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

The Gulf of Mexico, the earth’s tenth largest body of water, laps the coast of the southern United States and connects it to Central and South America. As such, the Gulf represents an important nexus where people, empires, and trade intersect to define modern geopolitical boundaries. John Sledge’s maritime history of the Gulf provides us with a broad survey of the Gulf’s importance to human history. By exploring how people, ships, and cities have interacted and developed, he has offered a well-written and riveting history that foretells the continuing importance of the Gulf of Mexico.

Beginning with the Gulf’s pre-history, Sledge details the rich Native American, Spanish, French, English, American, and Confederate stories that comprise the fabric of this region. Situated at the western end of the Gulf with a coast that stretches 367 miles, Texas joins the story during Sledge’s explanation of the coastal landscape at the time of LaSalle’s 1684–86 expedition, the Mexican and Texas independence movements, and the Confederate and modern periods. Beginning in January 1836, the first Texas Navy—initially consisting of four schooners and privateers—plied Gulf waters, helping to maintain Texas’s independence and even supporting Yucatan’s independence movement. By 1839, four schooners, two brigs, and a sloop constituted a new Texas Navy, and this fleet patrolled sea lanes along the Texas coast, keeping ports open until the Republic joined the United States in 1846.

Galveston Island became Texas’s connection to the world. Named after eighteenth-century Spanish military leader Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, the island served as the headquarters for Jean Lafitte’s piratical operations and for Louis-Michel Aury’s privateering empire during the early nineteenth century. In January 1863 Confederate General John B. Magruder expelled Union forces from the island, and Galveston remained the only major port in Confederate hands at the end of the war. Later in the nineteenth century, the city emerged as one of the largest commercial ports in the United States. Yet the great Galveston hurricane of 1900, which still ranks as the deadliest U.S. natural disaster, devastated the “Queen City of the Gulf,” and the city never regained its national importance. Thereafter, the development of the Houston Ship Channel brought the port of Houston into competition with and eventually eclipsed Galveston as the natural port for sea commerce. By the late twentieth century, Galveston reemerged as a financial and tourist destination and even weathered Hurricane Ike in 2008, which did considerable damage to buildings along the seawall.

During the twentieth century the Gulf became a center for the petroleum industry, with oil platforms marking the water’s horizon. Pipelines crisscrossed the underwater surface of the Gulf while oil tankers floated above. Petroleum became the source of wealth that propelled the development of the western Gulf states; yet, the explosion of the tanker Mega Borg off Galveston in June 1990 and the Deepwater Horizon disaster in April 2010 revealed ongoing tensions between oil production and tourist-centric development. During the spring of 2017, President Donald J. Trump rolled back decades-long restrictions on drilling in the Gulf, signaling a significant change that caused some to ask, “What is the future for the American Sea?”

This maritime history of the Gulf fills an important need. The first book to undertake this ambitious topic, The Gulf of Mexico sails into new territory. Sledge embraces a topic that is voluminous and offers a readable work supported by sound research. This is not the last word to be said about the Gulf, but it will serve as a launching pad for future scholars.