How Charleston is Like Barbados

And vice-versa. It all starts in the 17th century, and ends in a rum bar in downtown Charleston.

Annoyed author’s note: This story circulated, unappreciated and homeless, among some of the most esteemed English-language publications for nearly a year. But it’s a great story! It’s about two different destinations, and some editors didn’t know what to do with that. Then it all hinges on an obscurity of 17th century British colonial history, and in this age of 7 Best Beaches in Barbados that’s something of a tough swallow. Finally my good friends at GoWorld Travel gave it a home. I leave it to you to determine whether the editors at National Geographic, the Times of London, Smithsonian, Conde Nast Traveler…I could go on…and on…overlooked a gem or wisely protected their editorial franchise. But I hope you like it!

Downtown Charleston, South Carolina is one of the most famously rewarding neighborhoods in America for aimless roaming. One reason is the distinctive “single houses” that line the Spanish moss-veiled streets. The colorful, well-preserved colonial-era homes, built one room wide and two or three stories high, are arranged with their narrow ends facing the street, a single gable rising above.

On the second floor is a “piazza,” the aspirationally Italianate name given to the porch spanning the long side, built to offer relief from the torpid summers that residents endured until air conditioning arrived. The windows are aligned so the breezes could cool the upstairs rooms. As legions of tourists prove every season, a simple stroll along Church Street looking at these homes delights the eye and triggers the imagination.

And there’s no way you’d know the origin story of this high-Southern architectural style is told 1,832 miles away, in the simple dockside neighborhood of Speightstown, Barbados.

That’s where you find Arlington House, a small history museum and one of the last surviving examples of the single house design that originated on the island, flourished there, and was adopted nearly whole by the early residents of Charleston. The building has seen renovations over the years, but the bones are unmistakable: Narrow end facing the street, a single gable above, a porch spanning the long side to capture the breeze.

This unexpected connection between the Southern cultural capital of Charleston and the easternmost Caribbean island turns out to be just one of many linking these two beloved vacation destinations. And they are not accidental.

Barbadians at the Gate

In the late 17th century Barbados was England’s most successful New World colony. Using African slave labor with ruthless efficiency, British-born Barbadian planters grew sugar cane, milled it into sugar, and spun it into unimaginable riches.

But they wanted more. They’d simply run out of land to farm in Barbados, having paved all the arable terrain with sugar cane. And so, in an action that would implausibly bend the arc of American history, some of the Barbadian planters set off for the uncharted land of Carolina, establishing what some historians call “a colony of a colony.” They created Carolina’s first successful plantations, made its first fortunes, became Charleston’s earliest political leaders, designed the city and its homes, and established a framework for colonial life, including its brutal practices of enslavement, that created the foundation of what we now know as the American South.

And even today evidence of the unlikely connections lingers. As I discovered on recent visits to both, you can tour either Charleston or Barbados and -- amidst the many delightful pleasures each place offers to visitors -- get an unexpected bonus: A kind of shadow vacation, where a trip to one provides unexpected echoes of the other.

Rhoda Green, a Charlestonian born in Barbados, is a co-founder of the Barbados and the Carolinas Legacy Foundation. A retired educator, she’s devoted the better part of her adult life to promoting the connection between her native and adopted homes: “If you know where to look,” she says, over a Low Country lunch at Gillie’s Seafood in Charleston, “you can find Barbados all over Charleston -- and Charleston all over Barbados.”

The Barbadian Great House

One of the highlights of a trip to Barbados, in addition to the gentle aquamarine waters and the impossibly fresh red snapper, is a visit to the lovely St. Nicholas Abbey. (It’s an “abbey” in the spirit of Downton, not the church.) An afternoon at the restored plantation house, surrounded by verdant gardens featuring elegant cages of chatty parrots, provides a view into the Barbadian plantocracy from the 17th century through 20th centuries, their tropical lives gilded through the work of hundreds of enslaved sugar workers who lived in shacks on the property.

Built in 1658 by a Colonel Benjamin Berringer, the structure is one of only three surviving examples of the Jacobean Great House in the western hemisphere. It appears to have been built with little attention to budget. Its facade presents three broad, elegantly curvaceous Dutch gables, each pinched to a point. Chimneys stand at each end, purely decorative extravagances in a tropical climate.

The handsome Anglicized furnishings tell the story of wealthy families living properly elevated Colonial lives in the tropics. The delicately painted dining china gleams; a magnificent grandfather clock has held its place at the top of the main stair since the early 1700s. One of the portraits in a drawing room is an ancestor of the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, an 18th-century owner of the plantation.

The Planter Who Left for Carolina

But one of the most colorful owners of St. Nicholas Abbey was John Yeamans, an influential Barbadian planter and judge who took possession of the house in the late 1660s, when he married the widow of Benjamin Berringer. (That act of widowing might have been accomplished by Yeamans himself, but that’s another story.)

In any event, Yeamans’ proprietorship of the abbey was brief: He was one of the rich planters who headed off to Carolina to get richer. After surviving a variety of seagoing adventures, he eventually brought 200 African slaves to Carolina and built one of the first successful plantations there, growing rice and indigo. He is credited, if that’s the word, with introducing the cruel Barbadian style of chattel slavery to the American colonies. (The first American slave code was adopted nearly word-for-word from Barbados’.) He had multiple plantations and became one of the richest, meanest, greediest landowners in the colonies.

Yeamans became a widely disliked governor of Carolina. His one popular act seems to have been appointing a surveyor to lay out the streets of what was then called Oyster Point, now downtown Charleston. For that, Yeamans turned to a surveyor from Barbados named John Culpeper. One of the first thoroughfares he laid down was called Broad Street, a wide road running east and west, set back from the water -- just like the wide road called Broad Street running east and west, set back from the water, in Bridgetown, Barbados.

Which is to say that when you walk the streets of what’s known as “South of Broad” in Charleston today, you’re experiencing another one of those unlikely connections between Charleston and the tiny Caribbean nation of Barbados. We’ll get to the Barbadian pirates buried there later.

The Charleston-Barbados Connection Tour

The Barbados and the Carolinas Legacy Foundation has published a map (sadly now out of print) that allows Charleston visitors to experience the connection for themselves. It has 10 stops downtown and eight in the surrounding region.

The downtown set includes sites that bear the names of the Barbadian founders (like the Gibbes Art Museum, named for a family of plantation owners and later Charleston civic leaders) and the always-buzzing selfie background Rainbow Row (a string of townhouses in tropical colors, claimed by some to pay tribute to the city’s Caribbean heritage).

But the most direct Barbados story-telling happens farther out, at Charles Towne Landing State Park, built on the place where the “Barbadian Adventurers” landed in 1670. The area features a re-creation of the original stockaded village and a museum that tells the settlement story. As the museum conveys it, within a few years the planters had, with the labor of Barbadian slaves and indentured servants, carved out plantations and begun to build wealth. Some quickly moved into positions of authority and influence in early Carolina affairs.

The Southern Plantation with Barbadian Echoes

This is well illustrated at another stop on the foundation’s map, just down the road at one of Charleston’s grand antebellum mansions, Middleton Place.

The great-grandfather of Henry Middleton, proprietor of the plantation bearing the family name, was among the founding Barbadians. Ten generations of Middletons flourished there, each growing rich on rice, which was farmed by enslaved workers who brought the knowledge about farming that finicky crop from West Africa.

While it’s the expansive and beautifully kept grounds that draw visitors to the plantation today, don’t miss the piles of elegantly collapsing brick just to the west of the mansion.

That’s what’s left of Henry Middleton’s house.

A Connection in Piracy

But my favorite stop on the Barbados Carolina Trail map is the small monument to Stede Bonnet.

Born in Barbados to a wealthy planter and orphaned shortly thereafter, Bonnet was raised as a proper gentleman and, at 21, married the daughter of another plantation owner. They grew a family and lived a respectable high-Colonial island life. But for reasons that puzzle historians to this day, at 29 Bonnet decided to leave his wife, family, and property to become a pirate.

In another one of those odd connections between these two places, the Barbadian pirate started his plundering and thieving off the coast of the Carolinas. His first run was successful -- he burned two ships from Barbados. But it quickly became apparent that Bonnet was a lousy pirate. He fell under the sway of Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard, and soon lost control of his pirating enterprise.

Treachery, kidnappings, reversals of fortune, and pitched battles at sea ensued. Bonnet was eventually taken prisoner, only to escape, possibly with the help of a sympathetic Barbadian guard. Recaptured, he was tried for his crimes and hanged in Charleston.

When you tour the waterfront White Point Gardens along the Battery (you should), make a stop at a high stone marker, erected in 1943. It reads: “Near this point in the autumn of 1718, Stede Bonnet, notorious ‘gentleman pirate,’ and twenty-nine of his men, captured by Colonel William Rhett, met their just deserts after a trial and charge, famous in American history, by Chief Justice Nicholas Trott. All were buried off White Point Gardens, in the marshes beyond low water mark.”

The Barbadian pirates' remains are said to be located beneath the foundations of one of those wonderfully grand Charleston homes just across Battery Street.

And a Bottle Full of Rum

The first recorded mention of rum in the world appears to be in a Barbadian document. Some claim rum was actually “discovered” on the island: Something about a barrel of molasses at a sugar factory being left out in the sun and so forth. Well, okay. Alcohol origin stories are always suspect.

In any event, you can state with certainty that Mount Gay Rum has been operating in Barbados since 1703, making it the oldest continually operating rum maker in the world.

If you’re visiting Barbados and can work it out, book a tour of the Mount Gay distillery up in St. Lucy Parish, not the mobbed visitor’s center down in Bridgetown.

It’s a delight to see the equipment, some of it ancient, in operation. You’re taken into a shack where you can run your hands through a small stream drawn from Mount Gay’s wells. You feel invisible motes of coral and limestone that make Barbados’ aquifer both unique in the Caribbean and key to the flavor profile of the plant’s liquid output.

You see a fermenting barn, where vats the size of dump truck beds silently bubble, converting raw sugar into molasses, the ebony goo that’s the foundation of all the factory's rums. You view two huge pot stills, their long copper arms looking like the cannon of ironclad ships. You see two fat vertical column stills that run through the roof.

But best of all you visit one of the bonding houses, where barrels of carefully selected distillates quietly age. When you enter you’re immediately struck by a wave of aromas so powerful, the sensation is almost physical. These are potent airborne hints of the flavors you’ll sample later, in the tasting room: sweet notes of cinnamon and caramel, woody smells of oak and pencil shavings, sharp unnamable spices. Some of these barrels, stacked 30 feet high in the island’s relentless heat, have been imparting richness and flavors to their contents since the clock struck midnight for the new millennium.

A Taste of Charleston Rum

But your best rum tasting may be in Charleston.

There, at a Meeting Street seafood restaurant called The Ordinary, I met beverage director Christian Davenport, who was then assembling an extraordinary collection of rums from around the Caribbean, 120 and counting. For hundreds of years, thanks to its trade connections to Barbados and the Caribbean, Charleston was solidly a rum town. But slowly, he said, like most southern cities it’s come to favor whiskey. He’s trying to do something about that.

As part of an effort to embrace the Barbados-Charleston connection, he’s made a study of the rums of Barbados. When I met him he had just returned from the island. (He has since moved on to Chubby Fish, another renowned restaurant in downtown Charleston.)

From behind the convivial bar at the Ordinary he explained that the Barbados style is to mix rums from both the pot stills and column stills I’d seen at Mount Gay, creating a distinctive flavor profile that is both clean and rich.

There are four rum makers in Barbados, and three are working to win the island the status of a Geographic Indicator, the rum equivalent of the AOC the French use to delineate regions that produce a distinctive style of wine.

He poured me a bit of Mount Gay’s finest work, some of it from bottles of which fewer than four thousand had been made. I’ll say this: These are not the products we’d been served on our tour in Barbados.

Davenport offered me a taste of Terrior, one of the earliest expressions of Mt. Gay’s estate blend. Its sugar had been grown on Barbados soil, its water drawn from the island’s distinctive aquifer, its alcohol pulled from its antique stills, and its barrels aged in its steaming warehouse. The rum was sweet, sharp, and full of sunshine.

To get a real taste of Barbados, I’d had to come to Charleston.

How to experience the Charleston-Barbados connection

Barbados in Charleston

• Charles Towne Landing State Park: The park has an informative, interactive museum that tells the story of Carolina’s Barbadian founders better than any other place. The grounds are expansive; you can spend an hour walking paths that take you through the property where the founders scratched out a living before they created plantations. There’s a replica ship, archeological digs, and living history presentations.

• International African American Museum: This beautiful, moving museum, which tells the story of the African diaspora and the resiliency of its dynamic culture, includes a few exhibits that explain the role Barbados played in the slave trade, including how it was the source of the brutal chattel slavery laws that established the enslavement practices of the American South. The museum is built on the site of the dock where for a generation Africans just off the ships were sold and bought. Be sure to visit the outdoor exhibits on that space before you leave.

• The single house: An exhibit at the Charleston Visitors Center includes models of Charleston’s famed single houses, along with one of its Barbadian source. To see the real thing, just take a stroll around King, Church, or Tradd streets and explore the blocks around them.

• Food: It’s hard to tease out the strictly Barbadian influences in Low Country food, since the early enslaved Barbadians who cooked for their families in Carolina drew on the same African food influences as later waves of the enslaved, who came directly from Africa. That said, rest assured that if you’re eating Low Country classics, you’re eating food with antecedents in Barbados. Rice and beans? That’s rice and peas on the island. Grits are made of ground corn; cou cou, one half of the Barbadian national dish when paired with flying fish, is made of cornmeal and okra. Okra’s big in both places, along with fried fish and shrimp. The mac and cheese side you find on any soul food table meets its match in Barbados’ macaroni pie. Pickled pig’s feet in the South were preceded by Barbados’ souse, whose main ingredient includes pickled trotters. Practically any authentic Low Country restaurant you go to in Charleston will be serving food with some Barbadian echoes.

Charleston in Barbados

• St. Nicholas Abbey. Tour the home that was briefly owned by one of the rich Barbadian planters who left to get richer in Carolina and became an influential figure in early Carolina and Charleston life. It’s architecturally significant and vividly displays what life was like for the 17th through 19th century plantocracy. Don’t miss the video, assembled from mid-century home movies by the son of the mansion’s last family owners. You see the plantation workers, doing the same manual labor as their enslaved predecessors -- cutting cane with machetes and boiling sugar in the tropical heat. The family, meanwhile, is shown on a swank European cruise. There’s also a small rum production facility and a restored narrow-gauge Victorian-era train.

• Oistin’s Fish Fry. Yes, the music at this dockside town event is so loud on Friday nights that you might forget your name. But you’ll be rewarded with the full range of local Bajan foods, fresh off the boats and hot off the grills: Flying fish and cou cou, the national dish, fresh snapper, mahi mahi, and fish cakes, along with Bajan sides like macaroni pie, rice and peas, and okra, all of which you’ll find versions of on Charleston’s Low Country tables.

• Arlington House: One of the last examples standing of Barbados’ single houses, which once were all around the island. The house has been renovated and added to, but the bones are there. Stand on the corner of Queen’s and Chapel streets and you’ll see the resemblance.

• Mount Gay Rum: Take the distillery tour. You’ll get the whole historical story, some hands-on experiences, and a chance to understand what makes this particular Barbadian product unique in the world -- and primary influencer of Charleston’s long-standing rum culture.