For one holiday week, Charleston's own tall ship is flying the wrong colors.
The Spirit of South Carolina, the 140-foot wooden schooner built downtown between 2001 and 2007, is docked at The Cooper hotel and welcoming visitors aboard through July 5, part of the run-up to the country's 250th birthday. Admission is free while she's docked.
Here's the twist. During harbor sails tied to the commemoration, the Spirit took on the role of the HMS Ranger, a British Royal Navy schooner present at the Battle of Sullivan's Island. Charleston's ship, cast as the redcoat, firing toward the fort.
The battle it honors is the one Charleston should never tire of telling. On June 28, 1776, six days before the Declaration was signed, a few hundred soldiers and militia inside an unfinished palmetto-log fort on Sullivan's Island repulsed a massive British fleet. It shouldn't have worked.
“We want visitors to come away with a better understanding of the Battle of Sullivan's Island ... particularly how improbable it was that the massive British fleet would have been defeated,” Carin Bloom, the Spirit's director of education, told the Post & Courier. “It was such a series of cascading failures, it's remarkable to consider.”
The crew isn't just telling the victory story. They're telling the harbor's whole revolutionary arc, including the British siege that took Charleston in 1780, and the role enslaved mariners played in both the harbor's economy and the battle itself.
“This was a major port city and an incredibly strategic location for both sides during the War for Independence,” Bloom said. “It's no accident that the British tried to take it twice.”
Costumed interpreters are aboard on the holiday weekend to fill in the rest. You can visit through July 5 at 176 Concord St., with ticketed harbor sails in the works.
The best seat for the 250th isn't a parade. It's a teak deck.
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