IT was called a Golgotha for unsuspecting mariners. A land of disease and death. A distant, dismal necropolis. Key West’s early years saw many felled by sickness and entombed in its soil. Sent there to enforce the nation’s sovereignty and protect commerce, American soldiers and sailors were the main vectors of disease, and made up … More Talk not to me of doctors
IN 1849 William A. Whitehead donated a map of Key West, Florida, to the New Jersey Historical Society in Newark. A memento of his first sojourn on the island and the result of his surveying it twenty years earlier, the map provided a link between towns far distant in temperament as in latitude, but a … More A key of many colors
GUNSHOTS piercing the early morning quiet of Key West’s seaward side disrupted the dreams of few island residents. Their houses clustered near the harbor on the opposite shore, far from the smoke and noise. Either the participants themselves, upon their returning to town, or a newspaper published days later alerted most of the population to … More Bad blood
“FULLER of open and lurking perils, than a voyage to Europe,” the Florida Straits, as every experienced mariner knew, were the playground of fickle winds and currents, the hideaway of treacherous sandbars and reefs, prompting from poet Henry Cogswell Knight a sobering reflection: It is an august, yet a fearful thing, to be riding on … More The measure of the island
COMMERCE sat and scanned the horizon for the vessel bringing William A. Whitehead from the north. A few weeks from his arrival on Key West, he would be pressed into its service. Commerce had only a tenuous foothold on this remote, imperfectly charted island which still pinned its fortunes on misfortune, still relied for life … More The forerunner
WILLIAM Whitehead considered few aspects of his first sea voyage worth transmitting to posterity. An unpublished memoir composed in later years but replete with details of his childhood and upbringing preserves scant information about this October 1828 journey. The vessel’s cabin was too crowded for its “three or four passengers”; the anonymous captain and crew … More Wild isle
LIEUTENANT Matthew C. Perry guided the Shark, battered by a spell of “boisterous weather,” into Havana harbor for repairs. The damage to the schooner, though slight, signified that its next assignment, to police the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, was to be no easy affair. Of late the Shark and its steely skipper had helped deter … More Rough seas
