The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea by Jack E. Davis (review)

Environmental historian Jack Davis follows what he calls painter Winslow Homer’s truth, the “intimate and vital connection linking humankind, nature, and history” (5), through five centuries and five hundredplus pages of history in the Gulf of Mexico. Homer was attracted to the Gulf by its scenic beauty and rich wildlife, and so have been millions of others from the distant past to the present. Estuaries—the world’s most productive ecosystems—attracted Native people to the Gulf shores. After 1500 a host of Europeans followed, this time coming by sea, and tried to bring the area under the control of various empires. People continue to be attracted to where the land meets the sea. The beaches around the Gulf’s perimeter, from Key West to Campeche Bay, Mexico, bordered by turquoise water, have attracted hordes of people. So too have the fish, shellfish, and oil that lies below. That oil threatens to tar the entire region, making for perhaps the most visible of a host of environmental problems facing the present-day Gulf. So richly productive of harvestable marine life were the estuaries that the fish and shellfish of southwest Florida provided sustenance for one of the world’s rare examples of a complex, sedentary culture not based on agriculture. It was not the estuaries, however, that attracted the Spanish, but the twenty-thousand people who lived in their midst, many upon mounds made of shells. The Spaniards failed to replicate the success of the indigenous inhabitants in taking advantage of the estuaries in part because the diseases they brought with them from Europe decimated Native populations. But the Spaniards’ descendants adapted well enough to establish the first Euro-American fishing villages along the Florida and Louisiana coasts. Fishermen from New England later pioneered the offshore industry that remains so vital today. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the railroads that took fish away from the canneries of Biloxi and Pensacola brought midwestern vacationers to the coast, but disease, malaria and yellow fever in particular, delayed beach cottage and hotel development until the early twentieth century, when disease declined and industry and leisure flourished. Fish and shellfish brought sportsmen along with jobs and factories. Book Reviews