11
Key West
1829–1836
In the early days, Martin fretted continually about money. Most of his income came from crewing on ?shing boats and sporadic salvaging at the wrecks, supplemented by extra earnings from repairing boats in port. Wrecks were occurring with growing frequency. The reef at the south of the island stretched seven miles out, and with only the Sand Key lighthouse to guide passing ships, the increase in marine tra?c meant that many unwary vessels ran aground. Wrecking was poised to become a very big business, and it was a highly competitive one.
There were many tales of dishonorable sea captains bruited about. Stories circulated of lights placed strategically on ships moored on the reef to look like they were in a safe channel, luring unsuspecting vessels from the safety of their own course.
“That’s utter nonsense,” snapped Martin when I once mentioned this. We were visiting the home of our friends, the Watlingtons, and he turned to the other men at the table. “She doesn’t know what she is on about. Every wrecking captain we know is honest and hardworking.”
“Aye,” added Captain George Lee indignantly. “You’ll not ?nd that practice hereabouts among any boat captains of our acquaintance.”
Another sea captain, William Loxley, who had studied maritime law in Boston, agreed: “Anyone who’d resort to a Judas ship in the Keys would be subject to laws governing piracy, and severely dealt with. The rest of us would ostracize such a man; he’d never get to work around Key West after that.”
“Aye,” agreed our host, Francis Watlington. “And why would anyone do that? We put our own vessels in jeopardy when we go to the exact dangerous spots of those ships that run aground. And mark me, there’s no insurance on wrecking vessels, either.”
In spite of the fact that it sounded legal, there was something ghoulish to me in the act of hovering around, watching a distressed crew try to save a hapless ship. Yet I said nothing; in Key West, I usually found it wise to keep my opinions to myself.
“Who is in charge of such operations?” I asked Martin on our way home from the social.
“The wrecking master. He’s the ?rst sea captain to arrive on the scene. It’s up to him to direct the operation. If anybody on board is hurt, his ?rst duty is to get them ashore to be looked at by the doctor.”
“And then?”
“He might also send for friends in Key West to help unload cargo from the boats.”
“Do you aspire to be such a wrecking captain?”
He shook his head. “No. I don’t own a ship. And even if I did, when would I have time to attend court sessions, with my many jobs? No. I’m content to be one of the help. As part of the crew, I’m well enough paid when Judge Webb adjudicates the cargo and awards us our percentage.”
It’s an ill wind, the saying goes, that doesn’t blow someone some good. The growth of the wrecking industry stimulated Key West’s economy, and the village ?ourished with many other businesses. Numerous warehouses were being built to store the booty from wrecks. Home-furnishing stores and pawnshops also started up. Dry-goods store owners like Alexander Patterson became auctioneers, doing a good business as buyers ?ocked in.
Wreckers took all manner of cargo from disabled vessels—from loads of ice or coal to livestock or expensive spices. It was no longer legal to transport slaves, but occasionally the wreckers could happen along such treasure as silver and valuable jewelry. And the local villagers, who had no other way to acquire such luxuries, quickly snapped up cargo like furniture, art, lace, silks, and ?ne European artifacts. In this way, Martin and I even managed to acquire a piano.
When my children arrived, Martha and then Timothy, we made the transition to an active family. My grandmother lavished attention on the babies, often vying with Ellen Mallory for the chance to look after them. I’d had very little contact with small children before my marriage, but when I held my ?rst baby, Martha, an instinct I did not previously imagine I possessed welled up from deep inside me. As I placed her gently to my breast to nourish her, I knew in that moment, I would treasure and defend my precious child in the face of any odds.
Now, when I thought of Martin, he had become for me a provider. We still came together once or twice a week, but I had long stopped hoping for these encounters to bring any pleasure or romance; I merely started to view his body as the conduit that could ?ll my own with new life.
I sought out newcomers with babies or young children. At this juncture, Bahamian wreckers and a few professional men were beginning to trickle into town. A number of them brought their wives, as promises of sudden wealth from salvaging ventures were attracting residents from all over, including the Caribbean islands. Against a background of this diverse texture, Key West began to grow and truly thrive.
An important segment of Key West’s early settlers were those a?uent Americans from southern states and New England who’d been involved in the original purchase and subsequent partitioning of the island. These “quality folk,” as Martin had called them, lived in stately new homes, waited on by slaves, and enjoyed Key West’s weather.
It was a young attorney from this group who swept my sister, Dorothy, off her feet. We’d been in Key West for about three years when my sister came to visit us for a month after Timothy’s birth. (Martha was by then an active toddler.) I had invited my sister to be Timothy’s godmother, and was delighting in her visit after such a long time apart.
St. Paul’s Church was not yet completed, so the christening took place in Gran’s garden, performed by Martin’s cousin, a priest from St. John’s Anglican Church in Harbour Island. A few days later, we held a welcome reception for Dorothy and invited all our friends. Mayor John Whitehead brought along a distant cousin of his, Tom Farrell, who was visiting from New York City.
Dorothy set her cap for Whitehead’s cousin as soon as she saw him. Pulling me aside in the cookhouse as I fussed with food and supervised Gran’s servants, she asked, “Sugar, who is that handsome, charmin’ man?” She took out her fan, adjusted her hair, and smiled. “Do introduce me to him.”
I did so, and watched with amusement as Dorothy brought to bear the full power of her southern-belle charm. She was just eighteen, the age I was when I met Martin, and had blossomed into a real beauty, making the most of her blond curls, blue eyes, and creamy ivory skin.
At twenty-?ve, Tom Farrell was strikingly handsome, a tall man with dark hair and the pale skin we’d come to expect in northern visitors. His jawline was as ?rm as his handshake; he had deep blue eyes and a large mustache. And here in Key West, where rough, sun-scorched men cared nothing of their appearance, he stood out like a beacon.
“Isn’t he just marvelous?” she whispered to me. “Who’d have thought I’d ?nd such a perfect man here in this tiny little village instead of in New Orleans?”
I had to agree; an ambitious young lawyer, he was a great prospect, although, based on my own experience, I felt protective. I wanted to reach out, warn her to slow down, to tell her what might lie ahead if she rushed into love too quickly. But as the music and dancing in the garden continued well into the warm night, Dorothy monopolized Tom Farrell. Clearly, she was smitten, yet she so cleverly concealed her feelings that he never seemed to realize how much he had piqued her interest.
“Do you think your sister would allow me to call on her?” he asked me tentatively as he was leaving.
I pretended to give the question a few moments of consideration. “Yes,” I ?nally said. “I think she might.”
Their ensuing courtship was fascinating to watch. Away from the strict formality of New Orleans’s French society, Dorothy could spend time freely with Tom, without a chaperone. They saw each other almost every night in our front parlor, or sat holding hands, swinging on our veranda as they sipped lemonade. And no one kept track of their whereabouts when they went for walks and attended parties.
I was happy for them, even though it made me painfully aware of how empty my own love life with Martin was. When I saw them laughing merrily together, so obviously in love and so responsive to each other’s presence, I had to bite back my envy in favor of my sister’s happiness. It was their shared laughter that I coveted most. Except for the weeks of our whirlwind courtship, Martin and I rarely laughed together; life had become a very serious affair. He valued hard work, stability, neatness, and diligence—all admirable traits, to be sure, but in the absence of any levity, his view of life often seemed very dour indeed.
In contrast, Tom was always ready with quips and stories and looked for the lighthearted side of everything. And despite his cosmopolitan charm, he found Key West’s exotic frontier life fascinating. He began to wear lighter clothing, put his heavy boots away, and delighted in the feeling of the heat and humidity on his skin.
Then he surprised us one evening when he announced that he’d decided to stay in Key West. “I’m tired of living in a cold northern city, competing with so many other lawyers,” he explained, smiling at Dorothy. Even so, I was still totally unprepared for Dorothy’s announcement.
“We’re getting married next week!” she told me one night after Tom brought her home.
“Married? You’re not! Next week? But you’ve known him such a short time!”
“We’re in love. There’s no reason to wait. Gran is thrilled. I told her this afternoon.”
“But what about Grandmère and Grandpère? Surely you’ll want their blessing beforehand. And they’ll want to give you a nice wedding in New Orleans.”
“We might go to New Orleans for our honeymoon. I’ll surprise them then. And anyway, I don’t want a big wedding there. I want to be married here. We’ll have it in Gran’s garden, as you did for the christening. It will be lovely.”
Secretly, I was deeply hurt that she had presented this most important decision in her life to me as a fait accompli, and even more hurt that she’d chosen to tell Gran ?rst. But I did not wish to spoil her happiness, and so I put aside my own feelings—I had grown quite adept at doing so anyway—and hugged her tightly. “That’s wonderful!” I said excitedly.
The wedding was every bit as lovely as Dorothy had promised. Despite her convent background, she eagerly accepted Tom’s Anglican faith, and Martin’s cousin o?ciated, postponing his return to the Bahamas. Gran arranged to have Martin and her handyman slave Cato build a little pergola for the occasion. She had taken to growing orchids imported from South America, and for the wedding she directed her servants to festoon the little structure with vanda and cattleya orchids in purple and white. My sister carried a large bouquet of beautiful gingers in a tropical range of red, orange, and yellow, threaded with stephanotis and hibiscus from neighbors’ gardens, and all the guests lavished the happy couple with gifts of silver and art treasures, most, I suspected, acquired from vessels run aground.
There was no time for a proper honeymoon. Tom quickly found legal work representing shipowners involved in wrecks, and Dorothy and her new husband settled into a happy state of newlywed bliss. “I just love bedding my handsome husband,” she would con?de with a giggle. “It’s so wonderful; I could do it every night!” Their trysts were also productive, as it turned out, for Dorothy immediately conceived my niece Maureen. During her con?dences, I would simply smile and nod, happy for my sister, but regretting once again that such romance and enthusiasm had been denied to me as a bride.
Life was good, I re?ected. Yes, there were worries about the Seminole Indian War. And captains still whispered their fears of piracy, but for our growing clan, these were not matters to dwell on. Since our land abutted the naval depot, we felt safe from such dangers as pirate or Indian raids.
Still, the war with the Seminoles was on everyone’s mind, and the government began to consider an expansion of naval land. Perhaps Martin and I should have read the warning signals, but in our innocence, we did not. Thus, our calamity hit us like a lightning bolt.
I was reading a story to Martha and Timothy, who were still toddlers, on the day it happened. My grandmother’s housemaid, Hagar, was on loan to us, polishing silver while she, too, listened to the story. Martin came rushing in, looking ashen as he waved a white envelope in my face.
“Do you know what this is?” he thundered. His eyes were blazing with anger, his mouth contorted, spittle at the corners.
The children were frightened, hiding their faces in the shelter of my lap. So alarmed was Hagar at his outburst that she scurried into the playroom, where she could still hear everything.
“It’s a letter from the U.S. government! They’re extending the naval base,” he sputtered.
I tried to calm his shouting. “Martin—are they con?scating our pineapple crop to feed the men?”
Martin rolled his eyes. “No, not our pineapples. They’ve expropriated our land! This new Commodore Archer,” he spat out the name, “he’s planning to extend the naval station onto our property.”
I could feel the blood slowly drain from my face. “Good God,” I ?nally said hoarsely. “Can he do this? Have we no recourse?”
Martin collapsed into a chair and buried his head in his hands. “Not even a bloody apology,” he muttered bitterly. “Our property is now government land.”
“With no compensation?” I was having trouble coming to grips with the full meaning of this catastrophe.
He looked up, glaring. “Aren’t you listening to me, Emily? It’s been con?scated. He’s taking it with no more regret than if it were a pig or a chicken, or a pile of lumber.” He shook the letter at me. “‘Expanding the navy to protect Key West from Indians and recurrences of piracy.’ Ha! We get nothing!”
I was stunned. After all Martin’s work and the money we’d invested in our home, we were about to lose everything.
“From what I’ve heard,” I stammered, “the navy would be better off spending the money on more lighthouses, not expanding the base here.”
“Indeed? Well, then, you tell the government that,” he retorted, and stormed out of the house.
Were we to be ordered off our land like squatters?
Over the next few weeks, I alternated between panic and confusion. We did everything possible to turn the decision around. We tried to make appointments with Commodore Archer, but he was always too busy to meet us. Dorothy’s husband ?led petitions to Washington, but it soon became evident that the suit would not be looked at for a long time, perhaps not in our lifetime.
We were devastated. Our life savings were all invested in our home and, in fact, we still owed money to Gran. Martin fell into a ?t of melancholy so profound, he was barely able to function.
“I’ll kill him,” he muttered several times. “The man has ruined us.”
“Hush. Those are seditious remarks. If something ever does happen to him, you’ll be blamed,” I cautioned him.
He could only grumble in reply.
“We’re young,” I said weakly. “We can start over.”
“And how are we going to do that?”
“If we could acquire another plot of land, we could move the house. People do that all the time. It’s the land that he wants, not the house.”
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that? The house is too big to ?t on a free plot of land, and we’ve no money to buy a larger one. We’re in debt as it is. And do you think a house can be moved for nothing? It’s an expensive undertaking. You can be sure Archer won’t pay for it. He’ll probably want to live in it himself. My house. The house I built with my bare hands!”
For indeed, by law, it was Martin’s house, not mine.
After numerous petitions, Commodore Archer ?nally agreed to meet Martin. When he returned home, he looked no happier than when he had left earlier that day.
“They’ve offered me the post of lighthouse keeper at Wreckers’ Cay,” my husband said bitterly.
Recently, I had seen an article in the Key West Enquirer that shipowners’ demands were ?nally making an impact on Washington. They were hiring lobbyists to plea for the construction of new lighthouses throughout the Keys and along the coast of the mainland. I knew plans were being accelerated but had not heard of one going up at the little island called Wreckers’ Cay.
“It’s not even built yet,” he said. “He’ll let us stay here until the lighthouse tower and the keeper’s house are built. It could take a year or two. He actually had the cheek to try to convince me he was conferring an honor on me with such a splendid position.”
“An honor?”
“It’s an appointment that needs presidential approval.” This was true—despite the low pay, tending a beacon was considered a respectable post, usually granted to war veterans or trusted friends of government o?cials. And ?nding responsible lighthouse keepers was di?cult because tending lights was not nearly as pro?table as salvaging; it was hard work, and often it could be a lonely life. Wreckers’ Cay, with its shallow waters, was considered a particularly dangerous spot for ships, one where a light was sorely needed. But it was a terribly isolated island.
This olive branch was by no means a real compensation for the loss of our land and home. But in the end, Martin and I had to bend to the ?nancial considerations. Quite simply, we needed a place to live.
Gran was upset when she heard we were moving to Wreckers’ Cay. I stopped by her house with the children the day after we received Archer’s letter. While Hagar amused Martha and Timothy, I took tea with Gran in the parlor. I was unprepared for her reaction when I told her the bad news. She brought her cup down into its saucer with a dramatic crashing gesture.
“What are you saying?” she demanded sharply. “You’re leaving … barely after I’ve arrived? I came here to be near my family and friends! And to watch my great-grandchildren grow up. This will ruin everything.”
I shrugged helplessly. I understood how she felt.
“Martin should have known, buying all that property over on the water,” she continued. “Any fool could have seen it was the obvious place for the naval station to expand.”
Her diatribe began to anger me, for instead of blaming the commodore, and offering me solace, she was ?nding fault with Martin.
“You didn’t raise that point at the time,” I retorted. “And if you are worried about your money, be assured that we will pay you back every penny we borrowed.”
This merely fueled her ire. “Did I mention the money to you, ever?” she challenged, her rheumy blue eyes ?ashing. “I lent it to you because I wanted to help you. I never expected to get it back. In fact, I’d be happy to lend you more to keep you here.”
“That’s out of the question,” I snapped. “We do not wish to remain in your debt forever.” And with that, I got up and left with my children.
The truth was that I had ?nally begun to love Key West and our growing community here. The prospect of having to start over again at Wreckers’ Cay made me so anxious, I starting waking up in the middle of the night in a sweat. I knew I would miss my sister and her family terribly, as well as our friends. And yes, even my di?cult grandmother. But I dared not reveal my feelings to Martin—he was already living in a perpetual state of anger and depression about the move.
Finally, in January 1836, we were o?cially informed that all was ready at the island. We were expected to move out by May. I had just found out that I was again pregnant, so I had to struggle for composure when the eviction notice was delivered.
Dorothy organized a social for our friends and neighbors to bid us good-bye. “You’re all set up over there,” Captain George Lee told me brightly. He had recently secured a contract with the U.S. Treasury Department and collector of customs to captain the lighthouse supply boat, which would be our lifeline to civilization.
“How does it look?” I inquired anxiously.
He shrugged. “It still needs some work. You’ll want to be puttin’ on some whitewash and all. A few plants … a garden. Hang curtains and such. Things to make it homeylike.”
I sighed. “I shall hate it, won’t I?”
Seeing the tears welling in my eyes, he touched my hand and quickly reassured me. “Listen, Miss Emily, anything you need, you just tell me, y’hear? I’ll be coming by twice a month on the Outlander.You just write me out a list o’ things and I’ll move heaven and earth to git ’em for you. Your Gran or Dorothy want to send letters or packages out, all’s they have to do is let me know and I’ll see that you git ’em.”
I smiled my thanks, patting his arm. “I’m grateful to you for that,” I whispered. “Very grateful.”
With great reluctance, we packed up our worldly goods on a warm, sun-?lled day in May and, with a fair trade wind at our backs, headed southwest toward Wreckers’ Cay aboard a new government sloop, the Pharos.Behind us trailed Martin’s wooden ?shing skiff. Captain Lee and his mate, Al?e Dillon, promised to barge over larger items, including my piano, within the month.
As I expected, I grew ill during the trip, the more so because of my condition. But with two young children to care for this time, I forced myself to remain alert and nurturing, despite my inclination to take to my berth and bury my head beneath the coverlet.