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The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History by John S. Sledge

2020; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 86; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2020.0244

2325-6893

Jamin Wells,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Reviewed by: The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History by John S. Sledge Jamin Wells The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History. By John S. Sledge. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xii, 243. $29.99, ISBN 978-1-64336-014-0.) The Gulf of Mexico is heating up, academically speaking. From Jack E. Davis's Pulitzer Prize–winning The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea (New York, 2017) to recent studies of its littoral communities, environmental disasters, and energy landscapes by Cindy Ermus, Andy Horowitz, and others, the tenth-largest body of water on earth is capturing the historian's gaze like never before. John S. Sledge's The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History is, at first glance, a welcome extension of this scholarly inquiry, offering a compelling narrative of the Gulf's storied maritime past for a popular audience. Indeed, one can almost taste those briny waters reading this handsomely produced volume. Rather than on a ship at sea or along the quays of New Orleans, Havana, or Veracruz, The Gulf of Mexico opens and closes in the so-called Redneck Riviera, a raucous yet oddly family-friendly stretch of sugar-white sands bifurcated by the Florida-Alabama border. This acknowledged bias toward the north-central Gulf coast shades the narrative, yet Sledge spins a yarn that spans thousands of miles and millennia, from the region's first inhabitants who faced a much smaller Gulf to its first modern climate refugees fleeing rising waters. The first chapter traces the development of the Indigenous coastal cultures of the Mayas, Mississippis, Pensacolas, and Calusas through the eve of European contact. The next six chapters—"Spanish Sea," "Colonial Crossroads," "Pirates' Haunt," "King Cotton's Pond," "Violent Sea," and "American Sea"—explore the succession of political-economic regimes that defined, for Sledge, the Gulf over the past four centuries. Those familiar with the basin's maritime history will encounter many familiar characters—Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, Jean Lafitte, Louis Agassiz, Andrew Jackson Higgins, Ernest Hemingway, and Malcolm McLean—and vessels—USS Alabama, USS Maine, SS Ideal X, and Carnival Cruise Line—in addition to the Gulf's famed ports and hamlets. The final chapter describes the development of the Gulf's petroleum industry, tracing the technological innovations that enabled oil and gas to profoundly shape the region's economics, its politics, and, sadly, its environment. The Gulf of Mexico is geared toward a broad readership keen on heroic narratives, romantic invocations of life and death at sea, and concise prose; the text is a crisp 188 pages. Written from a traditional maritime history perspective, this volume focuses on the political, economic, and naval leaders, economic systems, and characteristic watercraft of each epoch. Sledge's admiration of the "Gulf Coast residents who have . . . struggled with challenges both natural and manmade" and the technological innovations that came out of those encounters are the book's central thread (p. 6). Yet we hear about only a [End Page 899] small subset of the kaleidoscope of peoples and cultures who have shaped and been shaped by the maritime worlds of the Gulf of Mexico. We encounter brothels galore but no union meeting halls. We meet many savvy tycoons and hearty ship captains but few laborers or seamen, to say nothing of the social institutions at the heart of the Gulf's maritime communities. Women rarely appear in this text, with the exception of prostitutes. And discussions of race, and particularly of slavery, are troubling because they frame centuries of systematic, violent exploitation in the abstract, dehumanizing logic of economics, leading to awkward analyses that describe Congress's banning of the international slave trade in 1808 as a "problem" for "thwarted" planters to solve (p. 89). In short, readers looking for an inclusive, expansive new maritime history that provides the truly international perspective suggested by this volume's title will be sorely disappointed. These are not esoteric academic criticisms, as this book will likely sell widely and reinforce a white, male, and distinctly American narrative of a remarkably multifaceted, polyglot swath of time and space. Ultimately, Sledge's criticism of maps and tales depicting...