Onisecau

I stepped onto the public dock on Bull Island at 8:30, briefly talking to Wayne Tucker. He had spent the past two days working on the island, and was waiting for his boat ride back to the mainland and out of the cold. My relative warmth was a function of what awaited me on the island. Wayne would be the last person I saw until leaving the island hours later. 

The solo early start for my walk was serendipitous after I turned on Big Pond Road. Within a short distance a bobcat stepped out onto the road about fifty feet ahead. The cat did not initially detect my presence. My camera was still in its bag over my shoulder, and I attempted to retrieve it as discreetly as possible. The moment passed, and the bobcat was soon across the road and off into the forest. I recalled a past conversation with ferry captain Will Christenson about missing a photo of an eagle one day, and his reply was something like “This is the Wild West – you’ve got to draw and shoot!”

This island was one of the “hunting islands” described in South Carolina’s early days. When John Lawson spent several nights here at the end of 1700, the accompanying Seewee Indians went out to hunt, and brought back on the first day two deer, and on the second two more deer, two wild hogs, and three raccoons. It was a demonstration of the Seewee’s hunting prowess, and close relationship to the natural world. The Seewees knew this island as “Onisecau”.

My morning mission was an island exploration, and I continued east on the Big Pond Road all the way to the beach. It was less than two hours before high tide, and with above average tidal height I knew I would be pushing it to pass the Boneyard dry on the beach. The first hundred yards made it plain that this would not happen. I gave little thought to backtracking for a different path, instead removing shoes and socks, hanging them from my pack, and rolling up my pants to continue on. The walk had warmed me up, and the coolness of the incoming ocean water was pleasant. 

I had walked this island section before the Boneyard many times, but the tide made it all new. There was enough surf to push water up the beach, and I dodged those surges. Entering the Boneyard required climbing over and under trees until I ran out of beach. I began walking on the tidal wrack, which at the Boneyard was a jumble of driftwood from small pieces to logs. This path required extra care in bare feet. Fortunately the flotsam and jetsam was relatively clean, with occasional plastic trash, not the debris including used syringes seen in October along the Delaware River in Philadelphia. 

I finally reached a reprieve from this dodging and balancing on driftwood – the open sandy cove at the outlet of Moccasin Pond. In that stretch the paw prints of what looked like a bobcat appeared, though Billy Shaw later identified it as coyote. In the distance I noticed a large floating object, red and undulating with the tidal surge. As I approached it I saw the broken cable of this commercial buoy, perhaps from a dredge operation. I sat nearby on one of the many palmetto logs lining the beach, replaced my shoes, and ate lunch. Reviewing a photo later I took of the buoy, I saw something I missed at the time. The skeleton forest of the Boneyard transforms downed trees into many forms, and one was a feline-like doppelgänger of my bobcat sighted earlier.  

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Continuing on, surging waves covered the beach at this point of the Boneyard, and my path was now a bushwhack through a palmetto jungle. I anticipated a short section before the first open path leading to the road system, and I was relieved to avoid the sharp spears of a yucca. The sea level rise and impact of storm tides has eroded this path on a raised dike perhaps 50% in the past fifteen years. 

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I chose an alternate walk compared to recent ones; down Lighthouse Road and on to Alligator Alley, the mowed road leading me across dikes with views out to fingers of Jacks Creek. There were more wading birds than alligators, and egrets roosted in trees along the impoundment. Close by the dike, coots splashed off through the marsh grasses as I approached.  

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Prior to reaching the public dock, I veered off on one of the designated trails on the island, the Midden Trail. This short path takes one along the edge of the salt marsh, and has shell deposits known as middens. I have viewed these traces of indigenous peoples here before, but on this day a fresh coating of pine straw obscured any sighting of the shell and potsherd remains. I have seen a number of sherds on the beach: it is important to remember that these antiquities are protected and unlawful to remove.  

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If one wants to see middens, the Sewee Shell Ring in Francis Marion National Forest, adjacent to the marsh off the Intracoastal Waterway in Awendaw, is a place to visit. Technically this is not a midden but a shell ring. The raised boardwalk at the shell ring has been destroyed by coastal flooding, and encroaching sea level rise threatens this phenomenal site. There are middens throughout Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge and the Lowcountry, and in fact I have some on my property.

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There are a limited number of historical records of interactions with the Seewees, and several occurred on Bull Island. There are John Lawson’s accounts cited above. And then there was the historic landfall in April of 1670 of the Carolina, the frigate bringing the English settlers to found the initial South Carolina English colony. A party of colonists rowed a boat from the Carolina, which was anchored off the Northeast Point, and encountered a couple of Indians on the beach where they landed. Those Seewees addressed the Englishmen in Spanish, a reminder for us of the significant presence of the Spanish in South Carolina in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Seewees’ greeting consisted of Spanish words “Bony Conraro Angles”; loosely, good English friends. They did speak two indigenous names, as they pointed out important features to the English: the island they stood on – “Oni-se-cau”, and the body of water to the north – “Seewee”. Those words were spoken over 350 years ago.

In the European practice of replacing names, Onisecau became Bull, Bulls, Bull’s Island (even Bulling’s Island), and Seewee became Bulls Bay. Stephen Bull the immigrant was one of those settlers on the Carolina, and through some transference the renaming took place, despite the fact that Bull never owned the island. The name Onisecau has had various spellings: Anisecau, Onesecan, Onisecau, Onisecaw, Oni se cau, Oni=se=cau.

A number of people have wondered about the meaning and pronunciation of Onisecau. I consulted Eliot Raynor, my son and a linguist, on the pronunciation. Conducting an exercise in historical phonology, Eliot reviewed a number of the spellings in the historical record. His conclusion: ah-NI-suh-CAW. 

Another of the hunting islands also received a renaming: Timicau (Dewees Island). From a local perspective, so much has been lost of the coastal tribes’ heritage. Knowledge of the natural world. Cultural practices. And language death. Many indigenous sites have disappeared through the works of modern development. It seems important to recall indigenous names, it being November, National Native American Heritage Month. These place names resonate into the twenty-first century. The name – Oni-se-cau – deserves more frequent use, not just in November.