As much as I love water, I'm not someone who sails, you know, and who boats and who sort of had this knowledge of rivers and how you

navigate them. That's Eda Fields Black. She is a historian at Carnegie Mellon and in her latest book.

She dives into the story of what is one of the most daring spy operations and

raids of the entire Civil War, one that was led by Harriet Tubman herself.

And it all happened along a river in South Carolina called the Cumbi.

And if I'm going to put the reader in the raid,

I've got to study up on this river

and I've got to figure it out. So I felt like, okay this was a boat ride.

Yeah.

So in the summer of 2021, more than 150 years after the raid, Professor Fields Black decided

to head down to that very same river.

The raid took place under the full moon.

So we chose a night of the full moon and a night of the spring tide.

So I knew approximately how fast the boats could go. It was six to six or seven miles per hour.

So we went very slowly. We did not use any gadgets. We did not even use lights and we crept up the Kumbi River.

And you can read the water,

and you can read the water,

whereas the rice fields on one side

and the cypress swamps and the marsh on the other

are going to be just these

undifferentiated dark blobs.

The moonlight shimmers off of the water.

...