Menendez

You know those books — they’re always there — on the gift shop shelves of national parks and historic sites, those paperbacks that were printed in the 1960s by the local college or historical society and never updated, and they all look like they’ve been sitting on the dusty shelf for the past 20 years, but the price is right so you pick it up, feeling somehow culturally empowered by spending $8 on a paperback?  That’s the case with Florida’s Menendez: Captain General of the Ocean Sea, published in 1965 by the St. Augustine Historical Society.

I’m finally getting around to reading it.  It was purchased 12 years ago, and for all that time, I’ve only been pretending to be culturally empowered.

Pedro Menendez de Aviles was another one of those conquistadores employed in the “humane conquest” of the Americas.  (For more on that topic, see my post about Cabeza de Vaca.)  Unlike de Vaca, however, I at least know a little about Menendez, mainly because he was responsible for planting the Spanish flag in the ground at St. Augustine, Florida, and boy oh boy, mom and dad sure loved to take us to St. Augustine for vacations.

There’s a great controversy that pops up every year between the bored historians in New England and the bored historians in Florida about the location of the first “Thanksgiving.”  Of course, the winners write the history, so we all know the story of what happened in Plymouth in 1621, but an argument can be made that Menendez and crew had the first Thanksgiving (complete with Catholic mass, feasting, and socializing with the locals) on September 8, 1565, some 56 years before the pilgrims.  (And yes, we know the exact date because the Spaniards were Catholics, and those Catholics recorded everything.)  I’m not going to make too much of this Florida vs. New England thing, because now I understand that Texas is also claiming to have hosted the first Thanksgiving.  Oi.  But in my heart, I know Florida is the winner.

What I find most intriguing about Pedro Menendez de Aviles y Alonso de la Campa (to use his full name) was what happened at Matanzas Inlet.  Known to historians and college students not sleeping through Florida History 101, the “Massacre at Matanzas” is the story of a bloody mass execution of 111 Frenchman.  I had always associated this gruesome scene as an indicator of Menendez’s cold-blooded nature, but this book put things in a slightly different perspective.  Yes, he killed 111 people, but the book explained that this was a mere matter of practicality.  The Spanish simply didn’t have the manpower or resources to house so many prisoners, so he made the only logical choice.  In his honor, he did spare a few fellow Catholics and those saying they would convert from Protestantism, and the women, and the children.  Hey, that’s something.  But everyone else was killed on the spot.  It was one of those scenes where the movie narrator would say something like “The once-white sand turned crimson with the blood of the French.”

So this is how it happened, and it actually shows Menendez’s brilliance.  In 1565, the French had control of Fort Caroline, located at the mouth of the St. John’s River.  The Spanish wanted that fort, so Menendez was sent to take it over.  As he was chillaxin’ in Saint Augustine, the French decided that they wanted Saint Augustine for themselves.  They loaded up most of their men and arms and just about made it to the intended target when a mother of a hurricane rolled in, wreaking havoc on their plans to attack.  The never made landfall.  Instead, the hurricane left a trail of wrecked ships south from St. Augustine as far away as Daytona Beach and Cape Canaveral.  Nearly wetting his pants at the French predicament, Menendez knew that Fort Caroline was left with a skeletal crew.  He gathered his men and walked in the hurricane some 35 miles to Fort Caroline, sometimes up to their waists in flood water.  Menendez and his men easily overtook Fort Caroline (even though there were still about 200 Frenchman inside). On the return to St. Augustine, some local Native Americans told Menendez that the French shipwreck survivors were on the beach just south at the Matanzas Inlet.  (Okay, so that wasn’t the name of the inlet.  Yet.   Matanzas means The Slaughters.)  Menendez and his men surrounded the survivors at the inlet, and well, that’s about it. 

Near the inlet is Fort Matanzas, which was built much later, in the 1740s by the Spanish, as a way to guard the back entrance to Saint Augustine.  It’s a fun little fort, open to visitors via a pleasant boat ride provided by the National Park Service.  This is something I’d definitely like to include on the Florida Trip.  Every time I’ve been to the fort, I’ve seen touring cyclists stopping at the historic site for lunch or a break.

So, Mr. Menendez, I’m sorry that I misjudged you all these years.  You did what you had to do to preserve Florida for the king.  And now, those sands on the shores of the Matanzas Inlet are white as can be.  I know.  I took my daughter on her first St. Augustine trip last month.

P.S.  I’ve read so much about Fort Caroline, but I’ve never been there.  It seems like a logical destination for the Florida Trip.

The Open Boat

Hey, Billie. The GPS ain't working again.

So here’s another reason I have an issue with my high school English teachers. (My students would say, “We be beefin'”).  In eleventh grade, we read Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.”  I was bored, of course, but I was bored by most of the stories we read in high school.  My beef is that the teacher didn’t make any connection between the story and Florida.  Now,  23 years after graduating, I find out that the story was inspired by Crane’s own shipwreck off the coast of Florida in 1896.  (Specifically, the Commodore sunk off the coast of Daytona Beach, a mere 90 miles from my classroom at Melbourne Central Catholic High School.)  The boat was headed from Jacksonville to Cuba, and it was a known smuggling ship.  Crane was onboard as a journalist, of sorts.  (Again, to any teachers out there, this is information your students might find interesting.)

So, of course, I reread the story this week.  I’m afraid to say that I found it just as boring, but at least I was aware that the Mosquito Inlet in the story is now known as Ponce de Leon inlet, just south of Daytona.  And I’ve been there, several times.  I think I have pictures of myself at the top of the lighthouse wearing a very cool 1980s Van Halen painter’s cap.   

As a more experienced reader now than I was in high school, I see the appeal of the story.  It’s certainly the classic conflict of man versus nature, but without the instinct versus intellect that makes Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” one of my faves.  (What’s added though, to Crane’s benefit, is the cold, uncaring, outside world that’s completely indifferent to our individual longing for survival.  From a seagull to an empty lighthouse to the towering waves themselves, it seems that no one gives a rat’s butt about the four guys in the boat.)  I also love how Billie the Oiler, the most polite member of the crew, is the only one to die.  (If I’m correct, I think he also did the most rowing to get them to safety.) There’s a life lesson for you, kiddos.

As far as The Tour, I think a stop at the Ponce de Leon Lighthouse, aka the Mosquito Island Lifesaving Station, is in order.  Maybe I’ll get lucky and one of the Disney cruise ships out of Cape Canaveral will go down while I’m in the area.

Here are some excerpts from the story that I liked:

“The surf’s roar was dulled, but its tone was, nevertheless, thunderous and mighty.”

“There is a certain immovable quality to a shore, and the correspondent wondered at it amid the confusion of the sea.”

“The wind came stronger, and sometimes a wave suddenly raged out like a mountain-cat and there was to be seen the sheen and sparkle of a broken crest.”

(Wow.  I can’t wait to show that one to my students.  It’s a single-sentence example of both a simile and the passive voice. Crane, you devil.)

“When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God

These Aren't The Spark Notes

Apparently, my study of Florida literature simply must begin with Zora Neale Huston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.  How I graduated from an accredited high school in the state of Florida without reading this book is beyond me, but I guess that’s to be expected when your English 10 and English 12 teachers go on maternity leave and the class spends 2 months on adverbial phrases and a seemingly impossible three months on the first four acts of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.  When the teacher came back, we never read Act V.  The movie sufficed.  (Or maybe the problem was that it was a Catholic school.  I like to blame Catholicism for a lot of what’s wrong with me.)

I actually have a local connection to Hurston, strangely.  Although she claims to be Floridian by birth, she was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama, a town about 20 miles from Auburn.  I’ve been there on numerous bike rides.  It’s not a destination unto itself, but it does have a convenience store and roads with little traffic, like most of East Central Alabama.  The next time I’m in town (and “town” is defined loosely when it comes to Notasulga, Alabama), I’ll have to snoop around for a historical marker or something.  I really find it odd that one of America’s best novelists hailed from there.  I really need to stop being so judgmental.

Hurston’s birth claim, though, is Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black town in the country, and the setting for Their Eyes Where Watching God.  I’ll have to do a little looking before the Tour to see if there’s anything worthwhile to see in Eatonville.  It seems there should be, but the Internets aren’t providing much info.  I’m also a little concerned that Eatonville is so close to (just north of) Orlando, a city not particularly well known for being bicycle-friendly.  Actually, it’s downright bicycle hostile.  (It’s never made Bicycling magazine’s top-50 bicycle-friendly lists.  In related news, the Orlando/Kissimmee metropolitan area has been ranked the most dangerous place in the country for pedestrians.)  But again, there’s still plenty time for planning.  I won’t bore you with all these mundane details.  Just some of them.

Their Eyes was published in 1937,  a little late for it to ride on the coattails of the Harlem Renaissance.  For that reason, and along with some unfair and harsh criticism by Richard Wright, the book mostly disappeared from the world (as did Hurston herself, falling into poverty and residing in a welfare home), finally experiencing a resurgence of sorts when Alice Walker spread the gospel in the 1960s. 

The Walker connection continues.  In 1973, she went to Fort Pierce, Florida, to find Hurston’s grave, which was unmarked and overrun with weeds.  The grave she found, and it’s probably the correct one, was later inscribed “A Genius of the South.”  Now, again, I went to high school in Melbourne, less than 50 miles from Fort Pierce, and I think it’s the pinnacle of literary injustice that I was unfamiliar with Hurston until about twenty years after graduation.  At any rate, the Tour will include a visit to the grave.  Guaranteed.

I enjoyed reading the book.  I don’t think I’d agree that it’s the most important example of African-American literature about the South, but I do think it survives in several contexts.  The careful reader will notice the difference between Janie and “man,” so it’s definitely worthy of a feminist approach, even though I found Janie quite pathetic at times.  Personally, I think it’s a good snapshot of life in Florida from a relatively unexplored perspective.  I see it also as a quest for independence, as Janie seems to grow as a human as she moves from husband to husband to husband.  If nothing else, it provides some great Southern dialect that shows Hurston had an ear for detail.  Oh, that dialect!  If I could program my time machine, I’d go back to that welfare home in January of 1960 and beg Zora to do a reading.

If nothing else, I’m indebted to Hurston for giving me a new way to refer to the deceased, or the people I’d like to soon be deceased after I give ’em a knuckle sandwich: “Cemetery dead.”  That’s real-talk, people.

The novel’s opening line is, perhaps, one of the best I’ve read in American literature:

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”

If I make it to Eatonville on the Tour, I’m sure I’ll see some of the scenery that inspired many of the descriptions in the novel.  (Janie also spends considerable time in the Everglades, and Miami, and Palm Beach, so this is a four-fer.)  My highlights and dog-ears mainly seem to focus on this description:

“De noise uh de owls skeered me; da limbs of dem cypress trees took to crawlin’ and movin’ round after dark, and two three times Ah heered panthers prowlin’ round.  But nothin’ never hurt me ’cause de Lawd knowed how it was.”

And how’s this for a bicycle-friendly quote, even though it had nothing to do with bicycles:

“She had learned how to talk some and leave some.  She was a rut in the road.  Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels.”

 
And the Travelogue Humor Award goes to this little gem:

“We’se goin’ back tuh Miami where folks is civilized.” 

Ms. Hurston, I’m sorry it took me so long to meet ya.

Pascua de Florida

When I’m bored and feeling particularly unmanly, I generally grab a Hemingway biography off my bookshelf and read tales of alcoholism, big game hunting, and misogyny. It really is great fun.

This morning, I found a copy of A.E. Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway.  I haven’t read it before, and judging from the yellow sticker on the cover, I purchased it for ten cents at a garage sale.  There isn’t an index, so I couldn’t do my usual routine with a new Hemingway book and look up all the references to “colon” (try it some time).  Instead, I just breezed through the pictures in the middle.  There he is shirtless at the typewriter; there he is with Black Dog in Cuba; there he is playing matador for Ava Gardner; there he is using a rifle to shoot a cigarette out of the mouth of a birthday party attendee.  (That guy had stories to tell for a lifetime.)

Then this fell out of the book:

 

And on the back:

I’ve been to the Hemingway House a few times, mainly when I was a kid, most recently on Spring Break of my freshman year in college when a friend and I chased a girl all the way to Key West.  (She eventually got away.  Twice.)  I always saw the Florida/Hemingway connection as more of a tourism gimmick than anything else. Maybe it was just my naiveté (probably it was my naiveté), but the only real takeaway for me was the unsuccessful search for the famous six-toed cats.

But here are Jim and Dorothy living it up in Florida and having the time of their lives.  From my hobby as a philatelist (don’t tell anyone), I know the date was somewhere in the early 1970s, based on the eight-cent Eisenhower stamp (Scott #1402, thank you).

Jim and Dorothy seem to making the rounds in Florida, touring Key West on Tuesday and then heading out to Ft. Lauderdale. 

And the weather?  “Delightful.”

I see Dorothy and Jim slathered in sunscreen, their black socks reaching to the knee, their sandals covered in an entire vacation’s worth of sand and mosquito repellant and foot sweat.  They’re well rested because their room at the Flamingo Motor Court has one of those Magic Fingers devices hooked up to the bed, and Jim — always the planner — brought along two rolls of quarters.  They can’t believe that the sun is actually shining and the temperature are in the 70s in February, something that never happens back in Springfield.  They’re already thinking about buying a modular home in Boca and riding out their golden years in the Sunshine State.

And this is my eureka moment.

Could it be that Florida might make the ideal bike tour?  There aren’t mountains and streams, but there is that unmistakeable Florida charm that has bewitched New Jersey snowbirds and retirees for years.

I grew up in Florida, so I’ll always have fondness for the place, but could it, perhaps, be a placed that I’d actually like to explore?

I know, Thomas Wolfe, you can’t go home again.  But what if you never really appreciated home the first time around? 

And could the focus of the tour be … wait for it … literature?  Besides Hemingway, I’m not really sure that Florida has a rich literary heritage.  I’ll have to research this and get back to you.

But I’m excited.

A Literary Tour of Florida.  Who woulda thunk it?  Thanks, Jim and Dorothy.

P.S.  In the same book was the following newspaper clipping.  It appears that Louisa was very proud of Choon B. Choi.  I’m proud of him, too.