Cape Canaveral What’s Happening?
By Diane Barile
That’s a five hundred year old question. Today, if asked, you might say “Oh, that’s some rocket going off again.” For millennia it’s been as in the poem by Mildred Meigs:
The waves roll out and the waves roll in
And the nodding night winds flow But why the moon man fishes the sea Only the moon man knows
Ancient tides laid down succeeding waves of brilliant dunes. The sea rose and retreated east and west for over one hundred miles, fifty west to the central Florida Ridge, then thirty or more miles east of today’s shoreline. Today the sea is marching west again against the shoreline bulge of Cape Canaveral and wisp of south flung islands feathered to St. Lucie.
Heroic dunes forestall sea change, gripping windblown sand with fringe roots and rhizomes of hearty plants. Behind the wrack of daily tidal debris, flowing vines accept the sand to encourage growth of grasses to the heights of sea oats, shrubs and sea grape trees. Between the north south run of dunes, rich wetlands attract migrating flocks of colorful birds.
In the 1500s, perhaps John Cabot, and certainly Ponce de Leon, asked “What’s that?” “What’s happened there?” when they saw the anomaly of the bulge on the Atlantic Coast. Arrows, shot by native people, left little time for an answer. The golden glow of ripened sea oats moving with the afternoon breeze was reported as a field of canes (Cape Canaveral) on the most identifiable land form on the Florida Atlantic seaboard. Other than the Florida Keys, it was the only named site on early Spanish maps.
There is no need to ask the French “What happened?” The answer was fatal. The protestant Huguenots, ship wrecked by a
hurricane in 1565, camped to build an escape boat from wreck debris. Overtaken by the Spanish, they were taken in an inlet near St. Augustine named for their fate, Matanzas, slaughter in Spanish.
Repelled by the native Ais tribe and void of resources, Cape Canaveral saw no Spanish colonization. But it was quite familiar
to navigators asking “What’s happening?” First, currents were unpredictable, especially with shifting shoals. Secondly, ships could top off fresh water supplies from springs erupting from the land into the Atlantic. And finally, it was from Cape Canaveral ships began navigating east toward Spain and home.
As an English colony,1763 -1783, plantations grew north of the Cape including the Dummit orange grove. Bernard Romans and Gerald de Brahn defined what was happening at Cape Canaveral in their published maps and charts showing currents and bathymetry. Of course, at this time English Florida was at war with the rebellious thirteen neighbors. Notably the last battle of the American Revolution pitted the American ship Alliance against the English ship Sybil just off Cape Canaveral. The United States won the battle and the war.
Submerged ship wrecks populated the Canaveral shoals when Florida became an American state in 1845. Rippling waves did skip visibly across the sand banks, but were usually hidden at a depth of eleven to twenty feet. Light came to the dark of Cape Canaveral authorized by the American Congress as protection for navigation and trade. A wooden, then a brick, lighthouse warned ships of the banks and shoals to the north and northeast. During the Civil War, the light was doused protecting neither the Yankees blockading inlets and sea lanes,nor the local sailors trying to run the blockade for trade or supplies from the
Bahamas.
Still waves blew in from New Smyrna around the Cape, then uninterrupted south to the first connection to the Indian River near St. Lucie. A slim barrier island peninsula feathered between the Atlantic and the estuarine Indian River Lagoon.
Lighthouse keeper Mills Burnham relit the desolate tower after the war. The beacon shone over the sea, first for thirteen miles from shore than twenty-four. What’s happening after the Civil War? Just ask anyone from the Burnham family.
Settlers began to make homes on the windswept shores joining Douglas Dummit to the north of the Cape, Desoto Beach and to the south Stinkmore. Burnham’s daughters married assistant keepers whose families manned the Cape Canaveral light for about ninety years {1853-1942). Small communities with citrus groves and fisher folk grew and waned with family stories and the economy of the Great Depression and World War II.
And the waves rolled out and the waves rolled in
Then over the crackling sea the Moon Men came
Please visit the South Brevard Historical Society’s website (http://www.southbrevardhistory.org) for further information about Brevard’s history and local events.
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