“I knew there would be attack submarines armed with ICBM nuclear warheads. I just didn’t think we would see them.”
The ampule of sacred cow’s milk in hand, we head back to the harbor and prepare the ship to push north. We drift out on the last of the Amelia River, saluted by train whistles from the pulp mill on the north end – freight cars and conveyors and mountains of sawdust and ships listing with cellulose. A group of boating tourists motors by, lined up like ducks in a row. We’ve seen these all over Florida – little paddle boat size contraptions big enough for two. Big outboards on each one that weigh more than the boat, but a governor on the motor limits them to jogging speed. All hat and no cattle. In St. Mary’s Inlet, we catch a glimpse of Fort Clinch to the east on the tip of Amelia, sunbathers on the beach, and the wide Atlantic beyond.
At some indefinite but pivotal moment, we depart Spanish Florida and the expedition enters the wilderness of British Georgia. It’s like the wave of a magic wand. We know something of immense importance just happened; we just can’t say exactly when. Still, you KNOW something is different, if only an arbitrary border on a map. But we are on the right side of that border now, and welcome it.
During the Age of Exploration, the St. Mary’s Inlet was a no man’s land between warring European kingdoms. It was the best deepwater port along a hundred of miles of coast between Savannah and Jacksonville. Strategically, everyone with a navy wanted to control it. Forts were built, defended, and lost on both sides of the St. Mary’s Inlet for hundreds of years. The Empire of Spain controlled everything to the south, all the way to the tip of South America. France and England wrestled over everything to the north, with England dominating the middle; but the hold was tenuous. In fact, Spain still controlled Florida all the way up to 1845, almost to the American Civil War. But the border was always porous here, fluid as the waterway. Skirmishes pushed the envelope north until the other pushed it further south.
This problem, as the saying goes, created certain business opportunities. When nascent America entered conflicts with Britain and her European allies, trade embargoes were enacted and blockades deployed to enforce them. But Spain, focused on extracting gold further south, stayed neutral in these conflicts. So enterprising frontier traders would bring goods down the Inland Waterway from southern Georgia – indigo, rice, cotton, timber, tobacco, etc. – and simply slip across the inlet to Fernandina. Effectively sashaying into Spanish Territory where there were no embargoes. From there, goods brought by Spain made their way back north via the same route. The town of St. Mary’s on the mainland of Georgia, and Fernandina on Amelia, though political enemies, in practice were international trading partners.
A military presence remains active today. Across the inlet to our left is Kings Bay Submarine Base. Hardened graving dock covers rise in the distance over the trees, the marshes, and Cumberland Sound. We enter the Sound and follow a creek to the right that runs north along the island, heading for an anchorage marked on the charts near the ferry dock. Two larger boats already there, but plenty of room. Which is good, because the 7 foot tides are strong and we need lots of scope to stay put.
A Coast Guard Pon-Pon alert comes over the radio while we prepare to go ashore. All boats are advised to vacate and avoid the St. Mary’s Inlet for the rest of the day for a “live fire drill”. “Glad we don’t need to go out that way today,” says Doug.
We’ve heard so much about Cumberland Island we will spend extra time here – a day in the south and another on the north end. Variously claimed by colonial empires, a Revolutionary War General, antebellum plantation owners, a Civil War General, and the wealthiest industrial magnate of the early 1900s, it was a prize fought over in the last century by developers and preservationists.
I lived in Georgia when the island changed hands to become a National Seashore: from a private enclave of the uber wealthy family of Andrew Carnegie to become public land. It was a messy transaction that needed the work of state and environmental organizations, cooperation of the Carnegie family, and lots of money; but the deal eventually went through. Cumberland Island is now a National Park, one of the few that can only be reached by boat. Its relative inaccessibility, combined with the remote location far from urban centers, has done more to preserve it than any manmade controls ever could. Most of the island, abiding thousands of years of human history, remains remarkably unchanged.
Doing a bit of recon with maps, we see there’s a place near the beach on the ocean side of the island marked as having showers. So the rough plan is to walk the southern end of the island for a few miles, strike out east to hit the beach, and walk north along on the shore. We’ll go for a swim and shower off before walking back.
We pack light – just some water, snacks, and a towel – and lower ourselves into PS, the tender tender, then row diagonally across the fast current for a couple of hundred yards to the dock, which screeches and groans against the tide.
