KEY West’s harbor resounded at dawn with the boom of cannon, as Old Glory waved from the porches of hotels, billowing even from the schooners and brigs in port. At noon a military salute was fired, and a crowd of citizens raised three loud hurrahs. It was Wednesday 4 March 1829, the day William A. … More 018–Imprints
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 017–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 016–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 015–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 014–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 013–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 An unpublished memoir composed in later years but replete with details of his childhood and upbringing preserves scant information about this October 1828 journey.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 012–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 011–Rough seas
GULLS danced a ballet around the spars of the Mary Lord with a semblance of exultation at her journey’s end. Laborers and clerks, meanwhile, joined in their own peculiar revels, hefting wooden crates from the hold, inspecting and recording the cargo dockside, wheeling it away to a waiting storehouse. Chests of exotic shape and design … More 010–The entrepôt
FOR all that it has gained or lost in the tides of politics and war, Perth Amboy’s history attests to the power of place, the environment’s ability to span time and distance through the agency of human memory and motivation. For so many who spent the bulk of their lives elsewhere–and William Whitehead was by … More 009–Progress and place
An attractive presence 