‘I never repented so much of anything, my Sins excepted, as my coming to this place’.[1] Such was Gideon Johnston’s reaction when he and his family first arrived in South Carolina in 1708 as the Bishop of London’s commissary and rector of St Philip’s, Charles Town.[2] Writing to Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, he described landing in South Carolina:

It happened that I was put ashoar at a great distance from this Town [Charles Town] upon a Sandy Island, with a Merchant and a Sailour, w[h]ere we continued 12 days and as many nights, without any manner of meat and Drink, or Shelter from the scorching heat of the sun. Miserable and almost incredible was the shift we made to subsist in that unhappy place for so long a time; and the saylor being unable to bear the want of shelter and provision any longer did on the third day after our being Landed swim over to another Marshy Island in hopes to make his way \to/ the Continent, but he perished in the attempt. At last it pleased God to relieve us for upon the arrival of the ship (in which we were) at this Town and that upon our being missed, it was presently Suspected what became of us, Sloops and Boats, Perigoes and Canoes were dispatch’d to all such places as it was thought we might be in; \And/ on the twelfth day in the Evening a Canoe got to us when we were at the last Gasp and just upon the point of Expiring, the next morning we were Conveyed to the opposite port of the Continent where I lay a Fortnight before I cou’d recover Strength enough to reach the Town.[3]

Johnston’s troubles would only intensify after his stranding in the coastal wetlands of South Carolina, a ‘Marshy’ environment.[4]

Through his work as a missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), Johnston and his family suffered from myriad afflictions: opposition from dissenters, debilitating illness, poverty, war, and more.[5] The people of South Carolina were  ‘the Vilest race of Men upon the Earth they have neither honour, nor honesty, nor Religion enough to entitle them to any tolerable Character.’[6] At times his illnesses ‘forced [him] to write with both hands, which shews the weakness of my Body, not to say any thing of the ffevers and spasums I am continually subject to.’[7]

Two years after his arrival, Johnston went so far as to explain at length the mismatch between his environmental imaginary prior to arriving in South Carolina and what he now found himself living in:

the hope of Subscriptions, the goodness of the Climate the firtility of the soil, the plenty of all things necessary for the life of man, the peaches, the apricots, the Nectarins, with the superabundance of which they feed their swine; their Grapes, their pears, plums, Cherries &c the variety of their Animals, and the vast deal of fine wood they have, fit for all manner of work, make a strange impression upon the ffancy of a missionary when he is at London, either reading those Books which give an account of this province, or else informing himself by the relations of those who have been in it, or drive any trade to it. The same fine appearance dos Charles Town make in the maps, who tho’ as to the dimensions, scitutation, and ffortifications of it is rightly set out; yet many of those fine and regular Buildings which are represented in it, are not to be met with when we come upon the spot to look for them; and we find our selves more deceived & disappointed in the other particulars, than we do in this.[8]

His mission – including preaching, catechising, visiting the sick, burying the dead, holding vestries, and caring for the poor – had become ‘too great a burden for one Man’s shoulders’, thus demanding an assistant. Johnston also requested to return to ‘South Britain’ for the recovery of his health, recounting the origins of his health problems from being stranded in the wetlands of South Carolina:

It will be impossible for me to live long here, if the Vigours of the Climate and the Distempers incident to it shou’d continue to persecute me much longer; Nor do I think, that I shall ever recover the wonted Strength and Vigour of my Constitution, after the hardships that I indured on that moroon Island on which I was unhappily set ashoar.[9]

‘New World’ Wetlands

Johnston was not the only one to complain about South Carolina, including its wetlands and environment in the colonial period. South Carolina’s low-lying marshes and swamps, rainfall, and high temperatures brought, for example, large numbers of mosquitoes.[10] The ‘low-lying topography’ of Charles Town posed flood and health risks.[11] Hurricanes at times battered the colony through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whilst settlers remarked on the insects, snakes, and alligators that troubled the region.[12]

There is a sense in Johnston and others’ writings that nature does not want colonists to be there. For Johnston, environment and people intermix to create a land inimical to the propagation of the Church of England. As Hillary Eklund has shown, early modern colonists in the ‘New-World’ felt slowed-down and restricted by wetlands.[13] In her own words, ‘the perceived slowness of wetlands often runs athwart the circulation of dominant cultural and religious attitudes, the fast violence of conquest, and imperatives for technological progress.’[14] At the same time, colonists altered South Carolina’s natural environment to further ‘development and profit from the land.’ This included the draining and damming of wetlands to be replaced by agricultural land.[15] Enslaved people in particular laboured in ‘digging, ditching, damming, and filling [Charles Town] and surrounding plantation lands by hand.’[16]

Wetlands and Resilience

As someone who researches gender in eighteenth-century missionary work, the environment of the mission field is not always at the forefront of my mind. And yet, the landscape which missionaries entered had profound consequences for their work and its gendered dimensions. Whilst it is not possible in this piece to fully unpack the gendered relations within the SPG, we can nonetheless start to think about the impact of South Carolina’s wetlands on Johnston and gender. As noted above, sick from the climate and workload, his mission became ‘too great a burden for one Man’s shoulders’. Here, Johnston’s gender, body, and environment become webbed together, the latter two threatening the sustaining of a missionary masculinity. As historians and sociologists have pointed out, men’s ‘ability to perform particular masculinities [is] constrained by men’s bodies’, including physical disability.[17] Often disabled and bed-bound, the wetlands of South Carolina contributed to the reigning in of missionary progress and restricted Johnston’s ability to be a missionary man.

Beyond gender and more pressingly for today, thinking about the ways in which wetlands slowed missions and were shaped by broader colonial moves towards ‘progress’ and ‘development’ offers a long longue durée perspective of today’s wetlands. As Natalie Zwätz has written in her accompanying piece “Aquatic Lands: Floods, Wetland Drainage, and Protest in Early Modern England”: ‘In the face of the looming climate catastrophe, it is useful to reconsider the relationship between humans and the boggy spaces between water and land that could increase resilience against environmental crises.’

In eighteenth-century South Carolina, wetlands were a tool of ‘resilience’ against mission. Today, these wetlands contribute to resilience against the impacts of climate change. This year South and North Carolina witnessed ‘one of the most severe droughts in recent history.’ Rick Savage, Executive Director of the Carolina Wetland Association, describes wetlands as ‘nature’s water savings account. They quietly store water during wet periods and gradually release it when rainfall becomes scarce, helping to sustain streams, groundwater, wildlife, and even our drinking water supplies.’[18] In numbers, estuarine and marine wetlands in the City of Charleston Council Districts can hold 19.2 billion gallons of water, offering flood mitigation.[19]

Climate change, however, threatens these habitats. In one South Carolina wetland sea level rise and increased salinity levels have led to a loss of forested areas.[20] Elsewhere, historic clearing of wetlands for rice cultivation has put pressures on a range of bird species reliant on wetland habitats.[21] If in the seventeenth and eighteenth century humans began to exploit and alter South Carolina’s wetlands, the consequences of this are all the more apparent in the face of anthropogenic climate change. And yet, it is in these wetlands, ‘that moroon Island on which [Johnston] was unhappily set ashoar’, where we can find alleviations to these problems.

Wetlands serve as sites where past and present approaches to nature can be explored. Earlier this year, the Waccamaw Tribe of South Carolina recognised the ‘Rights of Nature’ in the Yadkin-Pee Dee Watershed, including ‘its surrounding forests, wetlands, native plants and wildlife: the right to exist, flourish and regenerate; the right to be free of contamination; the right to restoration; and the right to be respected as a living community.’[22] Thinking with the people who inhabited the land that became Johnston’s mission field is crucial;[23] it allows us to push back against the historic denigration of wetlands as blocks to colonial ‘development’ and missionary work, as we have seen was the case in early modern South Carolina. To draw on the Blue Sustainability and Society Initiative’s Conceptual Manifesto:

Behaviours we now recognize as ecologically damaging were once part of broader cultural ideals that told people what it meant to be prosperous, refined, a strong nation, or imperial power. Solutions that fail to acknowledge how these beliefs were created and reinforced run the risk of being ineffective bandages.

“ye sloop in w.ch he lost his Life'“

To conclude Johnston’s story, the waters of South Carolina eventually claimed his life. The missionary Francis Le Jau informed the SPG in April 1716 that Johnston had drowned after a sloop he was travelling in overturned:

The sloop had no Ballast but Indian corn and being the tide our Barr two Leagues form the shoar was over set by a Gust of Wind. The Comm.ry happened to be in the Hole and being infirm could not get out.[24]

William Bull, another missionary, gave more details the following month after Johnston’s body had been found.

in ye sloop in w.ch he lost his Life, was Johnston’s Body that remain’d therein and was taken out and Buried (I hear) by some Fishermen, w.ch found it on a Bank of Sand – y.e very same \on/ w.ch he was \near/ perishing at his first Arrival in this country.[25]

The coastal wetlands which first damaged Johnston’s health and strained his mission proved to be his resting place. The ‘Bank of Sand’ where Johnston’s body washed up still exists today.[26] Although the landscape of Johnston’s mission has altered since the eighteenth century, wetlands and humans remain intertwined. Moving forward, a choice can be made between working against and working with wetlands.

Notes:

[1] Gideon Johnston to Gilbert Burnet, 20 Sept. 1708, Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, USPG Papers, Letters A, Vol. 4, XCVII.

[2] Howard E. Kimball, “Gideon Johnston the Bishop of London’s Commissary to South Carolina 1708-1716,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 42, no. 1 (1973): 7, 10-11, 32.

[3] Johnston to Burnet, 20 Sept. 1708.

[4] Edward McCrady identifies Johnston’s place of stranding as Morris Island. Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina under the Proprietary Government 1670-1719 (The MacMillan Company, 1897). 473

[5] Johnston was appointed by the SPG in 1711. See USPG Papers, Journal, Vol. 2, 119-20. An overview of Johnston’s work can be found in Kimball, “Gideon Johnston.” For a selection of Johnston’s published letters, see Frank J. Klingberg, ed. Carolina Chronicle: The Papers of Commissary Gideon Johnston, 1707-1716 (University of California Press, 1946).

[6] Johnston to Burnet, 20 Sept. 1708.

[7] Gideon Johnston to the Secretary, 5 July 1710, USPG Papers, Letters A, Vol. 5, CLVIII.

[8] Johnston to the Secretary, 5 July 1710.

[9] Johnston to the Secretary, 5 July 1710.

[10] H. Roy Merrens and George D. Terry, “Dying in Paradise: Malaria, Mortality, and the Perceptual Environment in Colonial South Carolina,” The Journal of Southern History 50, no. 4 (1984): 540.

[11] Christina Rae Butler, Lowcountry at High Tide: A History of Flooding, Drainage, and Reclamation in Charleston, South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press, 2020), 15.

[12] John J. Navin, The Grim Years: Settling South Carolina, 1670-1720 (University of South Carolina Press, 2019), 133, 138.

[13] Hillary Eklund, “Early Modern Wetlands: A Brief Literary History of the Unfast,” English Literary Renaissance 52, no. 1 (2021): 110-11.

[14] Eklund, “Early Modern Wetlands,” 107.

[15] Butler, Lowcountry at High Tide, 15-16.

[16] Butler, Lowcountry at High Tide, 25.

[17] Ben Griffin, “Hegemonic Masculinity as a Historical Problem,” Gender & History 30, no. 2 (2018): 390; Gill Valentine, “What it means to be a man: the body, masculinities, disability,” in Mind and Body Spaces: Geographies of illness, impairment and disability, ed. Ruth Butler and Hester Parr (Routledge, 1999), 169-70; R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Polity, 2005), 54.

[18] Rick Savage, “Wetlands: Nature’s Hidden Defense Against Drought,” Carolina Wetlands Association, August 3, 2026, https://www.carolinawetlands.org/wetlands-natures-hidden-defense-against-drought.

[19] “City of Charleston Council Districts: Wetlands Water Storage,” ArcGIS, accessed September 27, 2026, https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/9bd1228f609149999a11d6f118611213#.

[20] William Conner et al., “Changes within a South Carolina Wetland Forest in the Face of Rising Sea Level,” Forests 13, no. 3 (2022): 10.

[21] James T. Anderson et al., “Wildlife of tidal forested wetlands in the southeastern Atlantic United States,” Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science 325 (2025): 8.

[22] Jonah Chester, “Waccamaw Tribe becomes first SC government body to recognize the ‘Rights of Nature’,” The Post and Courier, August 28, 2026, https://www.postandcourier.com/rising-waters/waccamaw-tribe-rights-nature-south-carolina/article_dc2287c7-2ca3-4a5d-a696-e87c8458cac2.html?mrfcid=202608286a918a7d7a7258588bb2767f.

[23] Johnston had limited success in converting the indigenous people of South Carolina. See Kimball, “Gideon Johnston,” 34.

[24] Francis Le Jau to the Secretary, 25 Apr. 1716, USPG Papers, Letters A, Vol. 11, p. 153.

[25] William Bull to the Secretary, 16 May 1716, USPG Papers, Letters, Vol. 11, p. 147.

[26] See n. 4.