we would only have to pry up the caps and relieve the excessive pressure and that
then it would be OK.
Next I went with Ben to show him my remedy to his dilemma. Now there was a crowd gathered to witness the
happenings. Well, a crowd for the island that is.
Very carefully I gingerly picked one of the little bombs up handling it like it was nitroglycerin and stepped outside. All
eyes were on me and I confidently took my bottle opener and ever so slightly began to ease off the cap holding my
mouth open and ready to catch any of the first beer that might escape before I had the situation totally under control.
Wow! Pow! Whoosh! An uncontrolled eruption took place in what seemed like a nanosecond and I only got some
misting of the explosive ingredients as the contents totally left the little hand grenade and I didn’t even get a single
drop in my mouth. The crowd went wild with laughter and then as soon as I could evaluate the situation I too had to
laugh at my total astonishment and amazement. No, in all of my years and with all of the many beers that I had
opened including a number of kegs, I had never witnessed anything so totally beyond my abilities to control.
Yes, Ben Smith did the ultimate in home-brew production and his little brewery was a short lived enterprise on
Daufuskie but luckily we all gleaned a hilarious story to remember for many a year to come…thanks Ben.
Ben and Shorty Smith reminiscing:
These two were opposites when it came to getting excited. Ben always was so calm and collected that I can’t ever
remember him in a panic. His jokes and spontaneous laughter made him liked by everyone he met.
Ben and Shorty loved to have a few beers and Old Milwaukee was Ben’s brand. After several beers Shorty would
always get into a snit and start calling Ben, “Hooper Smith”.
Then we were likely to hear some reminiscing of their younger years when they lived back in Tennessee.
It turned out that back in their youth they had fallen in with a traveling snake-oil salesman, named “Mystic”. Shorty
would be dressed up in some provocative outfit and parade around while Mystic pitched the crowd. Ben took care of
the sales and merchandise. Then we heard the laughing and snickering while they told of sneaking off in the night to
leave town.
After Ben got called “Hooper Smith” again he would merely pour Short another drink and soon she would forget
about her snit.
Another story that always brought laughter was when they told of their dear friend Dave Brown, a black man that
lived on Daufuskie.
The story goes like this; one afternoon Dave Brown came by in his boat to visit and he had a new motor for his boat.
They asked where he got the motor, and Dave said, “In town”. How much did you pay, “got me a good deal”? Well,
did you get a guarantee? Dave responded, “Hell no, I paid cash!”
One quiet evening as Jane and I were aboard our boat anchored at Papy’s Landing a loud noise was heard outside
our boat. At first we thought that it was a train coming but then it was nearly twenty miles to the nearest railroad
tracks. Next the noise intensified and our boat was laid ninety degrees over on its side. This happened so fast that
we were totally surprised and didn’t have any real recollection of just how long this sequence of events took.
What happened was that a twister or tornado had struck us with such force that it laid our 20-ton vessel on its side.
On the inside of our boat everything that was on the galley countertop wound up over and across on the top of the
chart table. Everything that was on deck was gone except for a canoe paddle that mysteriously remained. Another
thing was that the side of the boat that went down had the portholes all closed; if they had been open we would have
been swamped for sure.
On the shore huge old oak trees were up rooted and laid down. On the other side of the island nothing at all had
happened and no one was even aware of the twister passing.
At that time Ben and Shorty lived only a couple hundred feet from the landing where the twister had come through.
Ben’s comment was, “thought I’d see y’all gone”.
You couldn’t help but love these very special people. You will be lucky if you have the good fortune to meet such a
loving and very special pair as these two in your entire life.
CHAPTER 9
Bob Lancy Burn 1974;
Our second summer on Daufuskie Island Bob Lancy Burn moved his sailboat the Blue Gypsy over from Hilton Head
Island where he had been docking it at the Harbor Town Marina. This was Bob’s 28-foot Great Dane sailboat, which
he had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean three times.
The blue hulled sloop rigged fiberglass boat with lots of teak trim sported a self steering gear attached to the boats
outboard rudder and had painted on each side the silhouette of a dancing gypsy girl. The self-steering gear made it
possible for Bob to make his single-handed ocean crossings and the little gypsy girl painted on the gear was his
around the clock helmsman.
Bob Burn’s sailboat the, Blue Gypsy at anchor in Mongin Creek, our new neighbor.
Now Bob was our neighbor and he had a new companion, Emily Stapleton.
Bob and Emily worked together running Bob’s Wellcraft outboard powered boat that he used to pull a single shrimp
trawl net just offshore from the Daufuskie Island beach. Several people were engaged in this type of fishing
including Bob’s father A. Lance. Collectively they were referred to as the “Mosquito Fleet”.
Make no mistake about it, this was a very strenuous job because none of the boats had any winches or other
mechanical equipment to retrieve their nets and equipment.
A regular member of the “Mosquito Fleet” was a man named Joe Joyce from Bluffton, South Carolina. Well, Joe was
miraculously and repeatedly the biggest producer and when each day’s fishing was done you could count on Joe to
consistently come in with the biggest catch. All of his jealous competitors used to say about Joe that the reason he
caught so many shrimp was that he could think like a shrimp.
Oh, by the way!
Joe brought a cat to give as a present to Bob Burn.
Bob was emphatic that he did not want the cat, but Joe insisted and insisted…”You have to take it, it is a gift, it is
yours”. Bob said, “No, I don’t want it!” Then Bob says: “You mean that it is mine and I can do with it what I want?”
Finally, and reluctantly, Bob went to the house and got his gun and came back and shot the cat. Joe said: “Well,
what did you do that for?” Bob said: “It was my cat!”
We received this story third hand and happen to know that both Bob Burn and Joe Joyce tended to gross
exaggerations so we weren’t sure that this might just be another “Brer Rabbit” story.
NOTE: Bob’s mother Billie told us that when Bob was younger, he shot everything in sight and then she made him
eat everything that he shot….did he eat the cat? If he did, he must have put Crystal hot sauce on it!
Many days I was solicited to go out and help many of the different shrimpers or when they were coming in with a
“mess” of shrimp that was way more than they had expected, they would pull alongside our anchored boat,
Dursmirg, and I would get down and help them sort their catch. The pay was always a generous quantity of shrimp,
crabs or some fish.
Bob Burn in his shrimp boat tied to the Dursmirg in Mongin Creek during the summer of 1974. You can
see in the photo our bicycles sitting on our back deck.
Bob Burn and I cleaning fish after the shrimp had been sorted and cleaned up. We were in Bob’s boat
tied to the Dursmirg that was anchored in Mongin Creek.
The shrimp season was during the summer months and the shrimpers had to work the
tides and occasionally the weather would halt the fishing but summertime mornings generally tended to be tranquil
and still.
Bob and Emily took their catch to Hilton Head Island to sell every afternoon and that turned out to be more time
consuming than their time catching the shrimp.
Hilton Head Island made for a real paradox boasting more millionaires per square mile than anyplace in America and
just across Calibogue Sound was located Daufuskie Island with people renting houses for as little as $8.00 a month
and more ox carts than automobiles.
Prices on Hilton Head Island were high and Bob got paid well for his shrimp but if he shopped there he gave much of
his money right back. I remember one day asking Bob to pick up a couple of pounds of butter for us when he went
over to Hilton Head to sell his shrimp. When he returned he said that the price was $2.00 and I was shocked
because at that time in Savannah the price was only 49 cents a pound. Then Bob told me that it was $2.00 for each
pound.
Bob is an enterprising person that is a master at mechanical things and I was surprised at his little VW beetle he
used on the island. First he gave it a distinctive paint job. Most people paint the undersides with undercoater to
protect the vehicles from rust. Well, Bob painted the outside with undercoat from one end to the other and that gave
this unusual little vehicle a distinctive look that made it look like it was some kind of a jungle creature.
Bob is a first rate mechanic who can fix anything mechanical…that he wants to. This VW had no brakes all the time I
ever knew Bob and he also boasted that he had never changed the oil. Bob thoroughly enjoyed his little car and
when he wanted to stop he just rolled it up to a tree and bumped it to a stop. Emily used to get so mad and scold
him, but Bob would just get one of his unmistakable big grins and break into laughter…he loved it!
Bob also had a talent with fiberglass and we saw him several times take some derelict boat that was “junked-out” or
scuttled and go to work on it and in a matter of a couple of days have a factory fresh looking boat that would be far
tougher than the original.
Bob was always working some deal with his dad who had worked some of his boats literally to death shrimping and
running his route to town for the mail. Bob would resurrect them from the dead and make them better than new and
then trade up with his dad. In the end both got better boats and Bob had a little industry.
Bob had some land on the island where he intended to build a home some day and his first winter back living on the
island he pulled an old school bus up to where he had started to grow a garden and renovated the inside into his
island home.
This is where Bob and Emily spent their first winter on the island.
When Jane and I first visited the yellow and black ex-school bus we were impressed at Bob’s innovations that made
the place cozy and inviting.
That fall Bob came by our boat several times to get me to help him retrieve timbers that he had located washed
ashore along the Savannah River.
We would speed off in Bob’s Wellcraft boat with its two cylinder 50 horse power motor through the twists and turns of
the many rivers and bays that Bob knew instinctively at all stages of tide and then out into the Savannah River or
one of the adjacent waterways and there Bob had the materials for his new home.
We were collecting 12” by 12” timbers and some were nearly 40 feet long. We went up in the woods where the
various high tides had deposited the timbers. Bob would secure the timbers with a nylon line that he then attached
to the stern of his boat. The next step was to drive the boat at high speed out into the river and “snatch” the timbers
out to the waters edge. This system worked well and usually required several attempts before the timbers actually
got to the river where we would raft them up to be towed back to Daufuskie. These building materials were free for
the taking but wound up being costly in time and effort. Of course Bob could have purchased these same materials
from some saw mill and he still would have had the logistics problem of getting them to his building site out on the
island and a considerable distance from the shore.
Using his dad’s farm tractor, it was a major job to just drag one of these timbers at a time from where we had rafted
them in front of his parents’ home on the island to Bob’s building site.
We didn’t get to see how they got the rest of the materials for their new home but we got to hear the story of Bob
and Emily’s project of dissembling an old wooden barge that was pinned together with big long steel rods and each
piece of wood had to be pried apart. Then the wood had to be transported to the remote building site, cut to length
and assembled into their new two-story “A-frame” home.
Bob and Emily’s new home made from lumber out of the river.
That old barge that Bob and Emily salvaged was the same one that Jane and I had used to prop our boat the
Dursmirg in the fall of 1973 when we careened it and did a bottom paint job. It had been located less than a hundred
yards north of the Burn’s dock on the same side of the river.
Doing a bottom paint job to the Dursmirg. The Dursmirg is tied to the old wooden barge that Bob and
Emily Burn salvaged to use for lumber to complete their A-frame home. This spot is located just north of
the Burn home on the New River.
We did have a hand in other parts of their material acquisitions when we salvaged the foundation of an old
abandoned building on the beach and made many a trip toting truck loads of red bricks to their building site.
This was a monumental task and we had the up most of admiration for the outstanding effort required to accomplish
their building project because Jane and I had just built our own 46 foot sailboat completely from the point of
conception to our new completed home.
Many an evening Bob and Emily would come over to our boat to visit and sample and scrutinize our latest production
of wine or home-brew. Our two boats were anchored just far enough apart so that we each had our own privacy but
it was an easy row in the dinghy between boats. Because the currents were so strong it was important to catch hold
of the boat you were approaching on your first approach or it would be necessary to get to shore to pick up a back
current and then make another attempt, rowing against the current was not an option. Because our gunwale was so
high above the water we kept a line off our dinghy davits as a last chance to grab the boat while approaching by
dinghy.
On the deck of the Dursmirg anchored in Mongin Creek enjoying homemade wine and home-brew. This
was a private little island at a special place in time and space.
We usually spent our evenings out on deck to enjoy the lovely sea breezes but many times we would wind up in our
main salon and Bob took pity on Jane cooking on her diesel powered galley stove that heated the boat like an oven
especially on these warm summer days. One evening he presented her with a little Swedish Primus Kerosene stove.
This particular model had no adjustment to its flame size other than how many pumps you gave it to send the fuel to
the burner; this was the “roarer” burner. Jane was very happy with it because it was extremely fast to cook with and
was also portable. I even made a gimbal for it to sit in when we were under way or out to sea. We later discovered
that many different burners were available for this stove at the Cuba hardware stores in Miami and wound up with a
quiet burner that had an adjustable flame.
Here are a couple of recipes that Emily Burn gave to Jane:
“Date nut cake;
1 quart of pecans chopped
1 cup whole wheat flour
3 eggs
1 cup sugar or ½ cup honey
1 pound of dates chopped
1 teaspoon of vanilla
Roll dates and nuts in flour, mix other ingredients with the dates, nuts and flour.
Bake at 325 degrees for one hour.
Beer Bread:
3 cups of flour
3 tablespoons of honey
2 teaspoons of baking powder
Salt
1 can of beer
Bake one hour at 350 degrees.
These recipes have survived in our collection of favorites all of these years and are a fine reminder of some of the
best times we have ever had.
Another donation Bob made to our boat that made our living a lot better was a Tilley pressure kerosene lantern that
used a mantle and gave off the equivalent of two hundred watts of light. There were two reasons why we got the
lantern. One was that Bob thought that our wick kerosene Dietz lanterns were insufficient for us to read by and he
was right. The other reason was that he was totally fed up with his lantern and almost pumped it up to the point of
blowing the pressure tank up like a balloon ready to pop. The tank was severely convex on the bottom due to his
overzealous pumping and would no longer sit on a flat surface, which was fine with us because everything aboard
our boat had to either be bulkhead mounted or hung up and tethered.
I need to mention that we had no refrigeration at this time and the Burn’s were kind enough to freeze one-gallon jugs
of water to make ice for us and later on that year Ben and Shorty did the same. The next year I had put together a
kerosene powered absorption refrigeration system that only consumed a cup of kerosene a day and only needed
Jane’s constant vigilance to keep the wick trimmed and adjusted plus fill the fuel tank I had made out of a peanut
butter jar.
Bob was in a back to nature thing at this time and wanted to live a simple and clean life without the outside world
intruding. He had his own honeybees, wine production and mostly lived on what he caught in the river.
Bob really wanted to live with nature and not against it and one day when a DC-3 airplane came over repeatedly
spraying some strange insecticide that was designed to kill all the bugs on the Sea Islands, Bob had to take action.
He was one of the first people to observe that not only did all of the mosquitoes drop dead but also his colonies of
honeybees rolled over and did the same. Another observation was that the blue crabs in the creeks and rivers
surrounding the island were completely wiped out of existence at the same time.
Bob had just spent a good deal of time over in Vietnam and had witnessed first hand what the government was
capable of with sprayed chemicals like “Agent Orange”.
When the electric company approached Bob to put a power line right-of way across Bob’s property, he not only said
no but also made it quite clear that there would never be electric on his property.
A year later Bob seemed to see some wisdom in having the convenience of electric power that is ready when you flip
the switch. So, back to the power company he went, this time humbly to seek his installation permit. As my Jane
always says, “Whenever you say never… that could mean possibly”.
Bob and Emily Burn in 1982 on the beach at Daufuskie Island. Looking north; Calibogue Sound and Hilton
Head Island are in the background.
Bob and Emily Burn ten years after we first met them on Daufuskie Island.
Bob and I caught a lot of sheepshead fish during a visit we made to Daufuskie in 1987
next chapter
CHAPTER 7 Daufuskie Island
Bob Burn; (a re-cap of Bob Burn and our first meeting in the fall of 1972).
Jane and I were docked at the Savannah Inn and Country Club while we were regrouping after I had a debilitating
accident that left me with a shoulder injury. We were invited to listen to a presentation. The guest speaker was Bob
Burn and this is a short summarization of his story and our first meeting;
On his first sailing experience with his new “Great Dane” 28-foot sloop rig sailboat in Denmark, he was caught in a
storm and tried to anchor at night. He was driven up on the rocks high and dry at high tide and was alone along the
Danish coast. When he asked for help he was sent a six-pack of beer and told that he was a rich American and that
he should just buy another boat. Well, he worked long and hard, determined to launch the boat and he managed to
do it with materials he found on the beach and then sailed off to America.
I had written previously about meeting Bob first on Thanksgiving evening in 1972 while anchoring our boat Dursmirg
off of Daufuskie Island. Later in Savannah where Bob was a guest speaker at the Geechee Sailing Club relating his
single-handed Trans-Atlantic race experience where he came in second, and at a party afterwards aboard our boat
the Dursmirg. Bob then told Jane and I that we must come to visit at Daufuskie Island and he would give us a tour.
Bob Burn; spring of 1973
Well, in the spring of 1973 Jane and I along with our visitor Jim Muller returned to Daufuskie on our way north up the
east coast of the US with a possible destination of Chesapeake Bay.
We anchored our boat about a mile north of the Burn home on Daufuskie in the New River and I took our dinghy to
look for our friend Bob.
I was impressed by the stately oak trees hung heavy with Spanish moss as I tied our dinghy to the rickety but
serviceable old dock that was grayed with age and seemed to have been built of any lumber that might have drifted
by over the years.
I wasn’t even to the shoreline when a very distinguished and neatly dressed man with gray hair and determined blue
eyes confronted me. He had the appearance of just stepping out of a barbers chair and was very businesslike and
directly to the point. I will never forget his first words to me, “Who are you looking for Bubba?” It seemed strange to
be addressed as “Bubba”, but that is a local thing to do when a persons name is not known.
I was told that my message would be relayed to Bob and that was the end of the conversation. It turned out the
person I had just met was Bob’s dad, A. Lance Burn.
That evening a big flashy and very polished sport fishing boat pulled along side and someone hollered over to our
boat Dursmirg.
It was our friend Bob (Lancy) Burn and it turned out that he had a job running this sport fishing boat that happened
to belong to the developer of Hilton Head Island, Mr. Fraser.
(Hilton Head Island was the next island north of Daufuskie Island along the South Carolina coast and had the
dubious distinction or at least made the claim of having more millionaires per square mile than any other place in the
country.)
Bob had lots of stories to tell as usual because he forever was involved in a life of perpetual adventures.
Bob presented us with some of his homemade plum wine. It was a gallon bottle, which we considered to be very
generous.
Bob also gave us directions to a very secluded anchorage in a place called Mongin Creek at Papy’s Landing on the
south side of Daufuskie Island. This was a local knowledge only spot because of the many sand bars and oyster
banks to navigate past. With nearly a nine foot daily tidal range, this took some creative boat handling but it was well
worth it and we found out that this was going to be one of our very favorite anchoring spots that we would return to
many times over the coming years.
A strange thing the following evening Bob made a return visit to our boat and we poured him a glass of wine that he
exclaimed was just wonderful and asked where we had gotten such a lovely wine as this. Well, this was some of the
very same wine that he had given us just the night before. Bob couldn’t help his honesty in relating the story of his
wine production and how after this particular batch of wine had finished kicking that it had a strange and wild
“whang” taste that was not to his liking so parting with it wasn’t a hardship. Well, it did age well and quickly because
Bob had last sampled and bottled it was just the month before!
(At this point Jane and I made our first cruising trip north to Charleston and back to Daufuskie in 1973. Read about
that trip in volume 2 chapter 2.)
Billie Burn
(Our first meeting)
A couple of nights after Jane and I returned from our trip to Charleston in the spring of 1973 we again anchored
back in Mongin Creek at Papy’s Landing on the south side of Daufuskie island.
We had an invitation to visit at the home of Bob Burn’s parents. We eagerly looked forward to the experience.
We figured that anyone as adventuresome as our friend Bob just had to have some different and very eccentric
parents and our hunch proved to be correct.
A. Lance Burn, a brief history of his life
A. Lance was the son of a former lighthouse keeper on the island named Papy Burn who sent his son Lance off to
live with some neighbors named the “Fripps” when Papy married his fourth wife. In his youth A. Lance also spent
over seven years in an orphanage in Savannah, Georgia.
A. Lance went off to fight in World War II and one story that he related to me was of when he was in boot camp
training and developed an abscessed tooth that got so bad that one of the officers took note when A. Lance couldn’t
hold his gun up to his face on the target range. The officer sent A. Lance off to the dentist who without hesitation
hastily yanked a tooth out of A. Lance’s mouth and it turned out to be the wrong one so the dentist merely reached
in and pulled one more…this time it was the right one!
A. Lance was stationed in Europe during the war and didn’t mention his front line action much except to say that he
managed to blast those “damn blond haired Nazis”.
He had landed at Normandy then fought his way on foot every inch of the way across France and Germany to
Czechoslovakia.
After the war he was happy to discover that the government found it in its heart to give all of the veterans free
drivers licenses for life. Then he cynically said that if he lived to be a hundred years old it wouldn’t be worth a
hundred dollars.
Over the years I had the good fortune to spend many a fascinating hour listening to A. Lance’s stories as I rode to
Savannah and back aboard his mail boat. He made the trip five times a week, in all seasons and in all types of
weather. A. Lance was a marvelous boat handler that seemed naturally at ease as he guided his boat deftly around
sand bars and oyster banks taking advantage of the tidal currents. Passing various types of boats, barges, yachts
and speed boats he would read their wakes and then precisely guide his boat over and through like a professional
dancer gliding with a talented partner flawlessly executing the maneuver and make it look so very easy; trust me, he
was talented.
Each time we made that very interesting trip and we walked down their rickety old dock to leave the island A. Lance
always stopped for a brief moment to peer down along side the dock at the few remains of an old boat named the
Dandy; many years abandoned to the elements, the Dandy had been his original freight boat when he returned to
Daufuskie after the War. The Dandy had a fascinating history having been in the movie African Queen and Mr. Burn
bought it in Florida and brought it to Daufuskie Island; its final resting place. He used to shake his head and say,
“one of these days I’ll just have to get down there and change the oil!”
A. Lance Burn on his rickety old dock with the New River in the background, 1974.
Another comment he often made as he witnessed some large yacht that went flying past the billboard size sign on
the island cautioning to, “Slow Down, No Wake Zone” was, “if they were animals you could train them”.
Upon returning from town his usual comment was, “well, I spent a week in town today!”
Billie and her husband A. Lance both had spent a good deal of their lives on Daufuskie and even had a small fish
camp business with several rental rooms that proved to be not sufficiently lucrative to sustain their growing family so
they followed the rush to south Florida where A. Lance made a living plastering the new homes that were being put
up on a production line basis. When sheetrock wall construction became the vogue in the 50s, that was enough for
A. Lance and the move back to Daufuskie was the right thing at the right time.
All didn’t go smoothly at first back on Daufuskie until A. Lance put the bottle down and became righteous. That was
a turning point in the life of the entire family but their three kids by this time had all gone their separate ways in the
world.
I can only imagine the demons that must have haunted A. Lance’s mind with his detached home life as a child, he
didn’t even inherit a piece of land like his half brother Frank, his horrendous military experiences from his Omaha
beach landing in Europe to fighting his way across every inch of France and Germany all the way to Czechoslovakia.
A. Lance and Billie were dedicated to the island and its people and relentlessly filled jobs that held this population of
85 souls together. I found it amazing that there could ever be any criticism of the jobs A. Lancy and Billie filled.
I definitely noticed that these fine public spirited people now spoke with very measured and conservatively thought
out words because of the verbal flack that they had received at the hands of a person that they had befriended and
confided in. The book, The Water is Wide, had only been out a year and was a number one best seller. Though the
names had been changed there was absolutely no mistake that this book was about Daufuskie Island”. In the book
the Burn family was referred to as the Stones and A. Lance always used to say to us, “we are the Stones but you
are the stone boat people”. (The previous fall a newspaper story in Savannah referred to our boat as the “stone
boat).
Billie Burn was the Postmistress of Daufuskie Island. The post office was neatly kept and dependably met the hours
of opening, the mail was picked up five days each week by A. Lance Burn and dependably brought to the island, the
school bus punctually made the rounds, the grader regularly leveled the roads and A. Lance as magistrate settled
many an explosive situation.
A. Lance and Billie didn’t inherit the land or home they lived in on the island but bought it from the Fripp family that
had taken A. Lance in when he was a child and put out by his father.
The Burn home as seen from the river side on the west. (Formerly the Fripp Place)
Daufuskie Island at the Burn home. Billie and A. Lance Burn in front of the post office in the summer of
1973. (This was under the same roof as their home and was situated to the left hand side as seen in the
photo above taken from the dock.)
These two fine dedicated people came under what I consider very unjust criticism by the author of the book, The
Water is Wide. Though they did hold down many important jobs on the island I found it very interesting that when
they one by one surrendered these jobs not a single soul stepped forward to fill their shoes.
Jane and I were some of the very few people that could fully understand the reasoning behind the Burn family living
on this island, and loving it. Though it was a paradise for A. Lance and his wife Billie, their children didn’t all have the
same prospective.
These were independent people that cherished their privacy and loved nature without living in town or having close
neighbors. A. Lance used to say about people living in town locked up in their homes with barred windows and
burglar alarms, “those people lock themselves in their own jail”.
We had seen this same disposition at a small remote fishing village at Whitefish Point in eastern Lake Superior.
There the few residents didn’t engage in conversation because they loved their solitude and went to great lengths to
achieve it. I think the same was true of Jane and I when we were cruising aboard our boat the Dursmirg and after a
long days sail would find some desolate little anchorage to enjoy our privacy in and drop our anchor only to find that
after some time a boat would go far out of its way to come and anchor next to us, usually with a barking dog. We
would then do the only sane thing to do and move on. Privacy in this day and time is a very scarce thing that is
almost impossible to achieve; we have experienced it and cherish it.
A. Lance had full days starting before the sun when he would speed off in his boat as part of the “Mosquito fleet” to
be the first one out on the shrimping grounds. He came down Mongin Creek past our boat at Papy’s Landing on the
way to Bloody Point and then out to the shrimping grounds on the ocean side. We didn’t need an alarm clock
because
A. Lance was so reliable and could be counted on to be punctual. Then after fishing all morning he would sort the
shrimp, crabs and clean his catch that usually included several bushels of live crabs to get them ready for market. A.
Lance always used to say about the blue crabs, “they are the friendliest things in the sea; they all want to shake
hands with you”. He did show me how to handle them with only a stick to hold down their claws as you grab them
close to their body by one of their swim flippers… “Don’t be timid or they will take a piece of your flesh”!
Another story he told about the crabs was that if you put one in a bucket it would crawl right out. Well, if you put a
half dozen in the bucket they couldn’t escape because every time one reached for the rim of the bucket his
comrades would reach over and pull him right back. This was A. Lance’s collective mind theory and it applied to
people too.
One morning I saw A. Lance come in after 2 hours of shrimping with 175 pounds of shrimp. He had to quit because it
takes one pound of ice for one pound of shrimp and he only had 175 pounds of ice. If the shrimp season had gone
all year long they would have been millionaires.
If there was time before lunch in the morning he and Billie would take a few minutes to
sit in a swing suspended from a giant oak tree in their front yard and converse with whoever happened by. A. Lance
loved to point out a huge oak tree situated down adjacent to the river that had a white porcelain bathroom sink
attached to it with running water. A. Lance would always ask newcomers if they knew what kind of oak that was, and
then jokingly reply… “A water oak”.
A. Lance Burn and a friend Jon Moin in the front yard swing on a summer morning.
A. Lance headed to Savannah with the mail. I was riding with in the summer of 73.
At an exact time in the afternoon A. Lance would be down in his boat, this time with the mail headed to Savannah. It
was common for him to be carrying some one along and often it was an island person in a rush to get medical
attention.
Something I found interesting was that everything that these people used in their everyday lives on the island was
carried to the island by someone. Lance had a list of things that were shopped for, carried to the boat, loaded,
transported to the island and unloaded then carried up the rickety old boarding ramp to a wheel cart that was then
pushed up the hill to their home. Something for the freezer, the kitchen, the workshop, fuel, lubricant and parts for
the many motors were among the various items that Lance handled several times before they reached their final
destination.
Every year A. Lance purchased a brand new engine for his boat and I happened to notice that when he added the
lubricating oil to his gas mixture for his outboard he always stretched the measure a little.
After this busy day he usually found some time to do some garden work in his beloved garden. When it rained his
comment was, “somebody loves us”, and on Daufuskie, “when you run out, you do without”.
This garden seemed like much more than a hobby because of its size. Lance always wanted to make sure that he
raised enough and always wound up sharing his bountiful crops with someone.
I remember a number of times that Jane and helped with his harvest and he made sure we had plenty to take home.
His biggest claim to fame I think was his peanut crop. In all my life I have never seen anything like it and I can’t
imagine where he got the seeds for his giant peanuts, but they were not only huge but they were gigantic. When the
peanuts were harvested it was boiled peanut time at the Burn family home and that became a favorite of Jane and I.
This was the first place we had ever seen this done.
Burn backyard with Billie’s school bus and pecan trees.
The pecan trees provided a sizeable crop if A. Lance kept his vigilance up with the squirrels. With a Browning
automatic .22 caliber rifle, Lance was cunning, crafty and deadly accurate. The squirrels didn’t get many pecans
around the Burn home and when I saw Lance in action with a gun in his hand I was glad that he wasn’t after me
because he was in a class by himself when it came to the shooting department.
He loved to raise different birds around the homestead and couldn’t resist the temptation when he went to the feed
store in Savannah to buy Guinea hens, baby chicks, and even geese that he put into a movable hutch in order to
keep the lawn grass trimmed.
Over the years several dogs were kept and my favorite was a little dog named “Fuskie”. This skinny little dog with an
oversized head couldn’t be classed with a particular breed because he was such a “dukes” mixture. Well, little
“Fuskie” would take on any size foe that happened to trespass on the premises and I remember the little critter
climbing in a drainpipe after some snake that promptly got “Fuskie” on the end of the nose. For several days we all
thought that this was the end of the road for “Fuskie”, but miraculously he pulled through and still didn’t shy away
from pursuit of any class of trespassers.
A. Lance’s birthday was in the first week of September on the 5th, Jane on the 2nd and mine was on the 4th. A.
Lance’s comment about his birthday was that Julius Caesar, Jessie James and A. Lance Burn all had the same
birthday.
Back to the Burn family; It had been less than a year since the book The Water is Wide had come out casting a
not so lovely light on the Burn family, so we definitely understood their gun shy attitude toward newcomers to the
island.
Back to our first visit in the Burn home;
Our visit was an exchange of stories as we tried to glean the others reason for being here. We were definitely on the
island for just about the same reasons and we all loved nature, fishing, reading, craft projects and the time to enjoy
them.
This night we discovered that these people were real doers as Billie and Bob showed us project after project that
they had turned out with the simplest of materials. Bob was a first rate mechanic who had just returned from several
years in Vietnam where he had been a helicopter mechanic for Air America. A large elegantly crafted hunting knife
that he had just handcrafted attested to his creative and artistic abilities.
Bob Burn and his mother Billie in their front yard. Note the well-worn path up from their dock to their
home. Everything that came home came up this path from the river.
Bob’s mother Billie loved to create works of art from the native things of the island using
the original materials and had displayed many items that would catch your eye in their living room that resembled a
museum. It was a museum in many ways because of the variety of island artifacts that were proudly displayed there.
Many things from the beach like Indian arrowheads and pottery, civil war musket balls and clay pipes from the Civil
War soldiers and even artifacts from the plantation era adorned this special museum that also doubled as their
family living room and office.
As the years went by Jane and I were able to contribute to this collection as we wandered the island and recovered
some of those treasures of bygone days.
Something of special interest was Billie’s collection of hand crafted baskets and bowls completely fabricated from the
pine needles of the long leaf pine trees native to the island; neatly bundled together into a type of rope and then
coiled and laced to form the different containers that were replicas of the ones used by the island natives in years
gone by.
Billie was so resourceful and could dig up a catalog that sold and shipped every conceivable item you could ever
want or need. From seeds for planting to fishing gear to the strangest types of gadgets, Billie could always be relied
upon to put her hand on just the right catalog and she was always eager to help anyone that needed something
from the outside world, which we many times did.
Even with all of her busy island activities she managed to always have something cooking that gave their home a
very inviting aroma. Jane was many times at Billie’s elbow to learn some interesting cooking techniques such as
picking crabs. Billie was an expert and had mastered the talent with just the right equipment. She had a shrimp
deveiner, pecan sheller and many other gadgets that made kitchen tasks go smoothly. Besides all the gadgets she
was expert in their use and eager to share her knowledge with others. Jane still has the shrimp deveiner that Billie
gave her so many years ago.
Here are a couple of recipes that Billie gave to Jane that we still keep in our collection of favorites that brings back
many fond memories of a very special person;
Pineapple-Upside Down Cake (from Billie Burn August 1973)
½ stick of butter
½ cup brown sugar
4 or 5 slices of pineapple
5 tablespoons pineapple juice
1 cup of sugar
1 cup of self rising flour
3 eggs
1. Light and adjust oven to 350 degrees
2. Melt butter and brown sugar slowly
3. Beat the sugar and egg yokes until light
4. Blend alternately the juice and flour with the beaten yokes and sugar. Beat the egg whites and fold in.
5. Place the pineapple slices in the melted sugar and butter. Pour batter over this and bake 30 minutes.
Chicken ADO-BO; this recipe originally came from Billie’s daughter June.
1 fryer (cover/water)
1 teaspoon of vinegar
1 clove of garlic
1 large onion
Soy-sauce to taste
1 or 2 bay leaves
Salt (very little)
Pepper
Cook on high heat until the meat is tender. If you want lots of liquid add more water, soy and vinegar.
***
Before this memorable evening was over we were shown how to knit or tie a shrimp cast net. Bob and his mother got
us started and more or less challenged us to build our own net. To make this net completely authentic Bob gave us
an island cow horn to make the swivel and throat of the net from. He even lent us his mold for net weights, which was
an antique and gave us the lead to cast the weights with. We then dove into this project. I even made my own
needles to stitch the net together that I handmade from a hickory tree on the island.
These ten-inch long needles and the spacer above I handmade from hickory wood from Daufuskie
Island and still use them to this day.
We were dedicated net builders because we had been lent our friend Jim Muller’s shrimp cast net along with many
lessons and could see what a wonderful food provider it was.
Jane and I switched off tying all of the knots that it took to build this net that was to be ten feet in diameter when
completed. For two weeks we diligently tied the thousands of knots required to complete the net and as the project
drew to completion, Jim Muller and I went to the beach and built a really hot fire to melt the leads to cast the weights
to finish the net. Surprise! Some of the lead turned out to be zinc and we almost couldn’t extract the weights from the
mold because the alloy we created was not soft and malleable lead but some non-yielding metal alloy instead. The
net result was that we had all of the weights we needed in the end but the temperature at which this concoction of
metals melted at was so high that we could have used a smelting furnace
That net was a real prize that landed many a shrimp, fish and crab and an accomplishment that always conjured up
sweet memories of those wonderful times and incredible people that took the special interest to pass along that bit
of real island tradition to us…so Bob and Billie, thank you so very much!
Live shrimp
Jane on the deck of the Dursmirg with freshly caught flounder and a cast net we purchased. We mail-
ordered this Spanish cast net with its chain for a lead line and tucks instead of draw strings. It proved to
be worth its weight in gold for providing us with a constant supply of fresh fish. This type of net was
standard fishing equipment for the Burn family.
Five pounds of live shrimp; the result of my cast netting from the dinghy at Daufuskie Island.
CHAPTER 8
SHORTY AND BEN SMITH
Shorty and Ben Smith:
1974 Shorty; “Get your gun John!” “Get your gun John!” Shorty and Ben were living in a small cottage at Papy’s
Landing at the time. I was on our boat the Dursmirg anchored in Mongin Creek less than a hundred yards away with
my wife Jane.
By the third time that Shorty screamed at the top of her lungs, “Get your gun John!” This third time I could detect the
panicky urgency in her voice.
I had absolutely no idea what Shorty could have confronted to provoke such a passionate scream so I just grabbed
my Winchester model 12 pump shot gun, Jane got me some shells and I made a hasty trip to shore in our dinghy.
As I approached their little cabin at Papy’s Landing, Shorty was there pointing to the little screened porch and
exclaiming that a huge snake had just crawled underneath.
I ducked down with my gun loaded to confront a rattlesnake about three feet long coiled there more or less standing
its ground. A stick would have dispatched the critter but Shorty was so excited and insistent that I blow that serpent
out of existence that I did as she wished. A blast at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun immediately converted the
snake into so much bloody mush.
It took me some time to calm Shorty down and then I wondered how she could possibly live on the Island that was
literally slithering with a variety of snakes.
The week before Jane had helped Shorty’s sister in-law, Billie Burn clean a 6 foot 4 inch rattlesnake that Billie had
killed with a stick as she was making her rounds with the school bus. I was very impressed not only with Billie’s guts
to pursue a snake of that size with only a stick but to actually run it down in the woods and dispatch it. When I
arrived at the Burn home, I was amazed that this snake coiled into a bushel basket filled it to overflowing. That
trophy was fastened to a board and dried and prominently displayed in their home. Oh, by the way that wasn’t the
largest snakeskin on display there.
Yet another Daufuskie snake story; One day Jane and I were rowing in our dinghy near Bloody Point on the
southeast end of Daufuskie Island when we encountered a relatively large rattlesnake. This one was in the salty
seawater and swimming. It took a notion to board our little dinghy and I have never seen Jane row as fast as she did
that particular day. I had heard stories of shrimp boats getting rattlesnakes in their nets offshore but this was the
first and only time I had ever seen one in the briny sea waters…we were definitely believers now!
I liked what one of the colorful old locals, Hinson White, used to say about snakes on the island as he spoke with his
broken Gullah accent. He said, “John, when you go a walking in the woods you are forever tripping over sticks until
you spot a big snake, then you can’t find a stick to save your life”.
Shorty and Ben Smith; (Good food)
These two people were made for each other. Of all of the people on the island these two undoubtedly had more fun
than all the rest combined. Laughing, joking and happy to just be together, they welcomed all comers and made a
place at their dinner table no matter how large the group happened to get. The living room was usually their front
yard and their first year on the island they lived in a small shack at Papy’s Landing owned by Ben’s brother-in-law,
Frank Burn.
Shorty’s cooking specialty was fried everything; they had a huge deep fryer powered by an LP gas flame that roared
and was made to be used outdoors and it might not have even been safe there.
Shorty couldn’t resist giving a demonstration of one of her favorite cooking specialties. Hush-puppies made her
laugh and she just couldn’t contain herself as she would ball up a bit of dough and drop it into the smoking hot
grease and point out that it would quickly sink to the bottom. Then like magic in a few seconds it would miraculously
come bobbing to the surface and cook in the boiling grease. Then yet another miracle would transpire and that little
wad of dough that had become golden brown on one side would rollover and cook on the other side all by itself.
Shorty was absolutely delighted that she could give a demonstration of this seemingly trained ball of dough that
went through the paces of cooking and even let the cook know when it was finished with its final rollover. Then the
best of all came as Shorty laughingly explained that the name hushpuppy came because the dog barking to the
cook wanted a treat and as this little tidbit was tossed to the waiting dog the cook always said, “hush puppy”. Shorty’
s little Chihuahua was ironically named “Killer”.
Jane and I always thought that Shorty had a secret ingredient in her delicious cooking…Portland cement, because
we inevitability would come away from a meal at Shorty and Ben’s house with stomach cramps because everything
was “greased to kill”, and of course we also stuffed ourselves.
Fried fish, fried shrimp, crab cakes, fried okra, fried eggplant, fried oysters, and if that wasn’t enough grease when
the greens were cooked a piece of “white meat” or “pork belly” was always added to impart that special down south
“cookin flavor”
Boiled peanuts, boiled shrimp, corn bread and muffins made with Martha White’s self- rising flour were the
exceptions to the fried stuff. If you ever had the chance to have the real thing when it came to southern cooking you
could surely find it here on Daufuskie Island.
A recipe that Shorty gave to Jane:
5 cups of whole cooked onions (3 ½ pounds)
4 cups of cheddar cheese (grated ¾ pound)
1 cup self rising flour
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons butter
Mix all the ingredients;
Pour into a 1 quart casserole.
Sprinkle one cup of grated cheese on top.
Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
It is always a treat to find in our collection of old favorite recipes something like this that takes us back in time to
some of our fondest memories of our special friends from that time and place so long ago and gone.
Ben Smith, home-brew experience:
We became home brewers because of the inspiration Bob Burn instilled in us as he got us “kicking” plum,
persimmon, elderberry, and sassafras wines. All of these wines were made from things that we were able to harvest
from the wild woods of Daufuskie.
Our interest was perked by our successes with the wine production and soon the idea of making our own beer
became an appealing idea.
Jane and I received a beer-making recipe from some friends we had met down in south Florida at the Dinner Key
anchorage in Miami.
This “home-brew” was made using Blue Ribbon Malt Extract that could be purchased at most grocery stores back in
those days and came in a one-quart can. The thick syrup that resembled molasses was very tasty on its own and
was intended as an additive for making homemade bread. The extract came in a variety of different flavors, light,
medium, dark, hop flavored and several combinations of the above.
The only other ingredients needed were water, sugar and yeast. The amount of these ingredients determined the
body and alcohol content of the finished product. Cleanliness was very important or “skunkie” beer would result.
Timing was another important factor because if the beer was bottled too soon it would taste yeasty like doughy
bread because this product used exactly the same ingredients as in the making of bread.
That reminds me of what our dear old friend Armando used to say about beer, “the bread is in the bottle”.
The quantity and proportion of the ingredients gave the beer the special taste and determined how heavy it would
be. To us good beer should be able to be drunk at room temperature and still taste good. Only bad beer has to be
refrigerated to the point of freezing to disguise the “ersatz” ingredients. We always used to joke that you could buy
only two kinds of beer in Georgia, hot and cold.
In our first year of producing our own beer aboard our boat the Dursmirg we were actually refining the process to
the point that the people that sampled our home-brew raved about it.
Here is where Ben Smith comes into the story; Ben remembered that back in the Prohibition days in his childhood
that his family had resorted to making home-brew with malt extract and he thought that he would now like to make
his own here on the island because it was a long way to town and it would be a big savings to make his own.
Jane gave Ben the recipe and some helpful hints to make his brewing experience a good one.
Well, Ben was the type of person that thought that he could improve on everything and so as he went into
production he added extra sugar and doubled the yeast.
His beer kicked out in record time in the heat of the South Carolina summer time temperatures.
Ben was anticipating the bottling of his beer and had rounded up many of the old time Coca-Cola returnable bottles
that were discarded on the island. These were the type that dated back to the World War II era and were so tough
that you could back over them with a Caterpillar tractor without breaking them. He borrowed our capper and caps
and was ready the minute he thought it was time to bottle.
Next came the big surprise after a couple of days as the naturally fermenting extra sugar built the pressure in the
bottles to the point of transforming these little Coca-Cola bottles into small hand grenades.
The first explosion came in the middle of the night and almost gave Ben and Shorty cardiac arrest. The explosion
sent shrapnel of glass and a spray of freshly fermented beer through their tiny shack. This had to be contained and
Ben got a large heavy piece of canvas to cover the bottles of his prized “home-brew”. The explosions continued and
next Ben got large galvanized tubs to put the beer in and again covered the whole works with canvas, this time
several times doubled over.
The explosions continued and tore the canvas cover to shreds.
Ben then came to Jane for advice and counseling. As he related his alterations to his recipe to us it became clear
what the problem was. Ben had used enough sugar to make 25 gallons of home-brew and it was now bottled in a
five-gallon batch.
I then confidently told Ben that we would only have to pry up the caps and relieve the excessive pressure and that
then it would be OK.
Next I went with Ben to show him my remedy to his dilemma. Now there was a crowd gathered to witness the
happenings. Well, a crowd for the island that is.
Very carefully I gingerly picked one of the little bombs up handling it like it was nitroglycerin and stepped outside. All
eyes were on me and I confidently took my bottle opener and ever so slightly began to ease off the cap holding my
mouth open and ready to catch any of the first beer that might escape before I had the situation totally under control.
Wow! Pow! Whoosh! An uncontrolled eruption took place in what seemed like a nanosecond and I only got some
misting of the explosive ingredients as the contents totally left the little hand grenade and I didn’t even get a single
drop in my mouth. The crowd went wild with laughter and then as soon as I could evaluate the situation I too had to
laugh at my total astonishment and amazement. No, in all of my years and with all of the many beers that I had
opened including a number of kegs, I had never witnessed anything so totally beyond my abilities to control.
Yes, Ben Smith did the ultimate in home-brew production and his little brewery was a short lived enterprise on
Daufuskie but luckily we all gleaned a hilarious story to remember for many a year to come…thanks Ben.
Ben and Shorty Smith reminiscing:
These two were opposites when it came to getting excited. Ben always was so calm and collected that I can’t ever
remember him in a panic. His jokes and spontaneous laughter made him liked by everyone he met.
Ben and Shorty loved to have a few beers and Old Milwaukee was Ben’s brand. After several beers Shorty would
always get into a snit and start calling Ben, “Hooper Smith”.
Then we were likely to hear some reminiscing of their younger years when they lived back in Tennessee.
It turned out that back in their youth they had fallen in with a traveling snake-oil salesman, named “Mystic”. Shorty
would be dressed up in some provocative outfit and parade around while Mystic pitched the crowd. Ben took care of
the sales and merchandise. Then we heard the laughing and snickering while they told of sneaking off in the night to
leave town.
After Ben got called “Hooper Smith” again he would merely pour Short another drink and soon she would forget
about her snit.
Another story that always brought laughter was when they told of their dear friend Dave Brown, a black man that
lived on Daufuskie.
The story goes like this; one afternoon Dave Brown came by in his boat to visit and he had a new motor for his boat.
They asked where he got the motor, and Dave said, “In town”. How much did you pay, “got me a good deal”? Well,
did you get a guarantee? Dave responded, “Hell no, I paid cash!”
One quiet evening as Jane and I were aboard our boat anchored at Papy’s Landing a loud noise was heard outside
our boat. At first we thought that it was a train coming but then it was nearly twenty miles to the nearest railroad
tracks. Next the noise intensified and our boat was laid ninety degrees over on its side. This happened so fast that
we were totally surprised and didn’t have any real recollection of just how long this sequence of events took.
What happened was that a twister or tornado had struck us with such force that it laid our 20-ton vessel on its side.
On the inside of our boat everything that was on the galley countertop wound up over and across on the top of the
chart table. Everything that was on deck was gone except for a canoe paddle that mysteriously remained. Another
thing was that the side of the boat that went down had the portholes all closed; if they had been open we would have
been swamped for sure.
On the shore huge old oak trees were up rooted and laid down. On the other side of the island nothing at all had
happened and no one was even aware of the twister passing.
At that time Ben and Shorty lived only a couple hundred feet from the landing where the twister had come through.
Ben’s comment was, “thought I’d see y’all gone”.
You couldn’t help but love these very special people. You will be lucky if you have the good fortune to meet such a
loving and very special pair as these two in your entire life.
CHAPTER 9
Bob Lancy Burn 1974;
Our second summer on Daufuskie Island Bob Lancy Burn moved his sailboat the Blue Gypsy over from Hilton Head
Island where he had been docking it at the Harbor Town Marina. This was Bob’s 28-foot Great Dane sailboat, which
he had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean three times.
The blue hulled sloop rigged fiberglass boat with lots of teak trim sported a self steering gear attached to the boats
outboard rudder and had painted on each side the silhouette of a dancing gypsy girl. The self-steering gear made it
possible for Bob to make his single-handed ocean crossings and the little gypsy girl painted on the gear was his
around the clock helmsman.
Bob Burn’s sailboat the, Blue Gypsy at anchor in Mongin Creek, our new neighbor.
Now Bob was our neighbor and he had a new companion, Emily Stapleton.
Bob and Emily worked together running Bob’s Wellcraft outboard powered boat that he used to pull a single shrimp
trawl net just offshore from the Daufuskie Island beach. Several people were engaged in this type of fishing
including Bob’s father A. Lance. Collectively they were referred to as the “Mosquito Fleet”.
Make no mistake about it, this was a very strenuous job because none of the boats had any winches or other
mechanical equipment to retrieve their nets and equipment.
A regular member of the “Mosquito Fleet” was a man named Joe Joyce from Bluffton, South Carolina. Well, Joe was
miraculously and repeatedly the biggest producer and when each day’s fishing was done you could count on Joe to
consistently come in with the biggest catch. All of his jealous competitors used to say about Joe that the reason he
caught so many shrimp was that he could think like a shrimp.
Oh, by the way!
Joe brought a cat to give as a present to Bob Burn.
Bob was emphatic that he did not want the cat, but Joe insisted and insisted…”You have to take it, it is a gift, it is
yours”. Bob said, “No, I don’t want it!” Then Bob says: “You mean that it is mine and I can do with it what I want?”
Finally, and reluctantly, Bob went to the house and got his gun and came back and shot the cat. Joe said: “Well,
what did you do that for?” Bob said: “It was my cat!”
We received this story third hand and happen to know that both Bob Burn and Joe Joyce tended to gross
exaggerations so we weren’t sure that this might just be another “Brer Rabbit” story.
NOTE: Bob’s mother Billie told us that when Bob was younger, he shot everything in sight and then she made him
eat everything that he shot….did he eat the cat? If he did, he must have put Crystal hot sauce on it!
Many days I was solicited to go out and help many of the different shrimpers or when they were coming in with a
“mess” of shrimp that was way more than they had expected, they would pull alongside our anchored boat,
Dursmirg, and I would get down and help them sort their catch. The pay was always a generous quantity of shrimp,
crabs or some fish.
Bob Burn in his shrimp boat tied to the Dursmirg in Mongin Creek during the summer of 1974. You can
see in the photo our bicycles sitting on our back deck.
Bob Burn and I cleaning fish after the shrimp had been sorted and cleaned up. We were in Bob’s boat
tied to the Dursmirg that was anchored in Mongin Creek.
The shrimp season was during the summer months and the shrimpers had to work the
tides and occasionally the weather would halt the fishing but summertime mornings generally tended to be tranquil
and still.
Bob and Emily took their catch to Hilton Head Island to sell every afternoon and that turned out to be more time
consuming than their time catching the shrimp.
Hilton Head Island made for a real paradox boasting more millionaires per square mile than anyplace in America and
just across Calibogue Sound was located Daufuskie Island with people renting houses for as little as $8.00 a month
and more ox carts than automobiles.
Prices on Hilton Head Island were high and Bob got paid well for his shrimp but if he shopped there he gave much of
his money right back. I remember one day asking Bob to pick up a couple of pounds of butter for us when he went
over to Hilton Head to sell his shrimp. When he returned he said that the price was $2.00 and I was shocked
because at that time in Savannah the price was only 49 cents a pound. Then Bob told me that it was $2.00 for each
pound.
Bob is an enterprising person that is a master at mechanical things and I was surprised at his little VW beetle he
used on the island. First he gave it a distinctive paint job. Most people paint the undersides with undercoater to
protect the vehicles from rust. Well, Bob painted the outside with undercoat from one end to the other and that gave
this unusual little vehicle a distinctive look that made it look like it was some kind of a jungle creature.
Bob is a first rate mechanic who can fix anything mechanical…that he wants to. This VW had no brakes all the time I
ever knew Bob and he also boasted that he had never changed the oil. Bob thoroughly enjoyed his little car and
when he wanted to stop he just rolled it up to a tree and bumped it to a stop. Emily used to get so mad and scold
him, but Bob would just get one of his unmistakable big grins and break into laughter…he loved it!
Bob also had a talent with fiberglass and we saw him several times take some derelict boat that was “junked-out” or
scuttled and go to work on it and in a matter of a couple of days have a factory fresh looking boat that would be far
tougher than the original.
Bob was always working some deal with his dad who had worked some of his boats literally to death shrimping and
running his route to town for the mail. Bob would resurrect them from the dead and make them better than new and
then trade up with his dad. In the end both got better boats and Bob had a little industry.
Bob had some land on the island where he intended to build a home some day and his first winter back living on the
island he pulled an old school bus up to where he had started to grow a garden and renovated the inside into his
island home.
This is where Bob and Emily spent their first winter on the island.
When Jane and I first visited the yellow and black ex-school bus we were impressed at Bob’s innovations that made
the place cozy and inviting.
That fall Bob came by our boat several times to get me to help him retrieve timbers that he had located washed
ashore along the Savannah River.
We would speed off in Bob’s Wellcraft boat with its two cylinder 50 horse power motor through the twists and turns of
the many rivers and bays that Bob knew instinctively at all stages of tide and then out into the Savannah River or
one of the adjacent waterways and there Bob had the materials for his new home.
We were collecting 12” by 12” timbers and some were nearly 40 feet long. We went up in the woods where the
various high tides had deposited the timbers. Bob would secure the timbers with a nylon line that he then attached
to the stern of his boat. The next step was to drive the boat at high speed out into the river and “snatch” the timbers
out to the waters edge. This system worked well and usually required several attempts before the timbers actually
got to the river where we would raft them up to be towed back to Daufuskie. These building materials were free for
the taking but wound up being costly in time and effort. Of course Bob could have purchased these same materials
from some saw mill and he still would have had the logistics problem of getting them to his building site out on the
island and a considerable distance from the shore.
Using his dad’s farm tractor, it was a major job to just drag one of these timbers at a time from where we had rafted
them in front of his parents’ home on the island to Bob’s building site.
We didn’t get to see how they got the rest of the materials for their new home but we got to hear the story of Bob
and Emily’s project of dissembling an old wooden barge that was pinned together with big long steel rods and each
piece of wood had to be pried apart. Then the wood had to be transported to the remote building site, cut to length
and assembled into their new two-story “A-frame” home.
Bob and Emily’s new home made from lumber out of the river.
That old barge that Bob and Emily salvaged was the same one that Jane and I had used to prop our boat the
Dursmirg in the fall of 1973 when we careened it and did a bottom paint job. It had been located less than a hundred
yards north of the Burn’s dock on the same side of the river.
Doing a bottom paint job to the Dursmirg. The Dursmirg is tied to the old wooden barge that Bob and
Emily Burn salvaged to use for lumber to complete their A-frame home. This spot is located just north of
the Burn home on the New River.
We did have a hand in other parts of their material acquisitions when we salvaged the foundation of an old
abandoned building on the beach and made many a trip toting truck loads of red bricks to their building site.
This was a monumental task and we had the up most of admiration for the outstanding effort required to accomplish
their building project because Jane and I had just built our own 46 foot sailboat completely from the point of
conception to our new completed home.
Many an evening Bob and Emily would come over to our boat to visit and sample and scrutinize our latest production
of wine or home-brew. Our two boats were anchored just far enough apart so that we each had our own privacy but
it was an easy row in the dinghy between boats. Because the currents were so strong it was important to catch hold
of the boat you were approaching on your first approach or it would be necessary to get to shore to pick up a back
current and then make another attempt, rowing against the current was not an option. Because our gunwale was so
high above the water we kept a line off our dinghy davits as a last chance to grab the boat while approaching by
dinghy.
On the deck of the Dursmirg anchored in Mongin Creek enjoying homemade wine and home-brew. This
was a private little island at a special place in time and space.
We usually spent our evenings out on deck to enjoy the lovely sea breezes but many times we would wind up in our
main salon and Bob took pity on Jane cooking on her diesel powered galley stove that heated the boat like an oven
especially on these warm summer days. One evening he presented her with a little Swedish Primus Kerosene stove.
This particular model had no adjustment to its flame size other than how many pumps you gave it to send the fuel to
the burner; this was the “roarer” burner. Jane was very happy with it because it was extremely fast to cook with and
was also portable. I even made a gimbal for it to sit in when we were under way or out to sea. We later discovered
that many different burners were available for this stove at the Cuba hardware stores in Miami and wound up with a
quiet burner that had an adjustable flame.
Here are a couple of recipes that Emily Burn gave to Jane:
“Date nut cake;
1 quart of pecans chopped
1 cup whole wheat flour
3 eggs
1 cup sugar or ½ cup honey
1 pound of dates chopped
1 teaspoon of vanilla
Roll dates and nuts in flour, mix other ingredients with the dates, nuts and flour.
Bake at 325 degrees for one hour.
Beer Bread:
3 cups of flour
3 tablespoons of honey
2 teaspoons of baking powder
Salt
1 can of beer
Bake one hour at 350 degrees.
These recipes have survived in our collection of favorites all of these years and are a fine reminder of some of the
best times we have ever had.
Another donation Bob made to our boat that made our living a lot better was a Tilley pressure kerosene lantern that
used a mantle and gave off the equivalent of two hundred watts of light. There were two reasons why we got the
lantern. One was that Bob thought that our wick kerosene Dietz lanterns were insufficient for us to read by and he
was right. The other reason was that he was totally fed up with his lantern and almost pumped it up to the point of
blowing the pressure tank up like a balloon ready to pop. The tank was severely convex on the bottom due to his
overzealous pumping and would no longer sit on a flat surface, which was fine with us because everything aboard
our boat had to either be bulkhead mounted or hung up and tethered.
I need to mention that we had no refrigeration at this time and the Burn’s were kind enough to freeze one-gallon jugs
of water to make ice for us and later on that year Ben and Shorty did the same. The next year I had put together a
kerosene powered absorption refrigeration system that only consumed a cup of kerosene a day and only needed
Jane’s constant vigilance to keep the wick trimmed and adjusted plus fill the fuel tank I had made out of a peanut
butter jar.
Bob was in a back to nature thing at this time and wanted to live a simple and clean life without the outside world
intruding. He had his own honeybees, wine production and mostly lived on what he caught in the river.
Bob really wanted to live with nature and not against it and one day when a DC-3 airplane came over repeatedly
spraying some strange insecticide that was designed to kill all the bugs on the Sea Islands, Bob had to take action.
He was one of the first people to observe that not only did all of the mosquitoes drop dead but also his colonies of
honeybees rolled over and did the same. Another observation was that the blue crabs in the creeks and rivers
surrounding the island were completely wiped out of existence at the same time.
Bob had just spent a good deal of time over in Vietnam and had witnessed first hand what the government was
capable of with sprayed chemicals like “Agent Orange”.
When the electric company approached Bob to put a power line right-of way across Bob’s property, he not only said
no but also made it quite clear that there would never be electric on his property.
A year later Bob seemed to see some wisdom in having the convenience of electric power that is ready when you flip
the switch. So, back to the power company he went, this time humbly to seek his installation permit. As my Jane
always says, “Whenever you say never… that could mean possibly”.
Bob and Emily Burn in 1982 on the beach at Daufuskie Island. Looking north; Calibogue Sound and Hilton
Head Island are in the background.
Bob and Emily Burn ten years after we first met them on Daufuskie Island.
Bob and I caught a lot of sheepshead fish during a visit we made to Daufuskie in 1987
next chapter
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