The Floating Island of Bergeggi

Photograph by Franciop, reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Grove Koger

I’ve been working for years on a story about a floating island. Or maybe I mean “not working,” since I can’t actually get my story to float for more than a paragraph or two. The idea’s intriguing, but it calls for treatment as a fantasy rather than as a realistic or supernatural piece, and fantasy is a mode that usually doesn’t work for me, and certainly not in my own writing.

But that hasn’t stopped others. Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, for instance, wrote a novel titled A Jangada de Pedra (The Stone Raft), about just such an island. As he explained, his novel “separated the entire Iberian Peninsula from the European continent, transforming it into a large floating island, moving without oars, sails, or propellers toward the South of the world, ‘a mass of stone and earth, covered with cities, villages, rivers,’ … on its way to a new utopia.” And so on …

Eugen Bracht, *Blaue Insel (Isola di Bergeggi bei Spotorno)*, 1897

If we broaden the meaning of the term “island,” there are masses of floating aquatic plants on the Amazon River that would qualify. And then there are the artificial floating islands that have been manufactured and launched, for one reason and another, over the past few decades.

Jules Verne published a novel he called I’Ȋle à hélice (The Floating Island, or The Pearl of the Pacific, or The Self-Propelled Island) in 1895, but the reason you’ve probably never heard of it is that it doesn’t sound particularly exciting.

But real islands, islands of rock and soil and so on? Given my interest in such things, you can imagine my delight when I learned about the tiny limestone island of Bergeggi, which lies just off the Ligurian coast of Italy. What’s so interesting about it? Well, it seems that there was once a belief that it had floated to its present location across the Mediterranean Sea from the coast of Africa. Really.

Eugen Bracht, *Issola di Bergeggi,* 1893

In the 7th century AD, it’s said, two North African bishops who were fleeing Vandals broke free of their chains and, finding a boat on the shore, rowed it to a rock, which, in turn, floated up past Sicily to the Ligurian coast, where it stopped. Subsequently, the bishops visited the mainland to preach, but returned to their rock every evening. At the end of the tenth century, an abbey was built on it and dedicated to one of the bishops, who had been canonized as St. Eugenius. The island, which rises to a height of 174 feet, also boasts a defense tower.

At some point which I haven’t been able to determine, the island became known as Bergeggi. Gordon Home, who wrote about the region in Along the Rivieras of France and Italy (1908), described the waters surrounding Bergeggi as “deep peacock blue.” During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the island also attracted the attention of German impressionist Eugen Bracht, who captured its changing moods in several paintings. And, as you’ll notice, he, too, saw that deep peacock blue in the island’s waters.

If you have your doubts about the legend, the heavily wooded island still stands in the Ligurian Sea near Genoa, some 600 feet from the mainland and within sight of the promontory of Punta Predani. Since 1985, it’s been a nature reserve, the Riserva naturale regionale di Bergeggi, so apparently you can’t visit it, but you can stay on the mainland and enjoy the view over a plate of the region’s iconic pesto and a few crusty pieces of focaccia.

Eugen Bracht, *Die Isola di Bergeggi,* c. 1921

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Climbing the Old Man

Photograph by Dave Wheeler, reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Grove Koger

The Old Man of Hoy, that is. I hadn’t known of its existence until I ran across an image the other day. The picture was arresting enough, but what I learned in reading about it was nearly unimaginable.

The Old Man of Hoy is what’s known as a “stack” or “sea stack,” a steep column of rock sometimes created when water and wind wear away the layers of rock in a headland. Such erosion isn’t uniform, varying of course with the weather and the tides and the type of rock formation(s) in the headland. The most famous sea stacks include Oregon’s Haystack Rock (which I’ve been fortunate enough to have seen) and Tasmania’s Totem Pole, but the Old Man certainly belongs near the top of the list, partly because a 1966 climb was filmed and televised shortly afterward, to great acclaim, by the BBC.

The Old Man stands on the coast of Hoy, the second largest of the islands in the Orkney Archipelago off the northernmost tip of Scotland. (The famed Scapa Flow naval base is on the southeast coast of the island.) The Old Man itself is estimated to be only a few hundred years old, having been created sometime after 1750, and is doomed to collapse in the relatively near future. It once had two “legs,” as can be seen in a painting dating from 1817, but one was washed away in a storm sometime shortly after that date.

It’s the BBC film that shows what I found “nearly unimaginable.” And what’s shown (accompanied by music by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius) are scenes from several of the climbs. In all, there were three 2-man teams involved—Joe Brown and Ian McNaught-Davis, Chris Bonington and Tom Patey, and Dougal Haston and Pete Crew. (The film’s official name, by the way, is He Who Dares: The Old Man and the Climbers, and it was originally broadcast on July 7, 1967.)

Those who reach the top of the Old Man (and there now are as many as 50 a year!) record their feat in a log book kept in a Tupperware container wedged into a cairn on the Old Man’s summit.

If you’re considering visiting Hoy, the site Orkney.com assures me that the views from the island’s coastline are “simply staggering,” but adds that visitors should “take care and never get too close to the cliff edge.” Consider yourself warned.

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Sailing the Pacific with Louis Becke

My 1987 KPI ed. (London) in the “Pacific Basin” series. The image is a 19th-century watercolor of a Pacific islander by an unknown artist.

Grove Koger

As A. Grove Day wrote in 1966, “Almost without fail, people who know the vast ocean will respond that their favorite author is Louis Becke. Those who do not know the Pacific thoroughly will not have heard of Becke. Not to know Becke is to argue oneself unoriented in Pacific literature.”

Which, I suppose, leaves almost all of us “unoriented” in the subject.

A professor of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Day was writing in a study of Becke published in 1966 by Twayne, a study which, as far as I can determine, remains the only readily available book about Becke.

Becke was born in Part Macquarie, Australia, in 1855. By the time he died in 1913 in Sydney, he had traveled the length and breadth of the Pacific Ocean, and had visited the United States, Great Britain, France, and New Zealand. He had worked as a sailor, trader, book-keeper, gold miner, bank clerk, and store keeper, but it’s only as a writer that he’s remembered today, albeit by the few familiar with Pacific literature. In the index to his study, Day lists dozens of stories, articles, and novels, but for my post, I’m going to concentrate on his third collection, Pacific Tales. (You can read it here, thanks to Project Gutenberg Australia.)

Becke’s settings range from Micronesia and Melanesia to Polynesia, from the Caroline Islands and Marshall Islands to the Tuamotus and Samoa and Tahiti and Savage Island (now Niue), and, on occasion, to Becke’s homeland, Australia. Violence is almost always present, lurking below the surface when not in fact in plain view. His European and American characters are sailors and beachcombers, most of them near-alcoholics, while many of his Pacific Islanders are as cruel as the white interlopers. Missionaries are universally despised.

Becke’s stories themselves vary in length and particularly in tone, ranging from the humorous (“Mrs. Malleson’s Rival”) to the woeful (“For We Were Friends Always”) and from the brutal (“In the Old, Beachcombing Days” and “Hollis’s Debt: A Tale of the North-West Pacific”) to the macabre and even the grotesque, as in “Dr. Ludwig Schwalbe, South Sea Savant.” Here a German doctor living on the island of New Ireland in Melanesia turns out to be a merchant in … heads. “Vy,” he asks, “vot harm is there? Dese black beobles do kill each oder and eat de podies of dose who are slain. I buy der heads—dot is if der skulls are not broken mit bullets or clubs. Und I vork very hart to make dose heads look nice and goot, und I see dem to the museums in France und Russia, und Englandt under Germany. I dell you, my friend, it is a goot business.”

In the final chapter of his Twayne study, “Adventures in Assessment,” Day asks whether Becke was the “best writer of tales of the Pacific Islands as they were in the nineteenth century.” Such an assessment, as Day acknowledges, would pit Becke against Robert Louis Stevenson, admittedly a far finer writer but one whose actual experience of the Pacific was limited. Another choice might be Herman Melville, whom Becke praised, but whom I find difficult to appreciate, aside from his short 1854 collection The Encantadas, set in the Galágapos Islands. According to Day, James Michener found Becke’s stories “poorly written, but [bearing] the stamp of allure.” They were, he thought, the works “of an unlettered man, a graceless storyteller, but a wonderfully tactile writer.” Michener’s assessment is a sound one, for Becke succeeds as a storyteller despite his actual words, which are often hackneyed, and his actual story-telling, which can be roundabout. Becke’s works describe real people, however unappealing, and real places, however unattractive. He was there.

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John Singer Sargent Paints Capri

Grove Koger

The rocky Italian island of Capri, which lies in the Gulf of Naples, is the site of Phoenician, Greek, and Roman ruins, and has long proven attractive to writers, artists, and other, generally bohemian, individuals. Its visitors and residents have included writers Norman Douglas, whose novel South Wind (1917) is set on the imaginary island of Nepenthe, which owes much of its landscape and most of its louche atmosphere to Capri. Compton Mackenzie set his novel Extraordinary Women (1928) on an island he named Sirene, and it, too, is based on Capri. Other writers attracted to the island’s charms have included Curzio Malaparte and Graham Greene.

It seems as if fewer artists have been drawn to Capri, but, among them, John Singer Sargent stands preeminent. Born to American parents in Florence in 1856, Sargent visited Capri in 1878, staying at the Albergo Pagano, and, while on the island, painted several memorable works. Chief among these are simple pictures of a stone stairway and of a beach, as well as several paintings that include an attractive 17-year-old model, Rosina Ferarra (or Ferrara).

Ferarra had already posed for several other painters, including British artist Frank Hyde, in whose studio Sargent apparently met her. Sargent went on to employ her as a model several times, once as a figure in a landscape (In the Olive Grove), once as a dancer atop one of the island’s roofs (Capri Girl on a Rooftop), once as an onion seller (Portrait of Rosina Ferarra), and, perhaps most memorably, in a quick sketch on cardboard that shows her in profile. Titled Rosina Ferarra: Head of a Capri Girl, it’s remarkably lifelike and illustrates, as much as anything else, Sargent’s technical facility.

It’s been assumed that Sargent and Ferarra were romantically involved, but in his book The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), Paul Fisher is noncommittal. Perhaps we should leave the last word(s) to Frank Hyde, who would later remark that, on Capri, “Great Pan is not dead. He lives, he lives for those who can still hear his whispered music.”

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Disguise & Deceit on Pascali’s Island

Grove Koger

I read Barry Unsworth’s 1980 novel Pascali’s Island for the first time years ago, but now that I’ve reread it, I’m more impressed than ever. It’s as close to perfect as any piece of writing I’ve ever encountered.

Published in the United States as The Idol Hunter, the novel opens quietly in the form of a report from a Turkish agent and informer, Basil Pascali. He lives on an island in the North Aegean Sea near the coast of Asia Minor, and has been filing weekly reports on the island’s life for twenty years, but he’s never received a reply. He’s paid regularly for his work, but as the amount has never increased, he lives in a single room in near-poverty. He’s hopelessly in love with a foreign painter, Lydia Neuman, but she feels nothing more than friendship for him.

The year is 1908, and while the island’s population is predominantly Greek, they’re ostensibly subjects of the dying Ottoman Empire and its sultan, Abdul Hamid II. Unrest is rampant, however, and there are frequent episodes of insurgency in the hills. The island is ripe for revolt, and, as an agent of the hated Turks, Pascali is acutely aware of the danger he lives in: “It may be days or weeks but I am as good as dead.”

It’s at this time that another of the novel’s main characters appears on a boat from the Turkish port of Smyrna (Izmir). He’s Anthony Bowles, an English traveler “in fawn-coloured suit and paler hat” who registers at the Hotel Metropole. Innately and deviously curious, Pascali sneaks Bowles’ room key from the front desk while Bowles is eating in the dining room, searches his room, and finds the small marble head of a woman and … a revolver.

As Pascali has hoped, Bowles subsequently hires him as an interpreter, in this case to help him negotiate a short lease for a tract of coastal land owned by the Commandant of the Ottoman garrison, Mahmoud Pasha. As an archaeologist, Bowles explains, he’s interested in the islands that claim to have been the final resting place of the Virgin Mary, and although—“of course”—he has no intention of removing any artifacts he might find, he “wouldn’t be happy if everything wasn’t quite legal and above-board.”

As the novel progresses, we become aware of an intricate pattern of duplicity involving all of the novel’s characters. Bowles is clearly planning a ruse, and, in time, we realize that Lydia is involved in some sort of plot, as is Mahmoud Pasha himself. Pascali conceives one of his own, and, in a short period of time, the deceptions topple into disaster.

Unsworth traveled and lectured in Turkey and Greece during the 1960s, and his knowledge of their frequently conflicting cultures informs Pascali’s Island. The novel was nominated for the Booker McConnell Prize and, in 1988, filmed by James Dearden with a trio of brilliant actors—Ben Kingsley as Pascali, Charles Dance as Bowles, and Helen Mirren as Neuman. Shot on the Greek islands of Symi and Rhodes, it’s just as good as the novel—and that’s a rare accomplishment.

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Paul Gauguin, W. Somerset Maugham & Their Tahitian Woman

Grove Koger

Novelist, playwright, short story writer, memoirist—W. Somerset Maugham (whom you see below in a 1927 portrait) was one of the most famous and highly paid authors of his time. And although he enjoyed traveling, his visit to the islands of the Pacific during World War I may strike us as oddly timed.

However, as Maugham explained in a letter to a friend, the trip “was forced upon [him] accidentally by the fact that during the war [he] was employed in the Intelligence department, and so visited parts of the world which otherwise [he] might not have summoned up sufficient resolution to go to.” Maugham’s orders dealt in particular with the islands of Samoa, which had been devastated by volcanic eruptions and racked by civil wars—conflicts that had been exacerbated by the intervention of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Germany and the United States had eventually divided control of the islands, but with the opening stages of World War I, troops from the British Dominion of New Zealand had occupied the German islands. Maugham was expected to evaluate the uneasy situation.

Spurred by his long-standing interest in French painter Paul Gauguin (whom you see below in a self-portrait from 1889), Maugham went on to visit Tahiti in February 1917, staying at the Tiare Hotel in the capital city of Papeete and managing to find a few people who had known the artist, including Gauguin’s friend Louvaina Chapman. In turn, Chapman introduced Maugham to a female chieftain in a settlement near where Gauguin had lived. As a result, the writer learned that, during his ultimately fatal struggle with syphilis, Gauguin had been cared for by a farmer, and, in gratitude, had painted images on the panels of several of the farmer’s glass doors. One of the doors remained in passably good shape, and Maugham promptly paid 200 francs (twice what the farmer asked), took the door off its hinges, and carried it to his car.

In time, Maugham was able to display the door, dubbed Tahitienne debout, or Tahitian Standing, in his Villa Mauresque near Cap Ferrat on the Riviera. While palpably Gauguin’s work, it’s not among his best. The same is true of Maugham’s 1919 novel The Moon and Sixpence, whose protagonist Charles Strickland was inspired by Gauguin. It may be Maugham’s most famous work, but while Strickland’s appalling selfishness is a match for Gauguin’s own, Maugham seems to have no insight into the painter’s great talent. The stories he collected in Ashenden; or, The British Agent (1927), which were inspired by Maugham’s work in the intelligence service, are better, while The Narrow Corner (1932) and The Razor’s Edge (1944) show him at his very best.

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Thinking about Atlantis

Grove Koger

I don’t know of any myth in the Western World that has attracted so much ink as that of Atlantis, the great island that supposedly sank into the ocean sometime in the distant past.

However, the word myth can have several different meanings, and it’s important to understand what kind we’re talking about in discussing Atlantis. (That’s it at the top of today’s post in a map by Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who’s oriented his map with north at the bottom).

Plato’s retelling of the story appears in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, the latter of which lacks a conclusion. Plato provides the story with a pedigree, claiming to base his information on the works of Athenian statesman Solon, who is said to have visited Egypt in the 5th century BCE. However, we have only Plato’s word for what his source might have learned.

The truth is that Atlantis seems to have sprung full-blown from the head of Plato (seen above in a Roman copy of a bust by Silanion) in much the same manner that Athena was thought to have sprung from the head of her father, Zeus. Plato’s dialogues constitute the very first mentions of the island, which he described as lying “in front of … the Pillars of Hercules.” These pillars are usually understood to be promontories at the western end of the Mediterranean Sea, but—and this is only one of the many, many buts in the story of Atlantis—ancient authorities placed the pillars in any number of places, and even, on occasion, considered them to be metaphors. (For details, I encourage you to consult the entry in the invaluable online Atlantipedia.)

In any case, it’s important to keep in mind that the story of Atlantis has no precursors. It seems fairly obvious that Plato was teaching a lesson about the ideal state and about what happens when the citizens of that state turn away from the ideals that have sustained it. However, his story has been seized upon by subsequent philosophers, novelists, archaeologists (many of them amateurs), and crackpots, with the result that a small library could be filled to overflowing with their works.

The most popular location for Atlantis has proven to be the eastern North Atlantic Ocean, largely due to the modern identification of the Pillars of Hercules with Gibraltar in the north and Monte Hacho (or possibly Jebel Musa) in the south. As a result, prime candidates for the remains of the lost island have included three of the archipelagoes of Macaronesia—the Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Azores. A. Samler Brown, for instance, dealt a little too carelessly with the subject in early editions of his guidebooks. More recently, some archaeologists have seized upon the catastrophic eruption of the volcano at the Greek island of Santorini, or Thera, which occurred some 3,600 years ago. However, they overlook the central point that Atlantis didn’t erupt, it sank.

Among novelists, Jules Verne described how his travelers visited the ruins of Atlantis in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869-70), and Pierre Benoit placed his character Antinea, a descendant of the rulers of Atlantis, rather ingeniously in a cave in the Sahara Desert in his 1919 novel Atlantida. More recently, Lawrence Durrell suggested in his 1953 travel memoir Reflections on a Marine Venus that “islomanes”—those “who find islands somehow irresistible”—are “direct descendants of the Atlanteans, and it is towards the lost Atlantis that their subconscious yearns throughout their island life.” And on and on …

Several years ago, realizing that few writers of any stripe have dealt Plato’s inner life, I wrote a modest story I called “An Incident from the Childhood of Plato.” But when I submitted it to a market I thought I had a good working relationship with, I received a remarkably obtuse response. The editor suggested that I was trivializing Plato’s use of the myth, and that the physical actions I describe were simply unrealistic. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was trivializing anything at all, since, quite the contrary, I had connected the myth with what I thought could have been a profoundly important childhood experience. In addition, the physical events I describe in the story were perfectly consistent with reality, as I proved to the editor when I provided him with links to several news reports of similar events. In any case, I went on to submit the story to the publication Altered Reality, whose perceptive editor accepted it within a couple of days. You can read it here.

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Britain’s Greek Empire

Grove Koger

November 5 is the anniversary of the establishment of the United States of the Ionian Islands.

Despite what their name might lead you to think, these United States were actually a British protectorate, and operated for most of their existence—from 1815 to 1864—under the terms of a British-approved Constitution.

There are seven major Ionian Islands scattered down the western coast of Greece, from Corfu (or Kerkyra) in the north, opposite the Greek border with Albania, to Kythira, off the southern tip of mainland Greece. There are also a number of islets, including Antikythira, which lies about 24 miles southeast of Kythira itself.

The Ionian Islands are generally referred to as a group, but given their geography and particularly the great distance between Kythira and the other islands, I think it’s more accurate to think of them as a string. Some sources, including the Ionian Environment Foundation, refer to the six northernmost islands—Corfu, Paxos, Lefkada, Ithaca, Kefalonia, and Zakynthos—as an archipelago. It’s a classification that makes sense, as they lie more or less closely to each other.

The islands were controlled by the Republic of Venice from 1363 to 1797, by France for a few subsequent years, by a Russo-Turkish alliance (during which the islands were known as the Septinsular Republic) for a few more years, and by France again for a few more years still. During the early nineteenth century, the British navy defeated the French navy in a number of battles and went on to seize several of the islands, eventually capturing Corfu itself in 1814.

Finally, on November 5, 1815, according to the terms of the Treaty between Great Britain and Russia, Respecting the Ionian Islands, a British protectorate—the United States of the Ionian Islands—was established. (If you’re paying attention to the broader picture, the treaty was one of several signed during the 1815 Peace of Paris.) A constitution providing for a locally elected Parliament that would advise a British Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands went into effect a little less than two years later.

Britain instituted a number of welcome reforms, including freedom of the press and the use of modern Greek in all public and legal proceedings. An Ionian University was established, along with Greece’s first botanical garden. The British also introduced cricket, tsitsibira (lemon-flavored ginger beer), and postage stamps. Once mainland Greece established its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1830, however, sentiment for union with Greece naturally grew. After considering the situation for three decades, during which time it resorted to imprisoning and exiling a number of dissidents, Britain gave up its protectorate and ceded the Ionian Islands to Greece on May 21, 1864.

Britain’s decision was largely a strategic one. While it valued Corfu’s wide harbor, that of the island of Malta, which was some two and a half miles long and had been the base of the British Mediterranean fleet since 1827, was even better. In addition, Greece’s newly enthroned king, Danish-born George I, was viewed as sympathetic to British interests.

The image at the top of today’s post is a photograph of the harbor of Corfu, said to have been taken in 1860. The first map shows a section of the Ottoman Empire as it existed in 1801, with the Septinsular Republic in orange, while the second—a German map published by Georg Joachim Goschen in Leipzig in 1830—shows what had become the United States of the Ionian Islands. The stamp is one of three issued by Britain in 1859. Rather than carrying face values, they were distinguished by color; this one was for 2 pence.

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A. Samler Brown & Macaronesia

Grove Koger

A few individuals stand out among the authors and publishers of early travel guidebooks, particularly Karl Baedeker (1801-1859), whose name became practically synonymous with such works.

Unlike Baedeker, A(lfred) Samler Brown is now almost forgotten, but he pioneered English-language guidebooks covering Macaronesia—the Canary Islands (which are part of Spain) and Madeira and the Azores (which are part of Portugal).

According to what little information I’ve been able to track down, Brown was born in 1859. At some point, he moved to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, perhaps for his health, and built a house in the capital city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. He’s said to have become the first resident to travel on the island in an automobile.

Brown’s book was titled Madeira and the Canary Islands, with the subtitle A Practical and Complete Guide for the Use of Invalids and Tourists, and was published in 1889. The fourth edition (1896) included several pages on the Azores, and the sixth (1901), with the number of those pages significantly increased, was published as Madeira and Canary Islands, with the Azores. The guides included discussions of climatic conditions, lodging, food, and every other aspect of life on the islands that might be of interest to English-speaking travelers.

So influential was Brown that he was nominated Caballero de Merito Militar by King Alfonso XIII of Spain for his work in popularizing the Canaries.

By the time of Brown’s death on July 17, 1936, his guide had run through 14 editions—an accomplishment that he seems to have been quite proud of. I own a copy of the twelfth (1922) edition, whose title has become Brown’s Madeira, Canary Islands, and Azores. Brown notes that the “First Edition of this Guide consisted of 111 pages and included 10 maps in one colour, but no plans, diagrams, sketches or meteorological tables. The present volume contains 496 pages, 22 maps and plans in three colours, 2 diagrams, 12 sketches and 11 meteorological tables in addition to many other tables of shipping, public coaches, etc.”

Brown seems to have been one of the first authors to include advertisements in his guidebooks, and my 1922 edition contains quite a few pages of them, including intriguing ones for Olsen’s Alexandra Hotel and Pension in Santa Cruz (“English, French and German Spoken”) and the Société Anonyme des Tramways Électriques de Tenerife. For anyone studying the social life of the islands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his guides are indispensable.

Brown notes in one of his guide’s introductory pages that “the article on the ‘Sunken Continent of Atlantis’ has been re-written.” In the article itself, he explains that it had been “highly imaginative, purposely so, for which reason the author’s knuckles have more than once been rapped. The reader who studies it as it is will take notice that it confines itself strictly to scientific data and that the task of imagining things is left to him and—to Plato.”

I should add that, in 1893, Brown began publication of another series of guidebooks, one devoted to Southern and (over time) East Africa. The series, which used much the same cover image of palm trees as Brown’s earlier guides, seems to have been a family affair, because through 1936, G.G. Brown is listed as co-author with A.S. Brown. After the latter’s death, the authorship is credited solely to G.G. Brown, while A. Gordon-Brown is identified as author beginning in 1940. (I haven’t been able to find out where A. Samler Brown was born, but I wonder whether he might have been South African.) The series was published under the sponsorship of the Union Castle Mail Steamship Company, which ran passenger and cargo ships between Europe and Africa.

(For much of the information in today’s post, I’m indebted to an entry in John Reid Young’s blog Travel Stories in Tenerife and the Canary Islands and the entry for Brown in the Portuguese version of Wikipedia.)

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Driving to St. George Island

Grove Koger

If you want to visit Florida’s St. George Island but you don’t happen to have a boat handy, you’ll have to cross Apalachicola Bay over the St. George Island Bridge from the little community of Eastpoint.

Known officially as the Bryant Patton Memorial Bridge, a reference to an influential resident of nearby Apalachicola who died in 1954, the structure replaced two older bridges and a short causeway on little Bird Island. When construction was completed in 2004, the new bridge became the third-longest in the state, running to slightly more 4 miles. At one point (which you see above in Maggie’s photograph) it rises for a clearance of 65 feet to allow the passage of boats. The bridge and its approaches are also known, very officially, as State Road 300, although if you asked around the area about that designation, I suspect that few would recognize it.

I don’t normally give a lot of thought to bridges, but they’re a fact of life in the Florida Panhandle, a region that Maggie and I have been visiting for years. It’s one of those magical parts of the world where water and sky predominate, and land seems like an afterthought.

Now that I’ve become familiar with it, I’ve realized that the St. George Island Bridge is an elegant structure that combines beauty with utility. What’s more, two sections of the abandoned Bird Island causeway (above, in a photograph reproduced courtesy of Taylor Engineering) have been shored up and declared a Critical Wildlife Area where seabirds can nest undisturbed.

Hurricanes threaten the Apalachicola Bay region from time to time, and authorities close the bridge when winds reach a sustained 45 miles-per-hour. Should you miss the warnings while you’re on the island, you’re there for the duration. If you’re a resident, you presumably know what you’re doing, but if you’re a visitor, you’ll want to keep an eye on the forecasts.

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