Taming the Reef the Coast Survey in the Keys

Taming the Reef The Coast Survey in the Keys James Tilghman —No portion of the coast of the United States has stronger claims than this to a speedy and minute survey, whether we regard the dangers to navigation, the amount of commerce which passes it, or the various localities of the Union interest ed in the trading vessels. Alexander Dallas Bache Superintendent of the Coast Survey, 18u9 As Ponce de Leon sailed south along the coast of Florida in 1513, he encountered the Gulf Stream where it runs close to shore north of Lake Worth Inlet. Swept back bv a current his log describes as "more powerful than the wind,” it took weeks for the small fleet to regroup. Ponce de Leon’s pilot (navigator), Anton de Alaminos, remembered the ordeal six years later when he was aboard Hernando Cortes' flagship carrying the first Aztec gold and Cortes' bid to be governor of Mexico back to Spain. Speed was of the essence, and it was feared the lone ship might be inter cepted by the governor of Cuba, a rival, if it made for the Atlantic through the Old Bahama Channel, the established route that ran between Cuba and the Great Bahama Bank. So Alaminos decided to round Florida and head north instead, convinced that a current as strong as the one he had experienced would lead to open water. He was right, of course. The Gulf Stream not only carried him to the Atlantic but half wav back to Spain.1 This "New Bahama Channel," also known as the Gulf or Straits of Florida, became the most important sea lane in the New World—the route home for thousands of Spanish and European ships, and later the 6 TEQUESTA wav around Florida for American ships sailing between ports on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts. That made the Florida Reef, a barrier reef complex that arcs for some 200 miles along the coast of the Keys on the edge of the Straits and the Gulf Stream, a menace to shipping and the most sig nificant piece of geography in South Florida. Over the centuries it threat ened Spanish treasure fleets, appropriated names like Carysfort, Looe and Fowey from British warships lost there, and eventually became the “great American danger to navigation.” By the mid-1800s some $300-400 mil lion worth of ships and cargo were passing through the Straits ever)' year, and so many ships were coming to grief on the reef—five hundred dur ing the 1850s according to most—that Florida found itself in the midst of its first insurance crisis and Key West, the closest port with a court that had jurisdiction to process salvage claims, was on the way to becoming the richest city in Florida and one of the richest on a per capita basis in the U. S.2 The job ot taming the reef—ending the mayhem by lighting, mark ing, charting and otherwise providing the information needed to safely navigate it—fell to two federal maritime agencies: the Lighthouse Service, which was created in 1789 when Congress federalized existing lighthouses and aids to navigation and gave the secretary of the treasury the job of adding more; and the U. S. Coast Survey, born in 1807 when Congress called for accurate charts ot the coast and adjacent waters. The Coast Survey would spend some forty years in the Keys surveying the reef and helping the Lighthouse Service mark and light it—an undertaking remarkable not only for its enormity but for the politics, men, ideas and events that enabled and shaped it. The story, only partially told, begins with the Spanish, the British and the Lighthouse Service, who all strug gled with the reef first. Early Charts and Sailing Directions When Spanish treasure ships began using the New Bahama Channel in earnest, celestial navigation was in its infancy. Pilots of the day paid attention to latitude and sometimes sailed by it, but the instruments and tables needed to get a fix were not user friendly or particularly accurate, and there was no practical way to determine longitude. So they navigat ed mostly by dead reckoning, which meant keeping track of their posi Taming the Reef tion by estimating the distance traveled on each heading; plotting it on portolan charts, which provided a scale and configured primitive coast lines along constant compass bearings or directional lines rather than lat itude and longitude; and following written sailing directions, or “derroteros," which provided course and distance information as well as descriptions of the geography along the way and observations and advice about such things as weather, current, depth, bottom conditions and anchorages.4 For more than two centuries Spanish pilots refined their derroteros and portolans of the Straits, and dead reckoning served them reasonably well—particularly when it came to the treasure fleets, which ren dezvoused in Havana and departed from there, a jog to the south that made it easier to give the reef a wide birth. Of the thousands of ships that passed through the Straits as part of the treasure fleets, only thirty or so were lost in the Keys, or the “Martyrs” as the Spanish called them, and all but three of those were lost when hurricanes struck the fleet in 1622 and 1733. The problem for those that followed was that the Spanish were secretive and became set in their ways. As a result, few of their portolans and derroteros made it into British or American hands, and those that did would ultimately be dismissed as “paltry draffs” or “old Spanish charts.”5 When Spain ceded Florida to the British in 1763 to get Havana back after the French and Indian War, the stage was set for a leap forward in navigation and charting. The Mercator projection, a mapping technique particularly suited for charts because it produced a rectangular grid with parallel lines of latitude and longitude that allowed landmasses to be positioned so that compass courses from one place to another could be determined by drawing a straight line between them, had been on the shelf since the late 1500s. The instruments and techniques needed to conduct land based surveys had improved so that shorelines could be depicted on a chart with reasonable accuracy. The reflecting octant (and soon the sextant) made it easier to determine the angles between celestial objects and the horizon while underway. The tables needed to convert these “sights” into latitude had been simplified. An on-board chronome ter capable of telling the exact time sights were taken was about to be per fected so that longitude, long the missing piece of the puzzle, could be determined with relative ease, and accurate charts based on Mercator projections could finally be drawn. 8 TEQUESTA The British put these new tools to use and made surveying and charting the Keys and reef a priority. Three men, William De Brahm, George Gauld and Bernard Romans, took on the job. De Brahm, a German scientist, surveyor and cartographer who immigrated to British North America in 1751, worked as surveyor general of the Southern General Survey District of North America and the province of East Florida. George Gauld, a shipboard schoolmaster in the Royal Navy, was chosen to survey the area for the British Admiralty. Bernard Romans, a captain, navigator, and budding naturalist who emigrated from the Netherlands in 1757, mostly freelanced after working for a time as De Brahm’s principal deputy surveyor. Romans and De Brahm were both engaged in larger, more ambitious projects, but the demand was so great that they published their sailing directions and charts ot the Keys first—De Brahm in 1772 in The Atlantic Pilot, “a little treatise ... calculated for the safer conduct of ships ... through the New Bahama Channel,” and the accompanying Chart of the South End of East Florida and Martiers, and Romans in 1775 in an appendix to the first volume of his A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida and separately published charts. Gauld started surveying the Tortugas in 1773 and made it as far north as Rodriguez Key oil ot Key Largo before the threat posed by American privateers in the run-up to the Revolutionary War caused him to break off the work in 1775. He died in 1782, and the British Admiralty kept his work under wraps until 1790 when William Faden, a prominent London map publisher, secured per mission to publish Gauld’s Accurate Chart of the Tortugas and Florida Kays or Martyrs and his sailing directions, which Faden compiled from notes on Gauld’s manuscript charts and called An Account of the Surveys of Florida. Both were well received, and Faden used Gauld’s manuscript charts to produce another, smaller scale chart of the entire Straits, A Chart of the Gulf of Florida or New Bahama Channel, in 1794, and pub lished a corrected version of his sailing directions, renamed Observations of the Florida Kays, Reef and Gulf in 1796.b Each man’s sailing directions had their own flavor. De Brahm the sci entist, tor example, took the opportunity to promote his theories con cerning the Gulf Stream and the formation of the Keys and reef, and as an employee of the Crown apparently felt the need to rename most of the islands, channels and bays in the Keys after British political figures—an Taming the Reef 9 William De Brahms discrete chart of Biscayne Bay (Sandwich Gulf), Key Biscayne (Biskaino Island) and Cape Florida. The latter, at the southern tip of Miami Beach, at the time still included what later became Virginia Key.

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